Maverick Philosopher

Actualist and Presentist Ersatzism and Arguments Against Both

For the actualist, the actual alone exists: the unactual, whether merely possible or impossible, does not exist.  The actualist is not pushing platitudes: he is not telling us that the actual alone is actual or that the merely possible is not actual.  'Merely possible' just means 'possible but not actual.' The actualist is saying something non-platitudinous, something that may be reasonably controverted, namely, that only the actual exists: the merely possible and the impossible do not exist.

Analogously for the presentist.  For the presentist, the (temporally) present alone exists: the nonpresent, whether past or future, does not exist.  The presentist is not pushing the platitude that the past is no longer.  He is saying something stronger: the past is not at all.

For the actualist, then, the merely possible does not exist.  There just is no such item as the merely possible fat man in my doorway.  Nevertheless, it is true, actually true, that there might have been a fat man in my doorway.  (My neighbor Ted from across the street is a corpulent fellow; surely he might have come over to pay me a visit. 'Might' as lately tokened is not to be read epistemically.)    The just-mentioned  truth cannot 'hang in the air'; it must be  grounded in some reality.  To put it another way, the merely possible -- whether a merely possible individual or a merely possible state of affairs -- has a 'reality' that we need somehow to accommodate.  The merely possible is not nothing.  That is a datum, a Moorean fact.

Similarly, it is true now that I hiked yesterday, even if presentism is true and the past does not exist.  So there has to be some 'reality' to the past, and we need to find a way to accommodate it.  Yesterday's gone, as Chad and Jeremy told us back in '64.  Gone but not forgotten: veridically remembered (in part) hence not a mere nothing.  That too is a datum.

The data I have just reviewed are expressed in the following two parallel aporetic tetrads, the first modal, the second temporal.

Modal Tetrad

1. The merely possible is not actual.
2. The merely possible is not nothing.
3. To exist = to be actual.
4. To exist = not to be nothing.

Temporal Tetrad

1t. The merely past is not present.
2t. The merely past is not nothing.
3t. To exist = to be present.
4. To exist = not to be nothing. 

Each tetrad has limbs that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Philosophical problems arise when plausibilities come into logical conflict.  The tetrads motivate ersatzism since the first can be solved by adopting actualist ersatzism (also known simply as actualism) and the second by adopting presentist ersatzism.  (Note that one could be a presentist without being an ersatzer.)

The ersatzer solution is to deny the first limb of each tetrad by introducing substitute items that 'go proxy' for the items which, on actualism and presentism, do not exist.  These substitute items must of course exist while satisfying the strictures of actualism and presentism, respectively.  The substitute items must actually exist and presently exist, respectively.  So how does it work?

The actualist maintains, most plausibly,  that everything is actual.  But the merely possible must be accommodated: it is not nothing.  The merely possible can be accommodated by introducing actually existent abstract states of affairs and abstract properties.  Merely possible concrete states of affairs are actual abstract states of affairs that do not obtain.  Merely possible concrete individuals are abstract properties that are not instantiated.  Suppose there are n cats.  There might have been n +1.  The possibility of there being in concrete reality n + 1 cats is an abstract state of affairs that does not obtain, but might have obtained.   Suppose you believe that before Socrates came into existence there was the de re possibility that Socrates, that very individual, come into existence.  Then, if you are an actualist, you could accommodate the reality of this possibility by identifying the de re possibility of Socrates with an actually existent haecceity property, Socrateity.  The actual existence in concrete reality of Socrates would then be the being-instantiated of this haecceity property.

Possible worlds can be accommodated by identifying them with maximal abstract states of affairs or maximal abstract propositions.  Some identify worlds with maximally consistent abstract sets, but this proposal faces, I believe, Cantorian difficulties.  The main idea, however, is that possible worlds for the actualist ersatzer are maximal abstract objects.  Now one of the possible worlds is of course the actual world.  It follows immediately that the actual world must not be confused with the concrete universe.  It may sound strange, but for the actualist ersatzer, the actual world is an abstract object, a maximal proposition.

The actualist, then, rejects (1) and replaces it with

1*.  A merely possible concrete item is an actual abstract object that possibly obtains or possibly is instantiated or possibly is true.

The presentist ersatzer does something similar with (1t).  He replaces it with

1t*.  A merely past concrete item is a temporally present abstract object that did obtain or was instantiated or was true or had a member.

An Argument Against Actualist Ersatzism 

Let's examine the view that possible worlds are maximal abstract propositions.  If so, the actual world is the true maximal proposition, and actuality is truth.  Given that there is a plurality of worlds, whichever world is actual is contingently actual.  So our world, call it 'Charley,' being the one and only (absolutely) actual world, is contingently actual, i.e., contingently true.  Contingent affirmative truths, however, need truth-makers.  So Charley needs a truth-maker.  The truth-maker of Charley  is the concrete universe as we know it and love it.  Since actuality is truth, the concrete universe is not and cannot be actual.

So the concrete universe exists but is not actual!  But this contradicts (3) above, according to which existence is actuality.  The actualist ersatzer is committed to all of the following, but they cannot  all be true:

5. Actuality is truth.
6. Truth is a property of propositions, not of concreta or merelogical sums of concreta.
7. The concrete universe is a concretum or a sum of concreta.
8. Everything that exists is actual: there are no mere possibilia or impossibilia.
9. The concrete universe exists.

This is an inconsistent pentad because any four of the limbs, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the first four limbs entails the negation of (9).

Curiously, in attempting to solve the modal tetrad, the actualist embraces an inconsistent pentad.   Not good!

An Argument Against Presentist Ersatzism

A parallel inconsistent pentad is easily constructed.  The target here is the view that times are maximal propositions.

5t. Temporal presentness is truth.
6. Truth is a property of propositions, not of concreta or merelogical sums of concreta.
7. The concrete universe is a concretum or a sum of concreta.
8t. Everything that exists is present: there are no merely past or merely future items. 
9. The concrete universe exists.

One sort of presentist erstazer is committed to all five propositions, but they obviously cannot all be true. 

Related articles

Times as Maximal Propositions

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Still Puzzling Over Presentism

Defining Presentism

Presentism and Existence Simpliciter: Questions for Rhoda

For Alan Rhoda, "Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more.  The future is not yet.  Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period." Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position."  I will first comment on whether presentism is commonsensical and then advance to the weightier question of what it could mean for something to exist period, or exist simpliciter.

Common Sense?

It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet.  These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English.  They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present.  But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy.  It is a platitude that what no longer exists, does not now exist.  But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists, does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.'  That is a theoretical  claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it.

In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims.  This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes.  My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.

Compare the problem of universals:  It is a Moorean fact that my cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup.  But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope.  Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute.  Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. 

Existence Simpliciter

Be that as it may.  If we pursue the above line we will be led into metaphilosophy.  On to the central topic.  'Whatever exists, exists now' is open to the Triviality Objection:  of course, what exists (present-tense) exists now!  Enter existence simpliciter.  The following is not a tautology: 'Whatever exists simpliciter, exists now.'

The problem  is to understand exactly what existence simpliciter is.  Let's  recall that in this series of posts it is not the truth-value of presentism that concerns me, but something logically prior to that, namely, the very sense of the thesis.  Only after a thesis is identified can it be evaluated.  I am not being coy.  I really don't understand what precisely the presentist thesis is.  What's more, I have no convictions in the philosophy of time the way I do in the philosophy of existence.  No convictions, and no axes to grind.  For example, I am convinced that the Fregean doctrine of existence is mistaken, pace such luminaries as Frege, Russell, Quine and their latter-day torch-bearers such as van Inwagen.  I am not at all convinced that presentism is wrong.  Like I said, I am not clear as to what it states.

Alan can correct me if I am wrong, but I think what he means by 'existence simpliciter' is something like this:

ES.  X exists simpliciter =_df (Ey)(x = y).

In plain English, an item exists simpliciter if it is identical to something. 'Identical to something' is elliptical for 'identical to something or other.'  I ascribe (ES) to Alan on the basis of a comment of his to the effect that existence simpliciter is the unrestricted quantifier sense of 'exists.'   I take it that unrestricted quantifiers range over unrestricted domains, and that an absolutely unrestricted domain contains everything: past items, present items, future items, atemporal items, merely possible items . . . . Presentism could then be put as follows:

P. (x)[(Ey)(x = y) =_df x exists now].

That is,

P*. Everything is such that it is identical to something iff it exists now.

Now if the quantifiers in (P) and (P*) range over everything, including past and future items, then the theses are trivially false.  But if they range only over present items, then they are trivially true.  To avoid this difficulty, we might formulate Rhoda's presentism thusly:

P**. All and only present items instantiate the concept  being identical to something.

The idea, then, is that  we have the concept existence simpliciter and this concept is the concept being identical to something.  Accordingly the presentist is saying something nontrivial about this concept, namely, that all and only its instances are temporally present items.

Unfortunately, I am still puzzled.  Is the verb instantiate' in (P**) present-tensed?  No, that way lies Triviality.  Is it timeless?  No, there is nothing timeless on Rhoda's scheme.  Is it disjunctive: 'did instantiate or do instantiate or will instantiate'?  No, for that too is false:  it is false that all items that did or do or will instantiate the concept identical to something  are temporally present.  Socrates did instantiate the concept but he is not temporally present.   And obviously 'instantiate' in (P**) cannot be replaced by 'omnitemporally instantiate.'  That leaves a tense-neutral reading of 'instantiate' which somehow abstracts from the timeless, the present-tensed, the omnitemporal and the disjunctive use of a verb. 

I am having trouble understanding what what this tense-neutral use of 'instantiate' amounts to.  But this may only be a problem for me and not for Rhoda's theory.

Related articles

Five Time-Related Senses of 'Is'

Still Puzzling Over Presentism

Common Ground Between Presentist and Anti-Presentist?

What the presentist affirms, roughly, is that only (temporally) present items exist: there are no nonpresent existents.  The anti-presentist denies this, maintaining that there are nonpresent existents.  Now there is no genuine dispute here unless the identity of the presentist thesis is perfectly clear and the anti-present is denying that very thesis.

Following some earlier suggestions of Peter Lupu, I will now try to formulate this dispute using the concept nonpresent existent.  I will use 'NPE' to refer to this concept, a concept we may assume both the presentist and his opponents understand.  A nonpresent existent, by stipulative definition, is one that exists in time, but is either merely past or merely future.  Using NPE, presentism and anti-presentism may be defined as follows:

P. NPE is not instantiated

AP. NPE is instantiated.

The dispute, then, is about whether NPE is instantiated.  NPE is a concept both parties understand.  So it is common ground.  The dispute is not about this concept, but about whether it is instantiated.

But note that 'is' occurs in both formulations.  Does it have exactly the same sense in both (P) and (AP)?  If not, then the common ground afforded us by NPE avails us nothing.

Yesterday (see link below) I distinguished five time-related senses of 'is.'  Starting with (P), which sense of 'is' is operative in it?  We can right away exclude the 'is' of atemporality since presentism is a thesis about temporal items.  We can also exclude the 'is' of temporal presentness.  The presentist cannot be charitably construed as saying that NPE is not now instantiated, for that is trivially true. 

The 'is' of omnitemporality is not a suitable candidate either.  For if NPE is not instantiated at every time, then we have quantification over times.  But one cannot quantify over what does not exist.  So nonpresent times exist.  But if so, then NPE is instantiated, contrary to what the presentist intends.

On the disjunctively detensed reading of 'is', the presentist is saying that NPE was not instantiated or is not instantiated or will be not instantiated, and the anti-presentist is saying that the NPE was instantiated or is instantiated or will be instantiated.

Does this do the trick? At the moment I cannot see that it doesn't.  But time is the hardest of nuts to crack and my 'nutcracker' may not be up to the job . . . .

 

Related articles

Five Time-Related Senses of 'Is'

Five Time-Related Senses of 'Is'

I dedicate this post to that loveable rascal Bill Clinton who taught us just how much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Credit where credit is due: Some of the inspiration for this post comes from a conversation with Peter Lupu and from an article he recommended, S. Savitt, Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.

1.  There is first of all the 'is' of atemporality.  Assuming that there are timeless entities such as God (concrete) and the number 13 (abstract), any sentences we use to talk about them must feature tenseless verbs and copulae.  Consider the proposition expressed by the sentence, '13 is prime.'  13 is prime, but not now and not always.  If the truth were always true, it would be in time.  The truth is timeless and so is the object 13 and the property of being prime.  The same goes for '13 exists.'  It is not true now nor at every time.  It is true timelessly.  It is worth noting that the timeless is' and 'exists' do not abstract from the temporal determinations of pastness, presentness, and futurity for the simple reason that numbers and such are not in time in the first place.  So the 'is' of atemporality is not the result of a de-tensing operation whereby we abtract from the temporal determinations to lay bare the pure copula, the copula that merely 'copulates.'  The 'is' in question is tenseless from the 'git-go.'

Perhaps we should distinguish between grammatical tense and logical tense.  Every verb has a grammatical tense.  Thus the verb in 'God exists' is in the present tense. But God exists timelessly, and so 'exists' in this instance is logically without a tense.

Consider John 8:58: "Before Abraham was, I am."  Is that ungrammatical?  Yes, but logically it makes sense.

2. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the 'is' of temporal presentness.  Examples: 'Peter is smoking' and 'There are 13 donuts in the box.'  There are now 13 donuts in the box.

3. The 'is' of omnitemporality.  Savitt gives the example of 'Copper is a conductor of electricity.'  The sentence is true at every time, not just at present.  But it is not timelessly true since it is about something in time, copper.  I think the example shows that the tenseless is not the same as the timeless.  What is timelessly true is tenselessly true, but not conversely.

4. The Disjunctively Detensed 'Is.'  We can de-tense 'is' as follows: x is detensedly F just in case x was F or is  F or will be F.  We can do the same with 'exists.'  Thus, Socrates is detensedly wise iff Socrates was wise or is wise or will be wise.  De-tensing involves abstracting from temporal determinations.  A detensed copula is a pure copula: all it does is 'copulate' or link. 

The 'am' in 'I am dead' is a pure copula, and the sentence is tenselessly true, but not presently true or timelessly true or omnitemporally true.  Gott sei dank!

5. The Hypertenseless 'Is.'  God exists atemporally and thus tenselessly while Socrates exists temporally but not presently or omnitemporally and thus he too exists tenselessly.  If there is a hypertenseless sense of 'exist' it applies to both God and Socrates and abstracts from the way each exists, atemporally in the case of God, temporally in the case of Socrates.

In 'God and Socrates both exist,' the 'exist' is hypertenseless in that it is abstractly common to both the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'God exists' and the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'Socrates exists.' 

Now what is this hypertenseless univocal sense of 'exists' that applies to both God and Socrates?  Persumably it is the quantifier sense according to which x exists iff (Ey) x = y.  Existence in this sense is identity-with-something-or-other. Absolutely everything, whatever its mode of existence, exists in this hypertenseless sense.

Now the presentist wants to say that, necessarily, it is always the case that only present items exist.  But in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot be the first four, for reasons given in previous posts.  So let's try the fifth sense.  Accordingly, only present items are identical-with-something-or-other. 

Does this work? 

Related articles

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Defining Presentism

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities?  So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless.  Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition is the sense of an indexical-free sentence in the indicative mood.  The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, 7 is prime.  If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal.  If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of McCann, timelessly eternal.

Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time. 

On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort.  Here is how I see the argument. 

Part of what the temporalist says is that

1. There are no timeless states of affairs.

How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood?  The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:

2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.

Unfortunately, the eternalist will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2).  Consider 7's being prime.  Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist.  The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2).  The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly.  But then the temporalist ends up presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs.  For he presupposes that there is the timeless state of affairs, There being no timeless states of affairs.

Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.

Is this 'Mavericked-up' McCann argument a good argument or not?  Have at it, boys.

A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism

We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.'  He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  For that is not metaphysical 'news.'  It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must.  He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now.  But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist.  The upshot is that when presentism is given a nontautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself.  For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist. 

Addendum (10 March):  Hugh McCann Responds

On the argument from my ch. 3 about timeless states of affairs, I of course stand by it (as of this moment, at least).  But I don’t think this argument alone would suffice to show that there is a B-series.  It might be, for example, that the only timeless states of affairs that there are pertain to abstracta; things like Seven’s being prime, and so forth.  If that were so we would get no B-series, because abstracta exhibit no temporal features at all, whereas entities in a B-series share before and after relations.

BV replies:  Well, I didn't claim that McCann's argument suffices to show that there is a B-series, a series of events related by the so-called B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Perhaps my use of 'eternalist' misled him.  All I meant by it above, as I stated,  is someone who holds that some entities are timeless.  I wasn't using it in the more commonly accepted sense in which it implies a commitment to the B-series. So we agree that the above argues does not suffice to show that there is a B-series.  It could be that there are timeless entities, and entities in time, but no B-series.

As for the analogous anti-presentist argument you go on to give, I subscribe to it.  But all it shows, as far as I can see, is that we have to consider talk of tenseless states of affairs legitimate.  But to show that isn’t to show very much.  It doesn’t yet follow, for example, that we have to speak of Socrates as existing tenselessly.  Socrates is not a state of affairs, and there is nothing paradoxical about saying there neither is, was, nor will be a tenseless Socrates.  The question is just whether it is true, and there I am unsure of the answer.  Furthermore, I can imagine someone claiming that when it comes to the concrete world, tenseless states of affairs—the B-series, in effect—is just a necessary fiction, something we need in order to be able to keep proper track of our memories.  I have no knockdown argument for or against this position.  I am inclined to think, however, that it is a vast oversimplification, just as I think presentism is.

BV replies: I think what McCann is getting at here is that an adequate formulation of presentism must presuppose the meaningfulness of  talk of tenseless states of affairs, but needn't presuppose that there are tenseless states of affairs involving entities in time.  If that is what he means, then my quick little argument seems unsound, and McCann shouldn't have subscribed to it.  I'll have to think about it some more.  What a miserably difficult topic this is!

Related articles

Defining Presentism

McCann, God, and the Platonic Menagerie

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

John of the MavPhil commentariat drew our attention to the analogy between presentism and actualism.  An exfoliation of the analogy may prove fruitful.  Rough formulations of the two doctrines are as follows:

P. Only the (temporally) present exists.

A. Only the actual exists.

Now one of the problems that has been worrying us is how to avoid triviality and tautology.  After all, (P) is a miserable tautology if 'exists' is present-tensed.  It is clear that no presentist thinks his thesis is a tautology. It is also clear that there is a difference, albeit one hard to articulate, between presentism and the the various types of anti-presentism.  There is a substantive metaphysical dispute here, and our task is to formulate the dispute in precise terms.  This will involve clarifying the exact force of 'exists' in (P).  If not present-tensed, then what?

A similar problem arises for the actualist.  One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual.  If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology.  But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean? 

We seem to have agreed that Disjunctive Presentism is a nonstarter:

DP.  Only the present existed or exists now or will exist.

That is equivalent to saying that if x existed or exists or will exists, then x presently exists.  And that is plainly false. Now corresponding to the temporal modi past, present, and future, we have the modal modi necessary, actual, and merely possible.  This suggests Disjunctive Actualism:

DA.  Only the actual necessarily exists or actually exists or merely-possibly exists.

This too is false since the merely possible is not actual.  It is no more actual than the wholly future is present.

We must also bear in the mind that neither the presentist nor the actualist intends to say something either temporally or modally 'solipsistic.'  Thus the presentist is not making the crazy claim that all that every happened or will happen is happening right now.  He is not saying that all past-tensed and future-tensed propositions are either false or meaningless and that the only true propositions are present-tensed and true right now.  The presentist, in other words, is not a solipsist of the present moment. 

Similarly wth the actualist. He is not a solipsist of this world.  He is not saying that everything possible is actual and everything actual necessary.  The actualist is not a modal monist or a modal Spinozist who maintains that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world which, in virtue of being actual and the only one possible, is necessary.  The actualist is not a necessitarian.

There is no person like me, but I am not the only person.  There is no place like here, but here is not the only place.  There is no time like now, but now is not the only time.

In sum, for both presentism and actualism, tautologism, disjunctivism, and solipsism are out! What's left?

To formulate presentism it seems we need a notion of tenseless existence, and to formulate actualism we need a notion of amodal existence (my coinage).   

We can't say that only the present presently exists, and of course we cannot say that only the present pastly or futurally exists.  So the presentist has to say that only the present tenselessly exists.  I will say more about tenseless existence in a later post. 

What do I mean by amodal existence?  Consider the following 'possible worlds' definitions of modal terms:

Necessary being: one that exists in all possible worlds
Impossible being: one that exists in no possible world
Possible being: one that exists in some and perhaps all possible worlds
Contingent being: one that exists in some but not all possible worlds
Merely possible being: one that exists in some possible worlds but not in the actual world
Actual being: one that exists in the actual world
Unactual being: one that exists either in no possible world or not in the actual world.

In each of these definitions, the occurrence of 'exists' is modally neutral analogously as 'exists' is temporally neutral in the following sentences:

It was the case that Tom exists
It is now the case that Tom exists
It will be the case that Tom exists. 

My point, then, is that the proper formulation of actualism (as opposed to possibilism) requires an amodal notion of existence just as the proper formulation of presentism requires an atemporal (tenseless) notion of existence.

But are the atemporal and amodal notions of existence free of difficulty?  This is what we need to examine.  Can the requisite logical wedges be driven between existence and the temporal determinations and between existence and the modal determinations? If not then presentism and actualism cannot even be formulated and the respective problems threaten to be pseudoproblems.

Related articles

My Existence and My Possible Nonexistence

Defining Presentism

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Scollay Square No Longer Exists

Caesar, the Rubicon, Tenseless Truth, Determinism, and Fatalism

Defining Presentism

I concede to London Ed that it is not clear what exactly the thesis of presentism is.  There is no point in considering objections to it until we are sure what the thesis comes to.  The rough idea is of course easy to convey: only temporally present items exist.  This is more plausible under restriction to items 'in time' where the eternal God and abstracta such as Fregean propositions are not 'in time.'  The rough idea, then, is that only present contingent concreta exist.  This implies that a wholly past contingent concretum such as Socrates does not exist.

But how are we to take 'exist' in the last two sentences?  As present-tensed? Then both sentences are trivially true.  Surely no philosopher who calls himself a presentist intends

Tautological Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta exist at present.

And of course he doesn't intend

Timeless Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta exist timelessly.

For that implies that if x is a timeless contingent concretum, then x is temporally present.

But the clear-headed presentist must also, in his formulation of his thesis, avoid giving aid and
comfort to the absurdity that could be called 'solipsism of the present moment.'  (I borrow the phrase from Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon and Schuster 1948, p. 181.) To wit,

SPM Presentism:  Only what exists (present tense) exists simpliciter; nothing existed and nothing will exist.

The idea behind (SPM) is decidedly counterintuitive if not insane.  To illustrate, consider James Dean who died on September 30th, 1955.  It is a Moorean fact that Dean existed but no longer exists.  (Alter the example to Dean's car if you hold to the immortality of the soul.)  It is a Moorean fact that there actually was this actor, that he was not a mere possibility or a fictional being or nothing at all. But this plain fact is incompatible with SPM-Presentism. 

Another possibility is

Disjunctive Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta existed or exist or will exist.

Disjunctive Presentism seems objectionable because, e.g., Scollay Square existed, but does not now.

What about

Tenseless Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta tenselessly exist.

Now the problem is to explain that 'tenselessly exist' means if it does not mean 'timelessly exist' or 'did exist, does exist, or will exist.'

Ned Markosian defines presentism as the view that, "necessarily, it is always true that only present objects exist." (here, fn 1)  This is not helpful since we are not told how to read 'exist.'  The Triviality Objection threatens to kick in.  And how are we to understand, "it is always true"?  If this involves quantifying over times, then anti-presentism is let in through the back door.  If there is a manifold of equally real/existent times, then presentism cannot be true of these times. 

Related articles

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (St. Augustine)  This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time. 

On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible  monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming.  My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death  approaching from the future, getting closer and closer.  Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality.  At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality. 

If there is no temporal becoming in reality, then change  is not a becoming different or a passing away or a coming into being.  When a tomato ripens, it doee not become ripe: it simply is unripe at certain times and is ripe at certain later times.  And when it cease to exist, it doesn't pass away: it simply is at certain times and is not at certain later times.

Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality.  Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago.  Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say,  lies in the future.  Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period.  And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.

This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.'  He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned.  Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t.  An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.

Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is.  But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.

The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  Every
time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter.  This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness.  There just is no irreducible monadic property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property.  Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent.  If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not jusdt now (which is trivial) but at all.

Please note that the B-theory is incompatible not only with presentism, but with any theory that is committed to irreducible A-properties.  Thus the B-theory rules out 'pastism,' the crazy theory that only the past exists and 'futurism,' the crazy view that only the future exists.  It also rules out the sane view that only the past and the present exist, and the sane view that the past, present, and future exist.

 Why be a B-theorist?  McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction.  We should examine that argument in a separate post.

Related articles

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Clearly, a thing can exist without existing here.  The Washington Monument exists but not in my backyard.   Accordingly, 'x exists here' can be split up as follows:

1. x exists here iff (i) x exists & (ii) x is in the vicinity of the speaker.

It seems pretty obvious that existence and the indexical property of hereness  are different properties if you want to call them properties. 

A much more difficult  question is whether a thing can exist without existing now.  Is it true that:

2. x exists now iff (i) x exists & (ii) x is temporally present?

Clearly, we can prise apart the existence of a (spatially located) thing and its hereness.  Anyone who maintained that to exist = to be here we would deem either crazy or not conversant with the English language, a sort of 'local yokel' in excelsis.  But can we prise apart the existence of a thing and its temporal presentness?  Is there a real distinction between the existence of a thing and its temporal presentness?

A.  A negative answer will be returned by the presentist who maintains that only the temporally present exists.  He will maintain that what no longer exists and what does not yet exist does not now exist, and therefore does not exist at all.

Note that it ought to be is perfectly obvious to anyone who understands English that what no longer exists and what does not yet exist does not now exist.  What is not at all obvious is the part after 'therefore' in the sentence before last.  It is not at all obvious that an individual or event or time that is wholly past or wholly future does not exist at all.

B.  An affirmative answer will be returned by all those who reject presentism.  Some will reject presentism on the ground that abstracta exist, but are not in time at all, and so cannot be said to exist now. A presentist can accommodate this point by restricting his thesis:

Restricted Presentism:  Necessarily, only temporally present concreta exist.

Nevertheless, the anti-presentist will insist that there are past and perhaps also future concreta that exist but do not exist now.  Scollay Square, for example, no longer exists.  But that it not to say that it is now nothing.  After all, we  still refer to it and say true things about it.  It is true, for example, that my father visited Scollay Square while on shore leave during WW II on a break from service on destroyer escorts in the North Atlantic.  So it is true that a a sailor who no longer exists visited a place that no longer exists and was involved in events that no longer exist.  It also true that Scollay Square had been demolished by the time I arrived in Boston in 1973.  I can now argue as follows:

1. Various predicates (e.g., is remembered by some Bostonians) are true of Scollay Square.
2. Scollay Square does not exist now.
3. If x does not exist, then no predicate is true of x.
Therefore
4. Scollay Square exists. (From 1 and 3)
Therefore
5. Scollay Square  exists but is not temporally present. (From 2 and 4)
Therefore
6. Restricted Presentism is false.

I think there are three ways to attack this argument: (a) reject one or more of the premises; (b) find fault with the reasoning; (c) complain that it is not clear what Restricted Presentism amounts to.

Have at it, boys. 

Related articles

Scollay Square No Longer Exists

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

Scollay Square No Longer Exists

London Ed sends me a puzzle that I will formulate in my own way.

1. Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. Hence 'Scollay Square no longer exists' is true.

2. Removing 'Scollay Square' from the closed sentence yields the open sentence, or predicate, or sentential function, '____ no longer exists.'

3. If a subject-predicate sentence is true, then its predicate is true of, or is satisfied by, the referent of the sentence's subject term. 

4. If x is satisfied by y, then both x and y exist.  (Special case of the principle that if x stands in a relation to y, then both relata exist.)

5. What no longer exists, does not exist. (An entailment of presentism.)

6. The referent of 'Scollay Square' does not exist. (from 1 and 5)

7. The referent of 'Scollay Square' exists.  (from 1, 3, and 4)

How do we avoid the contradiction?  As far as I can see we have exactly three options.  The first is to  posit an haecceity property that individuates Scollay Square  across all possible worlds, and then construe the original sentence as saying, of that haecceity property, that it is no longer instantiated.  Thus the original sentence is not about Scollay Square, which does not exist, but about an ersatz item, an abstract deputy that does exist., and indeed necessarily exists. About this ersatz item we say that it now fails of instantiation.  The second option is to reject the principle that if a relation obtains between x and y, then both x and y exist.  One might say that past objects are Meinongian nonexistent objects.    The third option is to reject presentism and say that what no longer exists exists alright, it just doesn't exist now.  (Analogy: the cat that is no longer in my lap exists alright, it just doesn't exist here.)

None of these options is palatable.  I should like London Ed to tell me which he favors.  Or does he see another way out?

 

Being is Said in Many Ways: On the Uses of 'Is'

Chad reports:

In the opening pages of More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Blackwell, 2009), E. J. Lowe distinguishes five uses of ‘is’ as a copula: 1. The ‘is’ of attribution, as in ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Grass is green’.2. The ‘is’ of identity, as in ‘Napoleon is Bonaparte’ and ‘Water is H2O’.3. The ‘is’ of instantiation, as in ‘Mars is a planet’ and ‘A horse is a mammal’.4. The ‘is’ of constitution, as in ‘This ring is gold’ and ‘A human body is a collection of cells’.5. The ‘is’ of existence, as in ‘The Dodo is no more’.He says some may be reducible to others, and that one or two must be primitive. I thought this was a helpful spread.

That is indeed helpful, but here are some comments and questions.

1. First of all, I would be surprised if Lowe referred to the five uses as five uses of 'is' as a copula.  The 'is' of existence is not a copula because it doesn't couple.  There is no copulation, grammatical or logical, in 'God is.'  The 'is' of existence does not pick out any sort of two-termed relation such as identity, instantiation, or constitution. Calling the 'is' of identity a copula is a bit of a stretch, and I don't think most philosophers would.

2. Is there a veritative use of 'is'?  'It is so.'  'It is the case that Frege died in 1925.'  One could say, though it is not idiomatic: 'Obama's being president is.'  One would be expressing that the state of affairs obtains or that the corresponding proposition is true.  So it looks as if there is a veritative use of 'is.'

3. Reducibility of one use to another does not show that they are not distinct uses.  Perhaps the veritative use can be reduced to what Lowe calls the attributive use.  Attributions of truth, however, imply that truth is a property.  Frege famously argued that truth cannot be a property.  That is a messy separate can of worms.

4.  There are also tensed and tenseless uses of 'is.'  'Obama is president' versus '7 + 5 is 12.'  With respect to the latter, it would be a bad joke, one reminiscent of Yogi Berra, were I to ask,"You mean now?"  Yogi Berra was once asked the time.  He said,"You mean now?"

'Hume is an empiricist' can be used both in a tensed way and an untensed way.  If I say that Hume is an empiricist what I say is true despite the present nonexistence of Hume.  'Grass is green,' however, is never used in a tensed way, though one can imagine circumstances in which it could.

5. One and the same tokening of 'is' can do more than one job. Is the 'is' in 'Max is black' as used by me in the presence of my cat Max the 'is' of predication merely?  I don't think so.  It also expresses existence.  But this requires argument:

1. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' are intertranslatable. 
2. Intertranslatable sentences have the same sense.
Therefore
3. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' express the very same (Fregean) sense.
Therefore
4. Both sentences express both predication and existence: a property is predicated of something that cannot have properties unless it exists.
Therefore
5. The 'is' in 'Max is black' has a double function: it expresses both predication and existence. 

Note that both sentences include a sign for the predicative tie.  The sign is 'is' in the first sentence and in the second sentence the sign is the immediate concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order. This shows that to refer to logical (as opposed to grammatical) copulation does not require a separate stand-alone sign.  'Black Max exists' expresses both existence via the sign 'exsts' and predication via the immeditae concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order in the context of the sentence in question. 

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A Question About Predication and Identity

Phenomenon and Existence

E. C. writes:

In the recent post Mary Neal’s Out of Body Experiences you state: "No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.  Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics."

I have been attempting to reconstruct your reasoning here, and the following is the best I could come up with.

 1) No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. 

 2) The subject matter of phenomenology is experience.

 3) The subject matter of metaphysics is existence, which includes the quest of proving the veridicality of intentional objects. Therefore:

 C) Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.

I have an issue with (1). Surely, the very meaning of ‘veridical experience’ designates a harmonious pattern of interconnected experiences, the paradigm case being perceptual experiences. Correlatively, when one speaks about the intentional object existing, one means nothing other than the reappearance of the self-same object across this harmonious flow.

Non-veridical experiences, e.g. hallucinations, are then just those experiences that promise, but fail, to endure harmoniously. Whenever non-veridical experiences obtain so do veridical experiences. For example, I was mistaken that there was a cat walking outside on the pavement, and hence had a non-veridical experience of the cat, but I had a veridical experience of the pavement itself. Ultimately, the experience of the world is given as the veridical background that serves as a foundation for all non-veridical experiences. To speak ontologically, the existence of non-veridical experiences depends on veridical experiences and likewise non-existence objects demand existent objects. Therefore, non-veridical experience could never exist on their own, which does not prevent us as talking about them as self-sufficient.

In relation to (2), I would argue that the subject matter of phenomenology is not just experience but also the object experienced just as it is experienced. But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implication.

I do not think that perceptual experience is the only mode of experience through which existence is experienced; the room is left often for experiences that reveal the divine.

As always, I am very grateful for the existence of your blog.

REPLY

Thanks for reading, E. C., for the kind words, and for the above response.

First of all, you did a good job of setting forth my reasoning in support of (C).  But I take issue with your taking issue with (1).  You are in effect begging the question by just assuming that what makes veridical experience veridical is its internal coherence.  That is precisely the question.  It may well be that coherence is a criterion of truth without being the nature of truth.  By a criterion I mean a way of testing for truth.  It could be that coherence is a criterion, or even the criterion, of truth, but that correspondence is the nature of truth.  One cannot just assume that truth is constituted by coherence.  I am not saying the view is wrong; I am saying that it cannot be assumed to be true without argument or consideration of alternatives.  Such arguments and considerations, however, move us beyond phenomenology into dialectics.

To say of an experience that it is veridical is to say that it is of or about an object that exists whether or not the experience exists.  If so, then the existence of the object in reality cannot be explicated in terms of its manners and modes of appearing.  If you say that it can, then you are opting for a form of idealism which, in Husserlian jargon, reduces Sein to Seinsinn.  I would insist, however, that it part of the plain sense of outer perception that it is of or about objects whose existence is independent of the existence of perceivers and their experiences.  To borrow a turn of phrase from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, it is built into the very structure of outer perception that it is of or about objects as non-objects.  That may sound paradoxical, but it is not contradictory.  The idea is that the object is intended in the act or noesis as having an ontological status that surpasses the status of a merely intentional object.  Whether it does have that additional really existent status is of course a further question.

For example, my seeing of a tree is an intentional experience: it is of or about something that may or may not exist.  (Note that, phenomenologically, 'see' is not a verb of success.  If I see x in the phenomenological sense of 'see,' it does not follow that there exists an x such that I see it.)  Now if you say that the existence of the tree intended in the act reduces to its ongoing 'verification' in the coherent series of Abschattungen that manifest it, then you are opting for a form of idealism.  And this seems incompatible with the point I made, namely, that it is part and parcel of the very nature of outer perception that it be directed to an object as non-object.  The tree is intended as being such that its existence is not exhausted by its phenomenological manifestation.

But the point is not to get you to agree with this; the point is to get you to see that there is an issue here, one subject to ongoing controversy, and that one cannot uncritically plump for one side.  If you haven't read Roman Ingarden on Husserl, I suggest that you do.

As for premse (2), we will agree that there are acts, intentional experiences (Erlebnisse), and that they are of an object.  Throughout the sphere of intentionality there is the act-object, noesis-noema correlation.  But this leaves wide open the question whether the being of the thing in reality is exhausted by its noematic being, whether its Sein reduces to its Seinsinn.  On that  very point Ingarden disagreed strenuously with his master, Husserl.

"But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implications."  That is true.  But I deny the consequent of your conditional and so I deny the antecedent as well.

My point, in sum, is that you cannot just assume the truth of the antecedent.  For that begs the question against realism.  From the fact that an object manifests its existence in the manner you describe, it does not follow that the very existence of the object is its manifestation.

It may be methodologically useful to bracket the existence of the object the better to study its manners and modes of appearing, but this very bracketing presupposes that there is more to the existence of the object than its appearing.  One could say that Husserl was right to bracket the existence of the object for purposes of phenomenology, but then, in his later idealistic phase, he forgot to remove the brackets.

 

Related articles

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

Eben Alexander: "We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains"

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication"

Enough of politics, back to some hard-core technical philosophy.  If nothing else, the latter offers exquisite escapist pleasures not unlike those of chess. Of course I don't believe that technical philosophy is escapist; my point is a conditional one: if it is, its pleasures suffice to justify it as a form of recuperation from  this all-too-oppressive world of 'reality.'  It's what I call a 'fall-back position.'

I have been commissioned to review the collection of which the above-captioned article is a part.  The collection is entitled Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag 2012) and includes contributions by Peter van Inwagen, Michael Loux, E. J. Lowe, and several others.  My review article will address such topics as predication, truth-makers, bare particulars, and the advantages and liabilities of constituent ontology.  I plan a series of posts in which I dig deep into some of the articles in this impressive collection.

Stanislav Sousedik argues for an "identity theory of predication" according to which a predicative sentence such as 'Peter is a man' expresses an identity of some sort between the referent of the subject 'Peter' and the referent of the predicate 'man.'  Now to someone schooled in modern predicate logic (MPL) such an identity  theory will appear wrongheaded from the outset.  For we learned at Uncle Gottlob's knee to distinguish between the 'is' of identity ('Peter is Peter') and the 'is' of predication ('Peter is a man').

But let's give the Thomist theory a chance.  Sousedik, who is well aware of Frege's distinction, presents an argument for the identity in some sense of subject and predicate.  He begins by making the point that in the declarative 'Peter is a man' and the vocative 'Peter, come here!' the individual spoken about is (or can be) the same as the individual addressed.  But common terms such as 'man' can also be used to address a person.  Instead of saying,  'Peter, come here!' one can say 'Man, come here!'  And so we get an argument that I will put as follows:

1. Both 'Peter' and 'man' can be used to refer to the same individual. Therefore

2. A common term can be used to refer to an individual.  But

3. Common terms also refer to traits of individuals.  Therefore

4. The traits must be identical in some sense to the individuals.  E.g., the referent of 'Peter' must be in some sense identical to the referent of 'man.'

But in what sense are they identical?  Where Frege distinguishes between predication and identity, Sousedik distinguishes between weak and strong identity. 'Peter is Peter' expresses strong identity while 'Peter is a man' expresses weak identity.  "Strong identity is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, weak identity has none of these formal properties." (254)  It thus appears that strong identity is the same as what modern analytic philosophers call (numerical) identity.  It is clear that 'Peter is a man' cannot be taken to express strong identity. But what is weak identity?

S. is a constituent ontologist.  He holds that ordinary substances such as Peter have what he calls "metaphysical parts."  Whereas Peter's left leg is a physical part of him, his traits are metaphysical parts of him.  Thus the referents of the common terms 'man,' 'animal,' living thing,' etc. are all metaphysical parts of Peter.  Clearly, these are different traits of Peter.  But are they really distinct in Peter?  S. says that they are not: they are really identical in Peter and only "virtually distinct" in him.  The phrase is defined as follows.

(Def. 1)  Between x, y there is a virtual  distinction iff (i) x, y are really identical; (ii) x can become an object of some cognitive act Φ without y being the object  of the same act Φ . . . . (251)

For example, humanity and animality in Peter are really identical but virtually distinct in that humanity can be the intentional object of a cognitive act without animality being the object of the same act.  I can focus my mental glance so to speak on Peter's humanity while leaving out of consideration his animality even though he is essentially both a man and an animal and even though animality is included within humanity. 

The idea, then, is that Peter has metaphysical parts (MPs) and that these items are really identical in Peter but virtually distinct, where the virtual distinctness of any two MPs is tied to the possibility of one of them being the object of a cognitive act without the other being the object of the same act.

Is S. suggesting that virtual distinctness is wholly mind generated?   I don't think so.  For he speaks of a potential distinction of MPs in concrete reality, a distinction that becomes actual when the understanding grasps them as distinct.  (253) And so I take the possibility mentioned in clause (ii) of the above definition to be grounded not only in the mind's power to objectify and abstract but also in a real potentiality in the MPs in substances like Peter.

One might be tempted to think of weak identity as a part-whole relation.  Thus one might be tempted to say that 'Peter' refers to Peter and 'man' to a property taken in the abstract that is predicable not only of Peter but of other human beings as well.  'Peter is a man' would then say that this abstract property is a metaphysical part of Peter.  But this is not Sousedik's or any Thomist's view.  For S. is committed to the idea that "Every empirical individual and every part or trait of it is particular." (251)  It follows that no metaphysical part of any concrete individual is a universal.  Hence no MP is an abstract property.  So weak identity is not a part-whole relation.

What is it then?

First of all, weak identity is a relation that connects a concrete individual such as Peter to a property taken abstractly.  But in what sense is Peter identical to humanity taken abstractly?   In this sense:  the humanity-in-Peter and the humanity-in-the-mind have a common constituent, namely, humanity taken absolutely as common nature or natura absoluta or natura secundum se.  (254)  What makes weak identity identity is the common constituent shared by the really existing humanity in Peter and the intentionally existing  humanity in the mind of a person who judges that Peter is human.

So if we ask in what sense the referent of 'Peter' is identical to the referent of 'man,' the answer is that they are identical in virtue of the fact that Peter has a proper metaphysical part that shares a constituent with the objective concept referred to by 'man.'  Sousedik calls this common constituent the "absolute subject."  In our example, it is human nature taken absolutely in abstraction from its real existence in Peter and from its merely intentional existence in the mind.

Critical Observations

I am deeply sympathetic to Sousedik's constituent-ontological approach, his view that existence is a first-level 'property,' and the related view that there are modes of existence. (253)  But one of the difficulties I  have with S.'s  identity theory of predication is that it relies on common natures, and I find it difficult to make sense of them as I already spelled out in a previous post.    Common natures are neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular.  Humanity is many in things but one in the mind.  Hence taken absolutely it is neither one nor many.  It is this absolute feature that allows it be the common constituent in humanity-in-Peter and humanity-in-the-mind.  And as we just saw, without this common constituent there can be no talk of an identity between Peter and humanity.  The (weak) identity 'rides on' the common constituent, the natura absoluta.  Likewise, humanity is particular in particular human beings but universal in the mind (and only in the mind).  Hence taken absolutely it is neither particular nor universal. 

But it also follows that the common nature is, in itself and taken absolutely, neither really existent nor intentionally existent.  It enjoys neither esse naturale (esse reale) nor esse intentionale.  Consequently it has no being (existence) at all. This is not to say that it is nonexistent.  It is to say that it is jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein to borrow a phrase from Alexius von Meinong, "beyond being and nonbeing." 

The difficulty is to understand how there could be a plurality of distinct items that are neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, neither existent nor nonexistent.  Note that there has to be a plurality of them: humanity taken absolutely is distinct from animality taken absolutely, etc.  And what is the nature of this distinctness?  It cannot be mind-generated.  This is because common natures are logically and ontologically prior to mind and matter as that which mediates between them. They are not virtually distinct.  Are they then really distinct?  That can't be right either since they lack esse reale.

And how can these common or absolute natures fail to be, each of them, one, as opposed to neither one nor many?  The theory posits a plurality of items distinct among themselves.  But if each is an item, then each is one.  An item that is neither one nor many is no item at all.

There is also this consideration.  Why are common natures more acceptable than really existent universals as constituents of ordinary particulars such as Peter?    The Thomists allow universals only if they have merely intentional existence, existence 'in' or rather for a mind.  "Intentional existence belongs to entities which exist only in dependence upon the fact that they are objects of our understanding." (253)  They insist that, as S. puts it,  "Every empirical individual and every part or trait of it is particular." (251)  S. calls the latter an observation, but it is not really a datum, but a bit of theory.  It is a datum that 'man' is predicable of many different individuals.  And it is a datum that Peter is the subject of plenty of essential predicates other than 'man.'  But it is not a clear datum that Peter is particular 'all the way through.'  That smacks of a theory or a proto-theory, not that it is not eminently reasonable.

One might 'assay' (to use G. Bergmann's term) an ordinary particular as a complex consisting of a thin or 'bare'  particular instantiating universals.  This has its own difficulties, of course, but why should a theory that posits common natures be preferrable to one that doesn't but posits really existent universals instead?  Either way problems will arise.

The main problem in a nutshell is that it is incoherent to maintain that some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.  'Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever' is not a formal-logical contradiction, pace van Inwagen, but it is incoherent nonetheless.  Or so it seems to me. 

Still Trying to Understand Van Inwagen's Half-Way Fregeanism about Existence

In section 53 of The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege famously maintains that

. . . existence is analogous to number.  Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought.  Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down. (65)

Frege is here advancing a double-barreled thesis that splits into two subtheses.

ST1. Existence is analogous to number.

ST2. Existence is a property (Eigenschaft) of concepts and not of objects.

In the background is the sharp distinction between property (Eigenschaft) and mark (Merkmal).  Three-sided is a mark of the concept triangle, but not a property of this concept; being instantiated is a property of this concept but not a mark of it.  The Cartesian-Kantian ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus lauter Begriffen), according to Frege, runs aground because existence cannot be a mark of any concept, but only a property of some concepts.  And so one cannot validly argue from the concept of God to the existence of God.

Existence as a property of concepts is the property of being-instantiated.  We can therefore call the Fregean account of existence an instantiation account.

My concern in this entry is the logical relation between the subtheses.  Does the first entail the second or are they logically independent?  There is a clear sense in which (ST1) is true.  Necessarily, if horses exist, then the number of horses is not zero, and vice versa.  'So 'Horses exist' is logically equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.'  This is wholly unproblematic for those of us who agree that there are no Meinongian nonexistent objects.  But note that, in general, equivalences, even logical equivalences, do not sanction reductions or identifications.  So it remains an open question whether one can take the further step of reducing existence to instantiation, or identifying existence with instantiation, or even eliminating existence in favor of instantiation. 

(ST1), then, is unproblematically true if understood as expressing the following logical equivalence: 'Necessarily Fs exist iff the number of Fs is not zero.'  My question is whether (ST1) entails (ST2).  Peter van Inwagen in effect denies the entailment by denying that the 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a predicate of concepts:

I would say that, on a given occasion of its use, it predicates of certain things that they number more than zero.  Thus, if one says, 'The number of horses is not zero,' one predicates of horses that they number more than zero.  'The number of . . . is not zero' is thus what some philosophers have called a 'variably polyadic' predicate.  But so are many predicates that can hardly be regarded as predicates of concepts.  The predicates 'are ungulates' and 'have an interesting evolutionary history,' for example, are variably polyadic predicates.  When one says, 'Horses are ungulates' or 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' one is obviously making a statement about horses and not about the concept horse.  ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," pp. 483-484)

It is this passage that I am having a hard time understanding.   It is of course clear what van Inwagen is trying to show, namely, that the Fregean subtheses are logically independent and that one can affirm the first without being committed to the second.  One can hold that existence is denial of the number zero without  holding that existence is a property of concepts.

But I am having trouble with the claim that the predicate 'the number of . . . is not zero' is  'variably polyadic' and the examples van Inwagen employs.  'Robbed a bank together' is an example of a variably polyadic predicate.  It is polyadic because it expresses a relation and it is variably polyadic because it expresses a family of relations having different numbers of arguments.  For example, Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank together, but so did Ma Barker and her two boys, Patti Hearst and three members of the ill-starred Symbionese Liberation Army, and so on.  (Example from Chris Swoyer and Francesco Orilia.) 

Now when I say that the number of horses is not zero, what am I talking about? It is plausible to say that I am talking about horses, not about the concept horse.  What I don't understand is why van Inwagen says that 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a variably polyadic predicate. As far as I can see, it is not even polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.  What is the relation that the predicate expresses, and why is that relation multigrade?  I grant that there are indefinitely many ways the number of horses could be not zero: there could be one horse, two, three, and so on.  But what is the relation between or among horses that this supposedly polyadic predicate expresses? 

'. . .exist(s)' is monadic.  It expresses no relation.  Why not say the same about 'such that their number is not zero'?

Now consider 'are ungulates.'  If an ungulate is just a mammal with hooves, then I fail to see how 'are ungulates' is polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.  'Are hooved mammals' is monadic.

The other example is 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.'  This sentence is clearly not about the concept horse. But it is not about any individual horse either.  Consider Harry the horse.  Harry has a history.  He was born in a certain place, grew up, was bought and sold, etc. and then died at a certain age.  He went through all sorts of changes.  But Harry didn't evolve, and so he had no evolutionary history.  No individual evolves; populations evolve:

Evolutionary change is based on changes in the genetic makeup of populations over time. Populations, not individual organisms, evolve. Changes in an individual over the course of its lifetime may be developmental (e.g., a male bird growing more colorful plumage as it reaches sexual maturity) or may be caused by how the environment affects an organism (e.g., a bird losing feathers because it is infected with many parasites); however, these shifts are not caused by changes in its genes. While it would be handy if there were a way for environmental changes to cause adaptive changes in our genes — who wouldn't want a gene for malaria resistance to come along with a vacation to Mozambique? — evolution just doesn't work that way. New gene variants (i.e., alleles) are produced by random mutation, and over the course of many generations, natural selection may favor advantageous variants, causing them to become more common in the population.

'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history,' then, is not about the concept horse or about any individual horse.  The predicate in this sentence appears to be non-distributive or collective.  It is like the predicate in 'Horses have been domesticated for millenia.'  That is certainly not about the concept horse.  No concept can be ridden or made to carry a load.  But it is also not about any individual horse.  Not even the Methuselah of horses, whoever he might be, has been around for millenia.

A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F.  Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them.  'Blue' is an example.  If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.

If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective).  If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded.  If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did.  If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct.  Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries.  If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.

My problem is that I don't understand why van Inwagen gives the 'Horses have an interesting evlutionary history' example when he is committed to saying that each horse exists.  His view , I take it, is that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate.  'Has an interesting evolutionary history,' however, is a first-level non-distributive predicate.  Or is it PvI's view that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate?

Either I don't understand van Inwagen's position due to some defect in me, or it is incoherent.  I incline toward the latter.  He is trying to show that (ST1) doe not entail (ST2).  He does this by giving examples of predicates that are first-level, i.e., apply to objects, but are variably polyadic as he claims 'the number of . . . is not zero' is variably polyadic.  But the only clear example he gives is a predicate that is non-distributive, namely 'has an interesting evilutionary history.'  'Horses exist,' however, cannot be non-distributive.  If some horses exist, then each of them exists.  And if each of them exists, then 'exists' is monadic, not polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.

The ComBox is open if there is anyone who knows this subject and has read PvI's paper and can set me straight. 

More Fun With Existential Generalization

Intuitively, if something is identical to Venus, it follows that something is identical to something.  In the notation of MPL, the following is a correct application of the inference rule, Existential Generalization (EG):

1. (∃x)(x = Venus)
2. (∃y)(∃x)(x = y) 1, EG

(1) is contingently true: true, but possibly false.  (2), however, is necessarily true.  Ought we find this puzzling?  That is one question.  Now consider the negative existential, 'Vulcan does not exist.' 

3. ~(∃x)( x = Vulcan)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3, EG

(3) is contingently true while (4) is a logical contradiction, hence necessarily false.  The inference is obviously invalid, having taken us from truth to falsehood.  What went wrong? 

Diagnosis A: "You can't existentially generalize on a vacuous term, and 'Vulcan' is a vacuous term."

The problem with this diagnosis is that whether a term is vacuous or not is an extralogical (extrasyntactic) question.  Let 'a' be an arbitrary constant, and thus neither a place-holder nor a variable.  Now if we substitute 'a' for 'Vulcan' we get:

3* ~(∃x)( x = a)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3*, EG

The problem with this inference is with the conclusion: we don't know whether 'a' is vacuous or not.  So I suggest

Diagnosis B:  Singular existentials cannot be translated using the identity sign as in (1) and (3).  This fact, pace van Inwagen, forces us to beat a retreat to the second-level analysis.  We have to analyze 'Venus exists' in terms of

5. (∃x)(Vx)

where 'V' is a predicate constant standing for the haecceity property, Venusity.  Accordingly, what (5) says is that Venusity is instantiated.  Similarly, 'Vulcan does not exist' has to be interpreted as saying that Vulcanity is not instantiated. Thus

6. ~(∃x)(Wx)

where 'W' is a predicate constant denoting Vulcanity.

It is worth noting that we can existentially generalize (6) without reaching the absurdity of (4) by shifting to second-order logic and quantifying over properties:

7. (∃P)~(∃x)Px.

That says that some property is such that it is not instantiated.  There is nothing self-contradictory about (7).

But of course beating a retreat to the second-level analysis  brings back the old problem of haecceities.  Not to mention the circularity problem. 

The thin theory is 'cooked' no matter how you twist and turn.

The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity

Andrew B. made some powerful objections to a recent existence post.  His remarks suggest the following argument:

Argument A

1. Existence is self-identity
2. My existence is contingent:  (∃x)(x = I) & Poss ~(∃x) (x = I)
Therefore
3. My self-identity is contingent:  I = I & Poss ~ (I = I)

Argument A may be supplemented by the following consideration.  Since I am contingent, there are possible worlds in which I do not exist.  Not being in those worlds, I cannot have properties in them, including the property of self-identity. So it is not the case that I am necessarily self-identical; I am self-identical only in those worlds in which I exist, which is to say: I am contingently self-identical.  I am self-identical in some but not all worlds.

The argument can be rationally resisted. 

Consider a possible world w in which I do not exist.  In w, the proposition expressed by an utterance by me of 'I am not self-identical' is true.  But if it is true in w, then the proposition exists in w.  Now if the proposition exists in w, then so do its constituents.  On a Russellian view of propositions, I am one of the proposition's  constituents.  So for the proposition  *I am not self-identical* to be true in w, I must exist in w.  But if I exist in w, then of course I am self-identical in w, and the proposition is false in w.  But the same goes for every world in which I do not exist.  It follows that I am self-identical in every world and I exist in every world.

Of course, one needn't take a Russellian line on propositions.  One could take a Fregean view according to which propositions about me do not have me as a constituent but an abstract representative of me, a sense or mode of presentation.  But the first-person singular pronoun 'I' has the peculiarity that it cannot be replaced salva significatione by any description; so even if there is an abstract representative of me in the Fregean proposition expressed by my utterance of  'I am not self-identical,' there still has to be a referent of the representative external to the proposition.  So I have to exist in w for the proposition *I am not self-identical* to be true in w.  But if I exist in w then I am self-identical in w.  This in turn implies that the proposition is not true.  

The cognoscenti will appreciate that what I have been doing in a rough and dirty way is reproducing some of the thoughts in Timothy Williamson's paper Necessary Existents.  I am doing so to show that Argument A is not convincing.  Making use of materials from Williamson's paper, we can 'throw Argument A into reverse':

Argument B

1. Existence is self-identity
~3. My self-identity is necessary: Nec (I = I)
Therefore
~2. My existence is necessary.

In point of validity, there is nothing to choose between A and B: both are valid.  And both, I submit, have counterintuitive conclusions.  It seems to me that the arguments cancel each other out.  So I propose that we think very skeptically about the common premise that existence is self-identity, and the Quinean thin theory that commits us to it. 

The Modal Aporetics of Existential Generalization

Consider this trio of propositions:

1. '~(∃x)(x = Venus)' is possibly true.

2. Existential Generalization warrants the inference of '(∃y)~(∃x)(x = y)' from  '~(∃x)(x = Venus).'

3. '(∃y)~(∃x)(x = y)' is logically self-contradictory, hence necessarily false.

Solve the triad, either by showing that the limbs are (collectively) logically consistent or by rejecting one or more of the limbs.

Existence and Contingency

Let us return to the problem of contingency that I was belaboring in my last existence post.  Consider this reasoning:

1. (x)(x = x).  Principle of Identity: everything is self-identical
2. Venus = Venus.  From (1) by Universal Instantiation (UI)
3. (∃x)(x = Venus).  From (2) by Existential Generalization (EG)
4. (1) is logically true, hence necessarily true.
5. If p is necessary, and p entails q, then q is necessary.  (Principle of Modal Logic)
6. (3) is necessarily true.  The necessity of (1) is transmitted via the Modal Principle to (2), and then to (3)
7. 'Venus exists' is contingent.
8. If sentence s1 adequately translates sentence s2, then s1 preserves both the truth and the modal status of s2.  (Translation Principle)
Therefore
9. (3) is not an adequate translation of 'Venus exists': it preserves truth but not modal status.

And of course this result is generalizable:  'x exists' cannot be adequately translated as '(∃y)(x = y).'  But that is the canonical translation on the Quinean version of the thin theory.  So the Quinean version is untenable.

If you don't accept this argument, which premise or inference will you reject and why?

If Venus exists, then of course it is identical to something.  But surely it is not contingent that Venus  is identical to something.  It is contingent, however, that Venus exists.  Therefore, the existence of Venus is not its identity to something.  Once again we see that the thin theory is false. 

Beating the Dead Horse of the Thin Theory Some More

It is obviously true that something exists.  This is not only true, but known with certainty to be true:  I think, therefore I exist, therefore something exists.  That is my Grand Datum, my datanic starting point.  Things exist! 

Now it seems perfectly clear to me that 'Something exists' cannot be translated adequately as 'Something is self-identical' employing just the resources of modern predicate logic (MPL), i.e., first-order predicate logic  with identity.    But it seems perfectly clear to van Inwagen that it can.  See my preceding post on this topic. So one of us is wrong, and if it is me, I'd like to know exactly why.  Let me add that 'Something is self-identical' is the prime candidate for such a thin translation.  If there is a thin translation, this is it.  Van Inwagen comes into the discussion only as a representative of the thin theory, albeit as the 'dean' of the thin theorists.

Consider the following formula in first-order predicate logic with identity that van Inwagen thinks adequately translates 'There are objects' and 'Something exists':

1. (∃x) (x = x).

It seems to me that there is nothing in this formula but syntax: there are no nonlogical expressions, no content expressions, no expressions like 'Socrates' or 'cat' or placeholders for such expressions such as  'a' and 'C.'  The parentheses can be dropped, and van Inwagen writes the formula without them. This leaves us with '∃,' three bound occurrences of the variable 'x,' and the identity sign '=.' 

Now here is my main question:  How can the extralogical and extrasyntactical fact that something exists be a matter of pure logical syntax?  How can this fact be expressed by a string of merely syntactical symbols: '∃,' 'x,' '='?

It is not a logical truth that something exists; it is a matter of extralogical fact.  There's this bloody world out there and it certainly wasn't sired by the laws of logic.  Logically, there might not have been anything at all.  It is true, but logically contingent, that something exists.  Compare (1) with the universal quantification

2. (x)(x =x).

If (1) translates 'Something exists,' then (2) translates 'Everything exists.'  But (2) is a logical truth, and its negation a contradiction.  Since (1) follows from (2), (1) is a logical truth as well.  But (1) is not a logical truth as we have just seen.  We face an aporetic triad:

a. '(x)(x =x)' is logically true.
b. '(∃x) (x = x)' follows from '(x)(x = x).'
c. '(∃x) (x = x)' adequately translates 'Something exists.'

Each limb is plausible, but they cannot all be true.   The truth of any two linbs entails the falsehood of the remaining one. For example, the first two entail that '(∃x) (x = x)' is logically true. But then (c) is false:  One sentence cannot be an adequate translation of a second if the first fails to preserve the modal status of the second.  To repeat myself: 'Something exists' is logically contingent whereas the canonical  translation is logically necessary.

Now which of the limbs shall we reject?  It is obvious to me that the third limb must be rejected, pace van Inwagen.

Now consider 'Everything exists.'  Can it be translated adequately as '(x)(x = x)'?  Obviously not.  The latter is a formal-logical truth. and its negation is a formal-logical contradiction.  But the negation of 'Everything exists' -- 'Something does not exist' -- is not a formal logical contradiction.  Therefore, 'Everything exists' is not a formal-logical truth.  And because it is not, it cannot be given the canonical translation.

Finally, consider 'Nothing exists.'  This is false, but logically contingent: there is no formal-logical necessity that something exist.  One cannot infer the existence of anything (or at least anything concrete) from the principles of formal logic alone.  The canonical translation of 'Nothing exists,' however -- (x)~(x = x)' -  is not contingently false, but logically false.  Therefore, 'Nothing exists' cannot be translated adequately as 'Everything is not self-identical.'

Van Inwagen and his master Quine are simply mistaken when they maintain that existence is what 'existential' quantification expresses. 

My Argument That 'Exist(s)' is not Univocal Revisited: No 'Is' of Predication?

On August 11th I wrote:

Suppose we acquiesce for the space of this post in QuineSpeak. 

Then 'Horses exist' says no more and no less than that 'Something is a horse.'  And 'Harry exists' says no more and no less than that 'Something is Harry.'  But the 'is' does not have the same sense in both translations.  The first is the 'is' of predication while the second is the 'is' of identity.  The difference  is reflected in the standard notation.  The propositional function in the first case is Hx.  The propositional function in the second case is x = h.  Immediate juxtaposition of predicate constant and free variable [with the predicate constant coming first] is the sign for predication.  '=' is the sign for identity.  Different signs for different concepts.  Identity is irreducible to predication which is presumably why first-order predicate logic with identity is so-called.

Those heir to the 'Fressellian' position, such as Quine and his epigoni, dare not fudge the distinction between the two senses of 'is' lately noted. That, surely, is a cardinal tenet of their brand of analysis.

So even along Quinean lines, the strict univocity of 'exist(s)' across all its uses cannot [pace van Inwagen] be upheld.  It cannot be upheld across the divide that separates general from singular existentials.

But the next morning I had a doubt about what I had written.  Is there an 'is' of predication in MPL (modern predicate logic)? I argued (above) that 'exist(s)' is not univocal: it does not in MPL have the same sense in 'Fs exist' and 'a exists.' The former translates as 'Something is (predicatively) an F' while the latter translates as 'Something is (identically) a.'  Kicked out the front door, the equivocity returns through the back door disguised as  an equivocation on 'is' as between predication and identity.

But if the 'is' in 'Grass is green' or 'Something is green' is bundled into the predicate in the Fregean manner, then it could be argued that there is no 'is' of predication in MPL distinct from the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of existence.  If so, my equivocity argument above collapses, resting as it does on the unexpungeable distinction between the 'is' or identity and the 'is' of predication.

Yesterday a note from Spencer Case shows that he is on to the same (putative) difficulty with my argument:

Hey Bill, I have a professor whose pet peeve is the claim that there is an 'is' of identity and an 'is' of predication. I don't know his arguments for thinking so, but his view is that 'is' is univocal and what differs is the content of the copula. If he's right, that would be a problem for you here. Do you know more about this position than I do?           

To sort this out we need to distinguish several different questions:

Q1. Is there a predicative use of 'is' in English?  Yes, e.g., 'Al is fat.'  This use is distinct from the existential use and the identitative use (and others that I needn't mention).  So I hope Spencer's professor is not denying the plain linguistic fact that in English there is an 'is' of predication and an 'is' of identity and that they are distinct.

Q2. Must there be a separate sign for the predicative tie in a logically perspicuous artificial language such as MPL (modern predicate logic, i.e., first-order predicate logic with identity)?  No.  When we symbolize 'Al is fat' by Fa, there is no separate sign for the predicative tie.  But there is a sign for it, namely, the immediate juxtaposition of the predicate constant and the individual constant with the predicate constant to the left of the individual constant. So we shouldn't confuse a separate or stand-alone sign with a sign.  Other non-separate signs are conceivable exploiting different fonts and different colors, etc. 

Q3.  Must there be some sign or other for predication in a logically adequate language such as MPL? How could there fail to be?  If our logical language is adequate, then it has to be able to symbolize predications such as 'Al is fat.'  And note that existentials such as 'Fat cats exist' cannot be put into MPL without a sign for predication.  '(∃x)(Fx & Cx)' employs non-separate signs for predication.

Q4.  Is the predicative tie reducible or eliminable?  No.  For Frege, there is no need for a logical copula or connector to tie object a to concept F when a falls under F.  The concept is "unsaturated" (ungesaettigt).  Predicates and their referents (Bedeutungen) are inherently gappy or incomplete.   So the predicate 'wise' would be depicted as follows: '___ wise.'  What is thereby depicted is a sentential function or open sentence.  A (closed) sentence results when a name is placed in the gap. The concept to which this predicate or sentential function refers is gappy in an analogous sense. Hence there is no need for for an 'is' of predication in the logical language or for an instantiation relation. Object falls under concept without the need of a tertium quid to connect them.

I would imagine that Spencer Case's professor has some such scheme in mind.  One problem is that it is none too clear what could be meant by a gappy or incomplete or unsaturated entity.  That a predicate should be gappy is tolerably clear, but how could the referent of a predicate be gappy given that the referent of a predicate is a single item and not the manifold of things to which the predicate applies?  The idea is not that concepts exist only when instantiated, but that  their instantiation does not require the services of a nexus of predication: the concept has as it were a slot in it that accepts the object without the need of a connector to hold them together.  (Think of a plug and a socket: there is no need for a third thing to connect the plug to the socket: the 'female' receptacle just accepts the 'male' plug.)

There are other problems as well.

But here is the main point.  Frege cannot avoid speaking of objects falling under concepts, of a's falling under F but not under G.  If the notion of the unsaturatedness of concepts is defensible, then Frege can avoid speaking of a separate predicative tie that connects objects and concepts.  But he cannot get on without predication and without a sign for predication.

I conclude that my original argument is sound.  There is is and must be a sign for predication in any adequate logic, but it needn't be a stand-alone sign.  (Nor need its referent be a stand-alone entity.)   Compare '(∃x)Hx' to '(∃x)(x = h)' as translations of 'Horses exist' and 'Harry exists,' respectively.  The identity sign occurs in only one of the translations, the second.  And the sign for predication occurs only in the first.  There is no univocity of 'exist(s)' because there is no univocity of 'is' in the translations. 

Existentials and Their Equivalents: Aid and Comfort for the Thin Theory?

I grant that logical equivalents not containing 'exist(s)' or cognates can be supplied for all singular and general existentials.  Thus, 'Socrates exists' can be translated, salva veritate, as 'Something is identical to Socrates,' or, in canonical notation,  '(∃x)(x = Socrates).'  Accordingly,

Socrates exists =_df (∃x)(x = Socrates).

But if the definiens preserves the truth of the definiendum, then the definiendum must be true, hence must be meaningful, in which case first-level uses of 'exist(s)' must be meaningful.  Pace Russell, 'Socrates exists' is nothing like 'Socrates is numerous.'

What's more, the definiendum is prior in the order of understanding to the definiens.  If I didn't already understand 'Socrates exists,' then I would not  be able to understand '(∃x)(x = Socrates).'  You couldn't teach me the Quinean translation if I didn't already understand the sentence to be translated.

One conclusion we can draw from this is that if 'exist(s)' is univocal across general and singular existentials, then  existence cannot be instantiation.  For the left-hand side of the definition does not make an instantiation claim.  It is simply nonsense to say of an individual that it is instantiated.  And if the right-hand side makes an instantiation claim, then we need those creatures of darkness, haecceity-properties.

But we don't have to give the RHS a Fressellian reading; we can give it a Quinean-Inwagenian reading.  (We could call this the 'Van' reading.)  Accordingly: There exists an x such that x = Socrates. On the Van reading, in stark contrast to the Fressellian reading,  'exist(s)' can be construed as a first-level predicate, as synonymous to the predicate 'is identical to something.'  Accordingly:

y exists =_df(∃x)(x = y).

On the reasonable assumptions that (i) 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate and that (ii) there are no nonexistent objects, this last definition is unobjectionable.  If Tom exists, then there exists an object to which he is identical.  And if there exists an object to which Tom is identical, then Tom exists.  No doubt!

The interesting  question, however, is whether any of this affords aid and comfort to the thin theory.  Well, what exactly is the thin theory?  It is the theory that existence is exhaustively understandable in purely logical, indeed purely syntactical, terms.  The thin theory is a deflationary theory that aims  to eliminate existence as a metaphysical topic.  It aims to supplant the metaphysics of existence (of whatever stripe: Thomist, Heideggerian, etc.) with the sober logic of 'exist(s).'  The aim of the thin theory is to show that there is no sense in which existence is a non-logical property of individuals.  The aim is to be able to consign all those tomes of metaphysical rubbish to the flames with a good conscience.

Now glance back at the definition.  Every mark on the RHS  is a bit of logical syntax.  Ignoring the parentheses which in this instance can be dropped, we have the backwards-E, two bound occurrences of the variable 'x,' a free occurrence of the variable 'y,' and the sign for identity.  There are no non-logical expressions such as 'Socrates' or 'philosopher.'  On the LHS, however, we find 'exists' which is not obviously a logical expression.  Indeed,  I claim that it is not a logical expression like 'some' or 'all' or 'not.'  It is a 'content' expression.  What could be more important and contentful than a thing's existing?  If it didn't exist it would be nothing and couldn't have properties or stand in relations.

Surely my sheer be-ing is my most impressive 'feature.'  "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Since there is content on the LHS there has to be content on the RHS.  But how did it get there, given that every expression on the RHS is just a bit of syntax? In only one way: the domain of the bound variables is a domain of existents.  But now it should be clear that the definition gives us no deflationary account of existence.  What it does is presuppose existence by presupposing that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents.  Existence is that which existents have in common and in virtue of which they exist.

In short, I have no objection to the definition read in the 'Van' as opposed to the  'Fressellian' way.  It is perfectly trivial!  My point, however, is that it gives no aid and comfort to the thin theory.  A decent thin theory would have to show how we can dispence with existence entirely by eliminating it  in favor of purely logical concepts.  But that is precisely what we cannot do given that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents.  (Of course, if the domain were populated by Meinongian nonexistent objects, then the definition would be false). 

Van Inwagen on Quine on Existence

From Peter van Inwagen, "McGinn on Existence" in Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, eds. Bottani et al., Ontos Verlag, 2006, p. 106:

There is the theory of Quine, according to which the two oppositions [that between being and non-being and that between existence and non-existence] are not two but one.  Existence and being are the same.  Existence or being is what is expressed by phrases like 'there is,' 'there are,' and 'something is.'  And, similarly, non-existence is what is expressed by phrases like 'there is no, 'there are,' and 'nothing is.'  Thus, 'Universals exist' means neither more nor less than 'There are universals,'  and the same goes for the pairs 'Carnivorous cows do not exist'/'Nothing is both carnivorous and a cow' and 'The planet Venus exists'/'Something is the planet Venus.'  This outline constitutes the essence of Quine's philosophy of being and existence.

And an accurate and succinct outline it is.  But it just reinforces me in my conviction of the wrongheadedness of Quine's version of the thin theory of existence.

I grant that existence and being are the same.  My objections begin with the assimilation of 'exists' to 'something.'  The following are logically equivalent:

Cats exist
There are cats
Something is a cat.

and the same goes for:

Mermaids do not exist
There are no mermaids
Nothing is a mermaid.

But the thin theorist goes beyond the relatively uncontroversial claim of logical equivalence to the eminently dubious claim that the meaning (van Inwagen uses this word above) of 'exist(s)' is exhausted by the meaning of 'something' and the meaning of 'not exist' is exhausted by the meaning of 'nothing.'

To sort this out, we first note that 'something' splits into 'some' and 'thing.'  To appreciate this, observe that the following are nonsensical

Some is a cat
Thing is a cat.

Equally nonsensical are their canonical counterparts:

(∃ )(x is a cat)
( x) (x is cat).

So both  'some' and 'thing' are needed for  'Something is a cat' -- '(∃x)(x is a cat)' -- to make sense. 

Now it is obvious that existence is not expressed by 'some' or '∃' since these are merely signs for particular (as opposed to universal) logical quantity.  Existence is not someness.  Existence is not expressed by '∃.'  And it is obvious that existence is not expressed by the variable 'x,' which is merely the canonical stand-in for the third-person singular pronoun, 'it.'  It is obvious, I hope, that one  cannot express the thought that cats exist by saying 'It is a cat.'  Existence is not 'itness.'  Existence is not expressed by 'x' any more than it is expressed by '∃.'

So existence cannot be expressed by the quantifier part of 'something' or the variable part.  Is existence expressed by both together?  No.  Putting together two pieces of mere logical syntax just gves you more logical syntax.  If existence is to come into the picture, we have to get off the plane of mere logical syntax: there has to be some reference to the real world. Suppose we write 'Something is a cat' as

Some thing is a cat.

But now the cat is out of the bag.  For surely these things one is quantifying over are existing things: 'thing' is a variable having existing values.  So to be perfectly clear, one must write:

Some existing thing is a cat.

And now the explanatory circularity of the Quinean account is obvious.  We were promised an account of existence in terms of the so-called existential quantifier.  But the account on offer presupposes the very 'thing' we want an account of, namely, existence.  Clearly, one must presuppose that the objects in the domain of quantification are existing objects if the logical equivalences above mentioned are to hold. 

My Existence and My Possible Nonexistence

Leo Mollica made a good objection to my earlier argument, an objection I  need to sort out.  I exist, but I might not have existed.  How might a thin theorist translate this truth?

On the thin theory, my existence is my identity-with-something.  It follows that my nonexistence is my diversity-from-everything, and my merely possible nonexistence is my diversity from everything in one or more merely possible worlds.  But -- and this I take it is Leo's point -- I needn't exist in merely possible world w for it to be true in w that I am diverse from everything in w.  So w is not a world in which I am self-diverse, but simply a world in which I am diverse from everything in w.  Had w been actual, I would not have been self-diverse; I would not have existed at all, i.e., I would not have been identical to any of the things that would have existed had w been actual.

To put it another way, on the thin theory, my actual existence is my self-identity, my identity with me.  Opposing this reduction of singular existence to self-identity, I argued that if my existence is my self-identity, then the possibility of my nonexistence is the possibility of my being self-diverse -- which is absurd.  Mollica's rejoinder in effect was that my possible nonexistence is not my possible self-diversity, but my possible diversity from everything distinct from me.

I could respond  by saying that this objection begs the question by assuming the thin theory.  But then Mollica could say that I am begging the question against him.  Let me try a different tack.

If I am diverse from everything in w, but I don't exist in w, then something must represent me there.  For part of what makes w w is that it lacks me.  It is essential to w that it not contain me. But how express this fact if there is no representative of me in w?  Now the only possible candifdate for a representative of me in possible worlds in which I do notr exist  is my haecceity-property: identity-with-BV.  If there is such a property, then it can go proxy for me in every possible world in which I do not exist, worlds which  in part are  defined by my nonexistence.

So it seems that Mollica's objection requires that there be haecceities such as identity-with-BV, and that these be properties that can exist unexemplified.  But now two points.

First, there are no such haecceity properties for reasons given elsewhere, for example, here.

Second,  if haecceities are brought into the picture, then we are back to the Fregean version of the thin theory according to which 'exists(s)' is a second-level property.  But what I have been pounding on is the latest and most sophisticated version of the thin theory, that of van Inwagen.  And we have seen that he rejects the view that 'exist(s)' is second-level.

'Something is Self-Identical' Cannot Translate 'There are Objects': Another Argument Against the Thin Theory

At Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.1271 we read: "So one cannot say, for example, 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."

In endnote 9, p. 194,  of "The Number of Things," Peter van Inwagen (Phil. Issues 12, 2002) writes:

Wittgenstein says that one cannot say " 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."  I have no idea what the words 'as one might say' ['wie man etwa sagt'] could mean so I will ignore them.

Is van Inwagen simply feigning incomprehension here?  How could he fail to understand what those words mean?  Wittgenstein's point is that object is a formal concept, unlike book.  One can say, meaningfully, that there are books.  One cannot say, meaningfully, that there are objects.  Whether Wittgenstein is right is a further question.  But what he is saying strikes me as clear enough, clear enough so that one ought to  have some idea of what he is saying rather than no idea.  By the way, van Inwagen is here engaging in a ploy of too many analytic philosophers.  In a situation in which it is tolerably, but not totally, clear what is being said, they say, 'I have no idea what you mean' when, to avoid churlishness, they ought to say, 'Would you please clarify exactly what you mean?'

Be this as it may.  Philosophers are a strange, in-bred breed of cat, and they acquire some strange tics.  My present topic is not the tics of philosophers, nor formal concepts either.

According to Wittgenstein, one cannot say (meaningfully) that there are objects.  Van Inwagen responds:

Why can one not say that there are objects?  Why not say it this way: '(Ex)(x = x)'? (p. 180)

Without endorsing Wittgenstein's claim, or trying to determine what exactly it means, my thesis is that van Inwagen's translation of 'There are objects' as 'Something is self-identical' is hopeless.

I do not deny the logical equivalence of the two sentences.   I do not claim that there are self-identical items that do not exist.  Everything exists.  My claim is that to exist is not to be self-identical.  They are not the very same 'property.'    If they were, then van Inwagen's translation would be unexceptionable.  But they are not.  Here is a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that existence and self-identity are distinct, that existence cannot be reduced to self-identity.

0. Existence and self-identity are the very same property. (Assumption for reductio)

1. If existence and self-identity are the very same property, then nonexistence and self-diversity are the very same property, and conversely. (Self-evident logical equivalence.)

2. Possibly, I do not exist.  (Self-evident premise: I am a contingent being.)

3. Possibly, I am not self-identical. (From 1, 2)

4. What is not self-identical is self-diverse.  (True by definition)

5. Possibly, I am self-diverse. (From 3, 4)

6. (5) is necessarily false.

7. (0) is false. Q.E.D.

The thin theory of existence is the theory that existence is exhaustively explicable in terms of the purely logical concepts of standard first-order predicate logic with identity.  Identity and quantification are such concepts.  Now the only way within this logic to translate 'There are objects' or 'Something exists' is the way van Inwagen suggests.  But what I have just shown is that 'Something is self-identical' does not say what 'Something exists' says.

If things exist, then of course they are self-identical.  What else would they be? Self-diverse?  But their existence is not their self-identity.  Their existence is their being there, their not being nothing, their  reality -- however you want to put it.  If something is self-identical, it cannot be such unless it first exists.  It astonishes me that there are people, very intelligent people, who cannot see that.  What should we call this fallacy?  The essentialist fallacy?  The fallacy of thinking that being = what-being?  Or maybe it is not a fallacy of thinking, but a kind of blindness.  Some people are color-blind, some morally blind, some modally blind.  And others existence-blind. 

A Quick Proof that 'Exist(s)' is not Univocal

Suppose we acquiesce for the space of this post in QuineSpeak. 

Then 'Horses exist' says no more and no less than that 'Something is a horse.'  And 'Harry exists' says no more and no less than that 'Something is Harry.'  But the 'is' does not have the same sense in both translations.  The first is the 'is' of predication while the second is the 'is' of identity.  The difference  is reflected in the standard notation.  The propositional function in the first case is Hx.  The propositional function in the second case is x = h.  Immediate juxtaposition of predicate constant and free variable is the sign for predication.  '=' is the sign for identity.  Different signs for different concepts.  Identity is irreducible to predication which is presumably why first-order predicate logic with identity is so-called.

Those heir to the Fressellian position, such as Quine and his epigoni, dare not fudge the distinction between the two senses of 'is' lately noted. That, surely, is a cardinal tenet of their brand of analysis.

So even along Quinean lines, the strict univocity of 'exist(s)' across all its uses cannot be upheld.  It cannot be upheld across the divide that separates general from singular existentials.

Or have I gone wrong somewhere?

Existence and Plural Predication: Could 'Exist(s)' be a First-Level Non-Distributive Predicate?

'Horses exist' is an example of an affirmative general existential sentence. What is the status of the predicate '___ exist' in such a sentence? One might maintain that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level distributive predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level non-distributive (collective) predicate. 

1. Frege famously maintained that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts only, and never a first-level predicate, a predicate of objects.  Russell followed him in this.  A consequence of this view is that 'Horses exist' is not about what it seems to be about, and does not say what it seems to say.  It seems to be about horses, and seems to say of them that they exist.  But on Frege's analysis the sentence is about the concept horse and says of it, not that it exists, but that it has one or more instances.

Paradoxically, the sentence ''Horses exist'  on  Frege's  analysis says about a non-horse something that cannot be true of a horse or of any concrete thing!

For an interesting comparison, consider 'Horses surround my house.'  Since no horse could surround my house, it is clear that the sentence is not about each of the horses that surround my house.  What then is it about?  One will be tempted to reach for some such singularist analysis as: 'A set of horses surrounds my house.'  But this won't do since no such abstract object as a set could surround anything.  So if the sentence is really about a set of horses then it cannot say what it appears to say.  It must be taken to say something different from what it appears to say.  So what does 'Horses surround my house' say about a set if it is about a set? 

One might be tempted to offer this translation: 'A set of horses is such that its members are surrounding my house.' But this moves us in a circle, presupposing as it does that we already understand the irreducibly plural predication 'Horses surround my house.'  After all, if the members of a set of horses surround my house that is no different from horses surrounding my house.

The circularity here is structurally similar to that of the Fregean analysis.  If 'Horses exist' is about a concept, and says of that concept that it has instances, then of course those instances are horses that exist.  So the attempt to remove existence from individuals and make of it a property of concepts ends up reinstating  existence as a 'property' of individuals.

Pursuing the analogy a bit further, the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly plural predications such as 'Horses surround my house' is like the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly first-level existence sentences.

2.  Pursuing the analogy still further, is it possible to construe the predicate in 'Horses exist' as a non-distributive first-level predicate like the predicate in 'Horses surround my house'?  First some definitions.

A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F.  Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them.  'Blue' is an example.  If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.

If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective).  If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded.  If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did.  If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct.  Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries.  If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.

I will assume for the purposes of this post that 'Horses surround my house' and 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' are irreducibly plural predications.  (That they are plural is obvious; that they are irreducibly plural is not.  For arguments see Thomas McKay, Plural Predication.)   And of course they are first-level as well: they are about horses, not about concepts or properties or propositional functions.  Now is 'Horses exist' assimilable to 'Horses surround my house' or is it assimilable to 'Horses are four-legged'? The predicate in the later is a distributive first-level predicate, whereas the predicate in 'Horses surround my house' is a non-distributive first-level predicate.

I am assuming that the 'Fressellian' second-level analysis is out, but I won't repeat the arguments I have given ad nauseam elsewhere.

I do not understand how 'exist(s)' could be construed as a non-distributive  predicate.  For if it is non-distributive, then it is possible that some things exist without it being the case that each of them exists.  And that I do not understand.  If horses exist, then each horse exsts.

Peter van Inwagen seems (though it not clear to me) to be saying that 'exists(s)' is a non-distributive first-level predicate. He compares 'Horses exist' to 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.'   'Horses exist,' he tells us, is equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.'  ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," p. 483)  But he denies that 'exists(s)' is second-level.  To say that the number of horses is not zero is to predicate of horses that they number more than zero. (483)  It is not to predicate of the concept horse that the cardinality of its extension is more than zero.

Now we cannot say of a horse that it surrounds a house or has an interesting evolutionary history.  We can say that of horses, but not of a horse.  Can we say of a horse that it numbers more than zero?  We can of course say of horses that they number more than zero. But I don't see how we can sensibly say of an individual horse that it numbers more than zero.  Perhaps Frege was wrong to think that number words can only be predicates of concepts which are ones-over-many.  Perhaps all one needs is the many, the plurality.  But it seems one needs at least that to swerve as logical subject.  If this is right, and to exist is to number more than zero, then we cannot sensibly say of an individual that it exists.  We can say this of individuals but not of an individual.  But surely we can say of an individual horse that it exists.  So I conclude that 'exist(s)' cannot be a first-level non-distributive predicate.

3.  And so one is driven  to the conclusion that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate.  'Horses exist' says of each individual horse that it exists.  But isn't this equally objectionable?   The vast majority of horses are such that I have no acquaintance with them at all.  So how can my use of 'Horses exist' be about each horse? 

It is at this juncture that Frege gets his revenge:

We must not think that I mean to assert something of an African chieftain from darkest Africa who is wholly unknown to me, when I say 'All men are mortal.'  I am not saying anything about either this man or that man, but I am subordinating the concept man to the concept of what is mortal.  In the sentence 'Plato is mortal' we have an instance of subsumption, in the sentence 'All men are mortal' one of subordination.  What is being spoken about here is a concept, not an individual thing. (Posthumous Writings, p. 213)

Plato falls under the concept man; he does not fall within it.  The concept mortal does not fall under the concept man -- no concept is a man -- but falls within it.  When I say that all men are mortal I am not talking about individual men, but about the concept man, and I am saying that this concept has as part of its content the subconcept mortal. 

Similarly, my utterance of 'Horses exist' cannot be about each horse; it is about the concept horse, and says that it has instances -- which is the view I began by rejecting and for god reason.

We seem to have painted ourselves into an aporetic corner.  No exit. Kein Ausgang. A-poria. 

God, Socrates, and the Thin Theory

I maintain that there are modes of being.  To be precise, I maintain that it is intelligible that there be modes of being.  This puts me at odds with those, like van Inwagen, who consider the idea unintelligible and rooted in an elementary mistake:

. . . the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what properly belongs to the nature of a chair -- or of a human being or of a universal or of God -- to the being of the chair. (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, p. 4)

To clarify the issue let's consider God and creatures.  God exists.  Socrates exists.  God and Socrates differ in their natures.  For example, Socrates is ignorant of many things, and he knows it; God is ignorant of nothing.  God is unlimited in power; Socrates is not.  And so on.  So far van Inwagen will agree.  But I take a further step: God and Socrates differ in the way they exist: they differ in their mode of being.  So I make a three-fold distinction among the being (existence) of x, the nature (quiddity, whatness) of x, and the mode of being of x.  At most, van Inwagen makes a two-fold distinction between the being of x and the nature of x.  For me, God and Socrates differ quidditatively and existentially whereas for van Inwagen they differ only quidditatively (in respect of their natures).

One difference between God and Socrates is that God does not depend on anything for his existence  while Socrates and indeed everything other than God depends on God for his/its existence, and indeed, at every time at which he/it exists.  I claim that  that this is a difference in mode of existence: God exists-independently while creatures exist-dependently. There would be an adequate rebuttal of my claim if thin translations could be provided of the two independent clauses of the initial sentence of this paragraph.   By a thin translation of a sentence  I mean a sentence that is logically equivalent to the target sentence but does not contain 'exist(s) or cognates or 'is' used existentially.  Translations are easy to provide, but I will question whether they are adequate.   Let 'D' be a predicate constant standing for the dyadic predicate ' --- depends for its existence on ___.'  And let 'g' be an individual constant denoting God.

1. God does not depend on anything for his existence

1-t. (x)~Dgx. 

2. Everything other than God depends on God for its existence

2-t. (x)[(~(x = g) --> Dxg].

I will now argue that these thin translations are not adequate. 

I begin with the obvious point that the domain of the bound variable 'x' is a domain of existent objects, not of Meinongian nonexistent objects.    It is also obvious that the thin translations presuppose that each of these existents exists in the same sense of 'exists' and that no one of them differs from any other of them in respect of mode of existence.  Call this the three-fold presupposition.

Now consider the second translation, (2-t) above.   It rests on the three-fold presupposition, and it states that each of these existents, except God, stands in the relation D to God.  But this is incoherent since there cannot be a plurality of existents -- 'existent' applying univocally to all of them -- if each existent except God depends on God for its existence.  It ought to be obvious that if Socrates depends on God for his very existence at every moment, then he cannot exist in the same way that God exists.

I don't deny that there is a sense of 'exists' that applies univocally to God and Socrates.  This is the sense captured by the particular quantifier.  Something is (identically) God, and something else is (identically) Socrates.  'Is identical to something' applies univocally to God and Socrates.  My point, however, is that the x to which God is identical exists in a different way than the y to which Socrates is identical.  That 'is identical to something' applies univocally to both God and Socrates is obviously consistent with God and Socrates existing in different ways.

Here is another way to see the point.  To translate the target sentences into QuineSpeak one has to treat the presumably sui generis relation of existential dependence of creatures on God as if it were an ordinary external relation.  But such ordinary relations presuppose for their obtaining the existence of their relata. But surely, if Socrates is dependent on God for his very existence, then his existence cannot be a presupposition of his standing in the sui generis relation to God of existential dependence. He cannot already (logically speaking) exist if his very existence derives from God.

The point could be put as follows.  The Quinean logic presupposes ontological pluralism which consists of the following theses: everything exists; there is a plurality of existents; each existent exists in the same sense of 'exists.'  Ontological pluralism, however, is incompatible with classical theism according to which each thing distinct from God derives its existence from God.  On classical theism, everything other than God exists-derivatively and only God exists-underivatively.

On the Quinean scheme of ontological pluralism, the only way to connect existents is via relations that presuppose the existence of their relata.  So the relation of existential dependence that is part and parcel of the notion of divine creation must be misconstrued by the Quinean ontological pluralist as a relation that presupposes the logically antecedent existence of both God and creatures. 

The ontology presupposed by Quine's logic is incompatible with the theism van Inwagen espouses.  One cannot make sense of classical theism without a doctrine of modes of being.  One cannot be a classical theist and a thin theorist.

Holes and Their Mode of Being

Consider a particular hole H in a piece of swiss cheese.  H is not nothing.  It has properties.  It has, for example, a shape: it is circular.  The circular hole has a definite radius, diameter, and circumference.  It has a definite area equal to pi times the radius squared.  If the piece of cheese is 1/16th of an inch thick, then the hole is a disk having a definite volume.  H has a definite location relative to the edges of the piece of cheese and relative to the other holes.  H has causal properties: it affects the texture and flexibility of the cheese and its resistance to the tooth.  H is perceivable by the senses: you can see it and touch it.  You touch a hole by putting a finger or other appendage into it and experiencing no resistance.

Now if anything has properties, then it exists.  H has properties; so H exists. 

H exists and the piece of cheese exists.  Do they exist in the same way?  Not by my lights.  The hole depends for its existence on the piece of cheese; the latter does not depend for its existence on the former.  H is a particular, well-defined, indeed wholly determninate, absence of cheese.  It is a particular, existing absence.  As an absence of cheese it depends for its existence on the cheese of which it is the hole.

So I say the hole exists in a different way than the piece of cheese.  It has a dependent mode of existence whereas the piece of cheese has a relatively independent mode of existence.

On the basis of this and other examples I maintain that there are modes of being.  To be precise, I maintain that it is intelligible that there be modes of being.  This puts me at odds with those, like van Inwagen, who consider the idea unintelligible and rooted in an elementary mistake:

. . . the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what properly belongs to the nature of a chair -- or of a human being or of a universal or of God -- to the being of the chair. (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, p. 4)

Did I make a mistake above, the mistake van Inwagen imputes to thick theorists?  Did I mistakenly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of the hole -- its dependence on the piece of cheese -- to the being (existence) of the hole?

I plead innocent.  Perhaps it is true that it is the nature of holes in general that they depend for their existence on the things in which they are holes.  But H is a particular, spatiotemporally localizable, hole in a particular piece of cheese.  Since H is a particular existing hole, it cannot be part of H's multiply exemplifiable nature that it depend for its existence on the particular piece of cheese it is a hole in.  The dependence of H on its host is due to H's mode of existence, not to its nature.

Suppose there are ten quidditatively indiscernible holes in the piece of cheese: H1, H2, . . . H10.  Each exists.  Each has its own existence.  But each has the very same nature.  How then can this common nature be the factor responsible for making H1 or H2 or H3, etc.,  dependent on the particular piece of cheese?  The dependence of each hole on its host is assignable not to the nature common to all ten holes but to each hole's existence as a mode of its existence.

Now of course this will not convince any thin theorist.  But then that is not my goal.  My goal is to show that the thick theory is rationally defensible and not sired by any obvious 'mistake.'  If any 'mistakes' are assignable then I 'd say they are assignable with greater justice to the partisans of the thin theory.

Talk of 'mistakes,' though, is out of place in serious philosophy.  For apart from clear-cut logical blunders such as affirming the consequent, quantifier shift fallacies, etc. any alleged 'mistakes' will rest on debatable substantive commitments.

Whether Being is an Activity on the Thick Theory: Van Inwagen's Straw Man Argument

(Note to Alfredo and Peter L:  I need your help in understanding this particularly opaque portion of PvI's paper.)

Here are some notes on section 2 of Peter van Inwagen's "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (pp. 476-479 of the Metametaphysics volume).

The first of the Quinean theses that van Inwagen maintains is that "Being is not an activity."  Here is the opening sentence of the section:

Many philosophers distinguish between a thing's being and its nature.  These philosophers seem to think of, e.g., Socrates' being as the most general activity Socrates engages in.

These two sentences have me flummoxed.  Let me explain why.

First, the two sentences taken together imply that philosophers who distinguish between a thing's being (existence) and its nature think of a thing's being as the most general activity it engages in.  That's just false.  There are philosophers who distinguish between being and nature (Aquinas for example) without holding that a thing's being is the most general activity it engages in.  Since I hesitate  to impute something plainly false to the dean of the thin theorists, I must question what he's driving at.

My suspicion is that van Inwagen (447) gets the notion that being is an activity entirely from J. L. Austin's jocose footnote to p. 68 of Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962):  "The word ['exist'] is a verb, but it does not describe something that things do all the time, like breathing, only quieter -- ticking over, as it were, in a metaphysical sort of way."  That's clever all right, but too frail a reed to support a global imputation to all thick theorists of the view that being is a peculiarly quiet activity.

Second, since van Inwagen goes on to deny that being is an activity, are we to conclude that he rejects the distinction between being and nature?  Is PvI denying that there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence?  Is he suggesting the following argument:

a. If there is a distinction between a thing's being and its nature, then being is the most general activity the thing engages in.

b. Being is not the most general activity a thing engages in.

Therefore

c. There is no distinction between a thing's being and its nature.

I hope van Inwagen is not suggesting any such argument.  For that would not cohere with his commitment to a Quinean translation of 'Socrates exists' into 'It is not the case that everything is identical to Socrates.'  This implies that the existence of Socrates is his identity-to-something -- in which case there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence.  After all, Socrates' nature and the property of being identical to something are distinct.

Third,  PvI speaks of "many philosophers' but gives no examples.  He needs a footnote right at the end of the second sentence above.  He needs to quote philosophers who explicitly say that being is a most general activity.  Farther down the page he mentions Heidegger and Sartre, but no page references are given and no quotations.  So my third point is that PvI seems to be committing a Straw Man fallacy.  Which philosopher ever said that being is the most general activity a thing engages in?

The view van Inwagen ascribes to thick theorists such as Heidegger and Sartre  involves the following propositions:

1. Being is an activity.

2. Being is the most general activity that a thing engages in, one that is implied by every other activity the thing in question engages in.  Thus if Socrates is running, then he is moving on his feet, and if so, then he is moving through space, etc.  until we come to some one terminal activity that is implied by all the other activities  the thing is engaged in at the time.

3.  This most general terminal activity -- being -- is the same activity at every time the thing in question is engaging in any activity.

4.  This most general activity is the same for each member of a given category, Thus it is the same for Socrates and Plato, but presumably not the same for a bridge or an ass.

5.  This most general terminal activity of being (existing) is different (or can be different) for different categories of entity. Thus the most general activity of a table is not the same as the most activity of a human being.  And so there are different kinds of being, different kinds of this most general terminal activity. 

Van Inwagen imputes the above five theses to Heidegger and Sartre and, it appears, to all thick theorists.

There are  several topics to discuss.  One, which I will leave until later, is whether Heidegger and Sartre are committed to the five theses listed.  A second is whether thick theorists in general are committed to them.

Well, I'm a thick theorist and I don't see that I am committed to them.  As a thick theorist I am committed to the intelligibility of the idea that there are modes of existence (ways or modes of being).  The thin theory, however, entails the unintelligibility of this idea.  For van Inwagen, the idea springs from a clear-cut mistake, namely, the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.  For van Inwagen, the vast difference between a human being and a rock is simply a vast difference in their natures, and does not imply any difference in the mode of being of that which has these natures.  The idea is not that a rock and a human being have the same mode of being, but that one cannot intelligibly speak of one or more modes of being at all.  The rock exists, the man exists, and to say that is just to say that each is identical to something or other.

I will now given an example which to my mind shows that it is intelligible that there be modes of existence.  We will have to see if I am committing the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.

Pains and Brains

Phenomenal pains exist and brain states exist.  More generally, there are non-intentional mental states and there are physical states.  But felt pains and felt pleasures and such have a “first-person ontology” as John Searle puts it.  The being of a pain is (identically) its being perceived.  But nothing physical is such that its being is (identically) its being perceived.  This certainly looks like a difference in mode of existence.  Pains exist in a first-person way while brains exist in a third-person way.  

What can the thin theorist  say in rebuttal?  The thins think that we thick-heads illicitly transfer what belongs to the nature of an item to its existence.  So a thin theorist must say that it belongs to the nature of a particular pain that it belong to some particular person.  But this cannot be right.  It cannot belong to the nature of this pain I am now enduring that it be felt by me.  For natures are multiply realizable.  We can of course say that it is the nature of pains in general to be perceived by someone or other. If a pain exists, however, it is a particular pain and it cannot be part of the nature of that particular pain to be perceived by some particular person sich as me.  The dependence of a particular pain on its being perceived is therefore due to its dependent mode of existence and not due to its nature.

Note also that nothing I said implies that the being of the particular pain I am in is a most general activity the pain is engaging in.  My pain is not an agent engaged in an exceedingly quiet activity; it is not an agent at all but a subjective state.

We must also note that the being of my felt pain and the being of your felt pain are numerically different contra van Inwagen's #4 above.

As far as I can see, little or nothing van Inwagen says in  section 2 of his paper  touches the thick theory.  What he has given us is a straw man argument.

Is Meinong's Theory of Objects "Obviously Self-Contradictory?" Van Inwagen Says 'Yes'

A good post from November aught-nine.  Highly relevant to current discussions.

Existence and an 'Open Question' Consideration

G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good?  The point, I take it, is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good.  To appreciate the contrast between open and closed questions, consider Tom the bachelor.  Given that Tom is  a bachelor, it is not an open question whether Tom is an unmarried adult male.  This is because the sense of 'bachelor' does not allow us reasonably to resist the identification of bachelors with adult unmarried males.    It is built into the very sense of 'bachelor' that a bachelor is an adult unmarried male.  But it is not built into the very sense of 'good' that the good is pleasure.

It occurred to me while cavorting in the swimming pool the other  morning that a similar Open Question gambit can be deployed against the thin theorist.

Suppose a thin theorist maintains  the following.  To say that Quine exists is to say that Quine is identical to something.  No doubt, but does the something exist?  The question remains open.  Just as 'good' does not mean 'pleasurable,' 'something' does not mean 'something that exists.'  Otherwise,  'Something that does not exist'  would be a contradiction in terms.  But it is not.  Consider

1. A matter transmitter is something that does not exist.

It follows from (1) that

2. Something does not exist.

I am not claiming that (2) is true.  I hold that everything exists!  My claim is that (2) is neither a formal-logical contradiction, nor is it semantically contradictory, i.e., contradictory in virtue of the senses of the constituent terms.  Here is an example of a formal-logical contradiction:

3. Something  that does not exist exists.

Here is an example of a sentence that, while not self-contradictory by the lights of formal logic, is semantically contradictory:

4. There are bachelors that are not unmarried adult males.

'Some cat is fat' and 'A fat cat exists' are logically equivalent.  But do they have exactly the same meaning (sense)?  This is an open question.  And precisely because it is an open question, the two sentencces do not have the same meaning, pace London Ed, van Inwagen and the rest of the thin boys.  For there is nothing in the very sense of 'Some cat is fat' to require that a fact cat exist.  Compare 'Some unicorn is angry.'  Does that require by its very sense that an angry unicorn exists?

Am I getting close to the point where I can justifiably diagnose van Inwagen and the boys with that dreaded cognitive aberration, existence-blindness? Or is it rather the case that I suffer from double-vision? 

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen -- the head honcho of the thin theorists -- want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  -- but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Some Man is White Because a White Man Exists

(Theme music: Ballad of a Thin Man)

Phoenicians and Londoners agree that 'Some F is a G' and 'An FG exists' are logically equivalent.  Thus, 'Some man is white' is logically equivalent to 'A white man exists.'  But I take a further step: some man is white because a white man exists, where 'because' expresses the asymmetrical relation of metaphysical grounding.   London Ed refuses to take this step and finds my position unintelligible.  He objects:

Now I agree that if 'a white man exists' has a different meaning from 'some man is white', then the question of whether some F is a G because some FG exists, is an intelligible one. But it is not intelligible if they have the same meaning, as London 'thin' theorists claim. After all, the statement

(1) Some man is white because some man is white

is not intelligible. Nor is

(2) Some man is white because the sentence 'quidam homo est albus' is true

For the Latin sentence 'quidam homo est albus' means the same as 'some man is white'. The one sentence translates into the other. So there is no meaningful 'because' here. So why does Maverick think that

(3) Some man is white because some white man exists.

is intelligible? He says as much in his comment #6. So does he think that 'some man is white' has the same meaning as 'a white man exists'? Surely not, for the reasons stated here. But if the meaning is different, what is that difference?

I agree with Ed that if 'Some man is white' and 'A white man exists' have exactly the same meaning, then 'Some man is white because a white man exists' is unintelligible.  That's entirely clear.  So I have to show that the two sentences -- call them the some-sentence and the existence-sentence -- do not have the same meaning.

We agree that the two sentences have the same truth-conditions.  But sameness of truth-conditions does not entail sameness of meaning.  'X is triangular' and 'x is trilateral' have the same truth-conditions but not the same meaning.  So I hope that Ed is not inferring sameness of meaning from sameness of truth-conditions.

Or maybe Ed thinks that the thin theorist stipulatively defines 'exist(s)' in terms of the particular quantifier.  If that is what the thin theorist is doing, then I grant that the existence-sentence and the some-sentence have the same meaning.  For then they are arbitrarily stipulated to have the same meaning. But then the thin theory is wholly without interest.  Substantive philosophical questions cannot be answered by framing stipulative definitions.  The substantive question is: What is the nature of existence?  If the thin theory is worth discussing it is the theory that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine), that existence is wholly understandable in  terms of such purely logical notions as the particular quantifier and identity.  Thus Quine explicates 'a exists' in terms of '(Ex)(x = a).'  That existence is a purely logical notion is what I most strenuously deny.

What positive reason is there for thinking that the two sentences have different meanings? Well, 'A white man exists' says all that 'Some man is white' says, but it says more: it makes explicit that there are one or more existing items that are such that they are both human and white.  The existence-sentence is richer in meaning than the some-sentence.  It makes explicit that the item that is both human and white exists, is not nothing, is mind-independently real -- however you want to put it.

Or perhaps we could put it this way.  The some-sentence abstracts from the existential aspect of the existence-sentence and so does not capture the whole of its meaning.

Do the gods love the pious because it is pious, or is the pious pious because the gods love it?   That, Ed agrees, is an intelligible question.  And so I take it he agrees that there is a relation we can call metaphysical grounding which is neither logical not causaI.   I say it's the same with the existence problem.  One can intelligibly ask whether some F is G because an FG exists, or vice versa. 

My answer is that existence is metaphysically prior to somemess, and metaphysically grounds it. 

Can a Thin Theorist Experience Wonder at Existence?

Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:

 . . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)

We find something similar in Wittgenstein:  Wie erstaunlich, dass ueberhaupt etwas existiert.  "How astonishing that anything at all exists." (Geheime Tagebuecher 1914-1916, p. 82.)

What elicited Magee's and Wittgenstein's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of  this wonderment at existence? Or at Sartre's/Roquentin's nausea at existence?  I will try to show that no thin theorist qua thin theorist can accommodate  wonderment/nausea at existence, and that this fact tells against the thin theory.

 

I have already exposited the thin theory ad nauseam, if you will forgive the pun.  So let's simply consider what the head honcho of the thin theorists, Peter van Inwagen, has to say about wonder at existence in "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, eds. Chalmers et al., Oxford 2009, pp. 472-506) He begins by pointing out (478) that everything we say using 'exists' and its cognates can be said without using 'exists'and its cognates.  'Dragons do not exist' can be put by saying 'Nothing is a dragon,' or 'Everything is not a dragon.'  'God exists' can be put in terms of the equivalent 'It is not the case that everything is not (a) God.' 'I think, therefore I am' is equivalent to 'I think, therefore not everything is not I.'  Here are some further examples of my own.  'An honest politican does not exist' is equivalent to 'No politician is honest.'  'A  sober Irishman does  exist'  is equivalent to 'Some Irishman is sober.'  'An impolite New Yorker does not exist' is equivalent to 'Every New Yorker is polite.'

From examples like these it appears that every sentence containing 'exists' or 'is' (used existentially) or cognates, can be be replaced by an equivalent sentence in which 'exists' or  'is' (used existentially), or cognates does not appear.

Now let's see how this works when it comes to the sentences we use to express our wonder at our own existence or at the existence of things in general.

Suppose I am struck by a sudden sense of my contingency.  I exclaim, 'I might never have existed.'  That is equivalent to 'I might never have been identical to anything' or, as van Inwagen has it, 'it might have been the case that everything was always not I.' (479)

To wonder why there is anything at all is to wonder "why it is not the case that everything is not (identical with) anything." (479)

Now I could mock these amazing contortions whereby van Inwagen tries to hold onto his thin theory, but I won't.  Mockery and derision have a place in polemical writing, as when I am battling the lunkheads of the Left, but they have no place in philosophy proper.  But really, has anyone  ever expressed his wonder at the sheer existence of the world using the sentence I just quoted from PvI?  But of course I need a more substantial objection that this, and I have one.

When I wonder at the sheer existence of things I am not wondering at the fact that everything is identical to something, or  wondering  at its not being the case that everything is not identical with anything.

Why not? Well, the truth of 'Everything is identical to something' presupposes a domain of quantification the members of which are existing items.  Surely what I find wonder-inducing is not the fact that every item x in that presupposed domain is identical to some item y in that very same presupposed domain! That miserable triviality is not what I am wondering at.   I am wondering at the  existence of anything at all including the domain and everything in it.

What I am wondering at is that there is something and not nothing.  How can a Quinean such as PvI express that something exists?  Is 'Something exists' equivalent to 'For some x, x = x'?  No.  Existence is not self-identity.  For x to exist is not for x to be self-identical.  Otherwise, for x not to exist would be for x to be self-diverse -- which is absurd.  My possible nonexistence is not my possible self-diversity.

Suppose there is only only one  thing, a, and that I am wondering at the existence of a.  Why is there a and not rather nothing?  Am I wondering at a's self-identity?  Obviously not.  I am wondering at a's sheer existence, that it is 'there,' that it is not nothing, that is it, that it has Being. 

And so I conclude that a thin theorist qua thin theorist cannot experience wonder at the sheer existence of things.  All he can experience wonder at -- if you want to call it wonder -- is that things presupposed as existing are self-identical -- which is surely not all that marvellous.  Of course they are self-identical!  Necessarily if a thing exists, it is self-identical. But existence is not self-identity. If existence were self-identity, then nonexistence would be self-diversity and possble existence would be possible self-diversity. 

Some of us experience wonder at the sheer existence of things.  As old Ludwig puts it, Ich staune dass die Welt existiert!  When I experience this wonder I am not experiencing wonder at the trivial fact that each of the things presupposed as existing is identical to something or  other.  I am wondering at the existence of everything including the presupposed domain of existents.  This then is yet another argument against the thin theory.  The thin theory cannot accommodate wonder at existence, or Sartrean nausea at existence either. 

Existence, Circularity, and Metaphysical Grounding

London Ed must have known by some paranormal means  that I was talking about him over Sunday breakfast with Peter Lupu.  For his post upon return from sunny Greece is about the alleged circularity of the thin conception of existence.  Peter and I were discussing Peter van Inwagen's  "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, eds. Chalmers et al., Oxford 2009, pp. 472-506.)  Van Inwagen is a Quinean about existence and perhaps the most prominent and formidable of the contemporary thin theorists.  Me, I'm a thick-head: existence is not (identical to) what so-called 'existential' quantification  expresses, and existence comes in modes.  The negations of these convictions I reject as two dogmas of analysis (from the title of a forthcoming paper).

I was lamenting to Peter that I couldn't get London Ed to see my point about circularity.  I now think I understand why Ed doesn't accept it.  It has to do with his not accepting a different notion, that of metaphysical grounding.

Let's start with a Quinean explication of a sentence such as 'Peter exists.'  It goes like this:

1. Peter exists =_df for some x, x = Peter.

What does (1) accomplish?  Well, it shows how one can get rid of 'exists' as a first-level predicate, and with it a reason for thinking that existence is a property of individuals.  For it is clear (assuming that there are no nonexistent objects) that the sentences flanking '=df' are equivalent, indeed logically equivalent: there is no possible situation in which  one is true (false) and the other false (true).

Now in one sense of 'circular' I want to concede to Ed that (1) is not circular:  the definiens -- the RHS of (1) -- does not contain 'exists.'  In other words, (1) is not circular in the way the following are circular:

X is a human being =_df x has human parents.
Knowledge is the state one is in when one knows something.
Knowledge is cognition.
A book of pornography is one that contains pornographic material.

The following, whether correct or incorrect,  are not circular definitions in the above sense:

Knowledge is justified true belief.
Justice is whatever is advantageous to the stronger.
A circle is a locus a points in the same plane equidistant to some common point.

(1) is clearly not circular in the manner of the above examples: the definiendum is not repeated in the definiens.  So in what sense is (1) circular? (1) is true iff the following is true

1a. Peter exists =_df for some existing x, x = Peter.

(1a), however, is plainly circular.  After all, (1) is  not equivalent to

1b. Peter exists =_df for some x, whether existent or nonexistent, x = Peter.

For if (1) were equivalent to (1b), then (1) would be false.

One response I anticipate Ed making is to say that there is no difference between 'x' and 'existing x': whatever is a value of the one is a value of the other, and vice versa.  If so, then perhaps (1a) collapses into (1) and there is no circularity in the sense in which the examples above are circular.

I would insist, however, that (1) is circular in a different and deeper  sense.  A presupposition of (1)'s truth is that the domain of quantification -- the domain over which the variable 'x' ranges -- is a domain of existents.  Therefore, if I want  to know what it is for x to exist, you have not given me any insight by telling me that for x to exist is for x to be identical to something that exists.  For of course x is identical to something that exists, namely x!

Suppose we distinguish between semantic and metaphysical circularity.  I am willing to concede that (1) is not semantically circular.  But I do maintain that (1) is metaphysically circular: its truth presupposes that the domain of quantification is a domain of existing items.  To put it another way, the truth of (1) has an ontological or metaphysical ground, namely the existence of the items over which we quantify.

Consider a domain consisting of just three items: Peter, Paul, and Mary. Peter exists iff one of these items is identical to Peter.  Paul exists iff one of these items is identical to Paul.  Mary exists iff one of these items is identical to Mary.  Perfectly true and perfectly trivial.  Although we learn something necessarily true about Peter, about Paul, and about Mary, we do not learn what it is for Peter or Paul or Mary to exist in the first place. 

I want to know that is is for Peter (who stands in here for any individual) to exist. You tell me that for Peter to exist is for Peter to be identical to something.  But in giving this true but trivial answer you have helped yourself to the existence of the thing to which Peter is identical.  You have evaded my question by assuming that we are just given existing individuals.

What form could an answer take?  One answer is that the existence of the items in the domain of quantification is a brute fact and thus inexplicable.  To exist is just to be there inexplicably.  That would at least be an honest answer as opposed to the silly triviality that to exist is to be identical to something.  A radically different answer is to say that for a concrete contingent ndividual to exist is for it to be a divine creation.  Both the brute fact answer and the theistic answer are consistent with Quine's triviality.

Getting back to London Ed, why doesn't he accept my circularity objection to the thin theory?  He doesn't accept it because he is operating with an exclusively semantic notion of circularity which remains at the level of sentences and does not descend to the level of the truth-makers (ontological grounds) of sentences.  (In earlier discussions it became clear that Ed has no clue as to what a truth-maker is supposed to be.) The thin theory, as expressed in (1), however, is not obviously semantically circular: 'exists' is not found on the RHS. All one finds there is a quantifier, a variable bound by the quantifier, the identity sign, and a name that functions in this context as an arbitrary constant.  My claim, however, is that (1) is metaphysically or ontologically circular.  This notion is one that Ed does not understand.

Metaphysical grounding, one of whose forms is truth-making, is for Ed a wholly unintelligible notion.  For Peter and me, however, it is an intelligible notion .  Here I think we can locate the ultimate root of our disagreement.

What say you, gentlemen?

Van Inwagen on 'Exists' as a Polyadic Predicate

This post continues my examination of Peter van Inwagen's "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment."  The first post in this series is here.  There you will find the bibliographical details.

We saw that van Inwagen gives something like the following argument for the univocity of 'exists':

1. Number-words are univocal

2*. 'Exist(s)' is a number-word

Therefore

3*. 'Exist(s)' is univocal.

The second premise is pure Frege.  The question arises: is van Inwagen committed to the Fregean doctrine that 'exists(s)' is a second-level predicate?  He says he isn't. (484)

How should we understand a general existential such as 'Horses exist'?  Frege famously maintained that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate: it is never a predicate of objects, but always only  a predicate of concepts.  What the sample sentence says is that the concept horse has instances.  Despite appearances, the sentence is not about horses, but about a non-horse, the concept horse.  The concept horse is not a horse!  (Frege also famously and perplexingly maintains that the concept horse is not a concept, but let's leave that for another occasion.)  And what our general existential says about the concept horse is not that it exists (as we ordinarily understand 'exists') but that it is instantiated.  Van Inwagen, though endorsing Frege's key notion that (as PvI puts it) "existence is closely allied to number" (482) does not follow Frege is in holding that 'exists' is a second-level predicate.

Van Inwagen thus appears to be staking out a middle position between the following extremes:

A. 'Horses exist' predicates existence of individual horses.

B. 'Horses exist' predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

Van Inwagen's view is that 'Horses exist' says that horses, taken plurally, number more than zero.  So 'Horses exist,' contra Frege, is about horses, but not about individually specified horses such as Secretariat and Mr Ed. 'Horses exist' is not about the concept horse or any other abstract object such as a property or a set: it is about concrete horses, but taken plurally.

I am trying to understand this, but I find it obscure.   One thing I do understand is that there are predicates that hold plurally (collectively) but not distributively, but are not, for all that, second-level.  Van Inwagen gives the example:

1. Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.

Obviously, the predicate in (1) is not true of each individual horse.  No individual horse evolves in the sense pertinent to evolutionary theory.  But the predicate  is also not true of the concept horse or the set of horses or the property of being a horse or any other abstract object.  No concept, set, or property evolves in any sense.  So what is the logical subject of (1)?  Horses in the plural, or horses taken collectively.  Or suppose the cops have a building surrounded.  No individual cop has the building surrounded, and of course no abstract object has the building surrounded.  Cops have the building surrounded.  Suppose Manny is one of the cops.  Then the following argument would commit the fallacy of division: (a) The cops have the building surrounded; (b) Manny is one of the cops; ergo (c) Manny has the building surrounded.  What is true of cops in the plural is not true of any cop in the singular.

If I have understood PvI, he is saying that 'exists' functions like the predicate in (1), and like the predicate in 'The cops have the building surrounded.'   But this strikes me as problematic.  Consider these two arguments:

Horses have evolved
Secretariat is a horse
ergo
Secretariat has evolved.

Horses exist
Secretariat is a horse
ergo
Secretariat exists.

The first argument is invalid, committing as it does the fallacy of division.  The second argument is perfectly in order.

So it seems, contra Van Iwagen, that  'Horses exist' is importantly disanalogous to 'Horses have evolved' and 'The cops have the building surrounded.'  'Exists' is predicable of specified individuals, individuals in the singular.  'Evolved' is not predicable of specified individuals, individuals in the singular, but only of individuals in the plural.

I take van Inwagen to be saying that the logical subject of 'Horses exist' is not the concept horse, but horses, horses in the plural, and what it says of them is that they number more than zero.  What I am having trouble understanding is how 'more than zero' can attach to a plurality as a plurality, as opposed  to a  one-over-many such as a concept (which has an extension) or a set (which has a membership).

A plurality as a plurality is not one item, but a mere manifold of items: there is simply nothing there to serve as logical subject of the predicate 'more than zero.' 

"But look, Bill, it is the horses that are more than zero; so there is a logical subject of the predicate."

Response: You can't say what you want to say grammatically.  If there IS a logical subject of the predicate, then it is not a mere manyness. But if there ARE many subjects of predication, then 'more than zero' applies to each horse which is not what you want to say.   There must be something that makes the particulars you are calling horses horses, and that would have to be something like the concept horse; otherwise you have an unintelligible plurality of bare particulars.  But then when you say that the horses are more than zero you are saying that the concept horse has more than one instance, and number-words become second-level predicates.

My suspicion is that van Inwagen's middle path is unviable and that his position collapses into the full-throated Fregean position according to which (a) "existence is allied to number" and (b) number-words are second-level predicates. 

Van Inwagen on the Univocity of 'Exists'

In "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, eds. Chalmers et al., Oxford 2009, pp. 472-506), Peter van Inwagen argues that 'exists' is univocal: it does not have "different meanings when applied to objects in different categories." (482)  This post will examine one of his arguments, an argument found on p. 482.  All quotations are from this page.

Van Inwagen begins by noting that number words such as 'six' or 'forty-three' do not "mean different things when they are used to count objects of different sorts."  Surely he is correct: "If you have written thirteen epics and I own thirteen cats, the number of your epics is the number of my cats."  So the first premise of the argument is the indisputable:

1. Number-words are univocal in sense: they mean the same regardless of the sorts of object they are used to count.

Van Inwagen takes his second premise straight from Frege:

2. "But existence is closely allied to number."

How so?  Well, to say that unicorns do not exist is equivalent to saying that the number of unicorns is zero, and to say that horses exist is equivalent to saying that the number of horses is one or more.  Surely that is true for both affirmative and negative general existentials.  Whether it is true for singular existentials is a further question.

Van Inwagen proceeds: "The univocacy [univocity] of number and the the intimate connection between number and existence should convince us that existence is univocal."  The conclusion of the argument, then, is:

3. Existence  is univocal.

The first thing to notice about this argument is that it is not even valid.  Trouble is caused by the fudge-phrase 'closely allied to' and van Inwagen's shift from 'exists' to existence.  But repairs are easily made, and charity demands that we make them.  Here is a valid argument that van Inwagen could have given:

1. Number-words are univocal

2*. 'Exist(s)' is a number-word

Therefore

3*. 'Exist(s)' is univocal.

The latter argument is plainly valid in point of logical form: the conclusion follows from the premises.  It is the argument van Inwagen should have given.  Unfortunately the argument is unsound.  Although (1) is indisputably true,  (2*) is false.

Consider my cat Max Black.  I joyously exclaim, 'Max exists!'  My exclamation expresses a truth.  Compare 'Cats exist.'  Now I agree with van Inwagen that the general  'Cats exist' is equivalent to 'The number of cats is one or more.'  But it is perfectly plain that the singular  'Max exists' is not equivalent to  'The number of Max is one or more.'  For the right-hand-side of the equivalence is nonsense, hence necessarily neither true nor false.

This question makes sense: 'How many cats are there in BV's house?'  But this question makes no sense: 'How many Max are there in BV's house?'  Why not?  Well, 'Max' is a proper name (Eigenname in Frege's terminology) not a concept-word (Begriffswort in Frege's terminology).  Of course, I could sensibly ask how many Maxes there are hereabouts, but then 'Max' is not a proper name, but a stand-in for 'person/cat named "Max" .'  The latter phrase is obviously not a proper name.

Van Inwagen's argument strikes me as very bad, and I am puzzled why he is seduced by it.  (Actually, I am not puzzled: van Inwagen is in lock-step with Quine; perhaps the great prestige of the latter has the former mesmerized.)  Here is my counterargument:

4. 'Exists' sometimes functions as a first-level predicate, a predicate of specific (named) individuals.

5. Number-words never function as predicates of specific (named) individuals

Therefore

6. 'Exists' is not a number-word.

Therefore

7. The (obvious) univocity of number-words is not a good reason to think that 'exists' is univocal.

Of course, there is much more to say -- in subsequent posts. For example if you deny (4), why is that denial more reasonable than the denial of (2*)?

Existence: A Contrast Argument Defeated

This is a post from the old blog.  It originally appeared on 27 May 2008 and appears now slightly redacted.

***********

In this blogging game you throw out your line and damned if you don't snag a good catch now and again. I dredged up Peter Lupu from the Internet's vasty deeps long about January [2008] and I'm glad I did. He's smart and has an admirable passion for philosophy, that highest and most beautiful of all human pursuits. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is his ability to keep his passion alive in the midst of the mundane quest for the buck that keeps the wolf from the door, the lupus from the Lupu.

Enough of cleverness and encomium. Back to work.

In a  comment [now lost in the ether], Peter mentions three points of difference between me and him on the topic of existence.

First, he denies my assertion that Frege and Russell are eliminativists about singular existence, though he agrees with me that for neither is existence attributable to individuals. Let's leave this topic for later. Second, Peter thinks that Kant denies that existence is a property of individuals and that Kant anticipates Frege and Russell on existence. This is a bad mistake that almost every analytic philosopher makes; Peter is in truly excellent company. It too deserves a separate discussion. [And receives it in a forthcoming article, "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis."]

Third, Peter seems to think that the fact that everything exists shows that existence cannot be a property of individuals. This is the question I propose to discuss in today's installment.

We agree:  everything exists, which is to say: there are no nonexistent items, pace Alexius von Meinong. Existence, then, is not classificatory: it does not divide a sum-total of items into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subgroups, the existent items and the nonexistent  items.  There are no nonexistent items.  Peter mentions rationality, weight, and temperature. Some things have weight, some things don't. And the same goes for the other properties. Because some things are rational and others are not, Peter  suggests that it makes sense to inquire into what it is for something to be rational. But since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense, Peter suggests, to inquire into what it is for something to exist. Existence lacks content due to a failure of contrast. Peter seems to be offering us a

Contrast Argument

   1. If a term 'F' has an explicable content, then there must be items to
   which 'F' does not apply.
   2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
   Ergo
   3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not have an explicable content..

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. But 'self-identical' is not rendered either without sense or content by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. Or consider the proposition  that every event has a cause.  Suppose it is true.  (And suppose that everything at bottom is an event.)  Then every event has the property of being caused and no event lacks this property.  But it does not follow that we cannot ask what it is for an event to be caused.  The different theories of causation would be answers to this question.

I  don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.
But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication one might think it to have. One might think that if everything exists,
then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between  existence and possible nonexistence.  Each contingent individual faces the contrast: existence versus possible nonexistence.  With apologies to the Bard, "To be or [possibly] not to be, that is the question."

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples or instances of nonexistents. One could put this by saying that the existence/nonexistence contrast does not show up extensionally and indeed cannot.  But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is nothing real in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?  I exist.  I am not nothing.  But I might never have come to exist.  And given that I do exist now, I might not have existed now.  This 'property' of existing is of course no ordinary property.  It is not like the properties of being red, or ripe, or spheroid.  But I have it and I might not have.  And so there is a contrast, situated at the level of each contingent individual, between its existence and its possible nonexistence.

Peter claimed that  since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense to inquire into what it is for something to exist.  I just rebutted his claim by pointing out that Contrast Arguments are in in general unsound and by pointing out that, with respect to existence there is after all a contrast, the contrast between the existence of a contingent individual and its possible nonexistence.

It seems to me that there is a rather obvious mistake that one ought to avoid. And that is to assume that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. The mistake is to think of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is an example of how the mistake is made:

     The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a
     distinction between the more general and the less general. This is
     a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily
     reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily
     point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the
     distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that
     Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not
     point to two distinct principles within Rover: dog and animal.
     Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being
     a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though
     there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog:
     there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that
     for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a
     dog. (John N. Deck, "Metaphysics or Logic?" The New Scholasticism,
     Spring 1989, 232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus.  Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a  being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general
what-determination. You can arrive at it by climbing the tree of Porphyry to the very top. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being  or existence is not a summum genus  or genus generallisimum as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22  of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion,  Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is. 

The Modified Leibniz Question: The Debate So Far

What follows is a guest post by Peter Lupu with some additions and corrections by BV. 'CCB' abbreviates 'concrete contingent being.'  The last post in this series is here.  Thanks again to Vlastimil Vohamka for pointing us to Maitzen's article, which has proven to be stimulating indeed.

 

 

So far as I can see Steve Maitzen (in Stop Asking Why There's Anything)  holds three theses:

 

A. Semantic Thesis

 

1. As a general rule, dummy sortals such as ‘thing’, ‘object’, ‘CCB’, etc., are not referential terms, unless there is an explicit or implicit background presupposition as to which sortal term is intended as a replacement. This presupposition, if satisfied, fixes the referent of the dummy sortal. In the absence of the satisfaction of such a presupposition, sentences in which they are used (not mentioned) have no truth-conditions and questions in which they are used (not mentioned) have no answer-conditions.

 

2. Examples such as ‘Cats are CCBs’ are no exception. Either this sentence has no truth-conditions because the term ‘CCB’ is merely a place holder for an unspecified sortal or it should be understood along the lines of: ‘Cats are animals’, etc., where ‘animal’ is (one possible) substitution term for the dummy sortal ‘CCB.'

 

BV adds:  Right here I think a very simple objection can be brought against the semantic thesis.  We know that cats exist, we know that they are concrete, and we know that they are contingent.  So we know that 'Cats are concrete contingent beings' is true.  Now whatever is true is meaningful (though not vice versa). Therefore, 'Cats are concrete contingent beings' is meaningful.  Now if a sentence is meaningful, then its constituent terms are meaningful.  Hence 'CCB' is meaningful despite its being a dummy sortal.  I would also underscore a point I have made several times  before.  The immediate inference from the admittedly true (a) to (b) below is invalid:

 

a. The question 'How many CCBs are there?' is unanswerable, hence senseless

ergo

b. The question 'Why are there any CCBs?' is unanswerable, hence senseless.

 

3. The semantic thesis is the driving force behind Steve M’s view. It is the fallback position in all of his responses to challenges by Bill, Steven, and others. So far as I can tell, Steve M. did not defend the general form of the semantic thesis in his original paper. It is, therefore, surprising that it has been ignored by almost everyone in these discussions and that neither Bill nor Steven challenged the semantic thesis. I have written an extensive comment on this thesis and challenged it on several grounds.

 

 

B.  Explanatory Thesis

  

1. As a general rule, Why-Questions are answered by giving an explanation. ‘Why are there any CCBs?’
is a [explanation-seeking] Why-Question. [It is worth noting that the grammatically interrogative form of words 'Why is there anything at all?' could be used simply to express wonder that anything at all should exist, and not as a demand for an explanation.]  Therefore, it invites an explanation. What sort of explanation? Steve M. holds two theses about this last question:

 

 

(MI) The Adequacy Thesis: empirical explanations typical in science offer (at least in principle) adequate explanations for the Why-CCBs question, provided the Why-CCB questions are meaningful at all (and their meaningfulness is a function of satisfying the semantic thesis);

 

(MII) The Completeness Thesis: Once an empirical explanation is given to Why CCBs?, there is nothing left to explain. And in any case there are no suitable forms of explanation beyond empirical
explanations that could be even relevant to explain Why-CCBs?

 

2. Bill and Steven certainly deny (MII). They may also have some reservations about MI. What is the
basis on which Bill and Steven challenge MII? They maintain that even if we assume that an adequate empirical explanation is offered (i.e., MI is satisfied) to each and every CCB, there is something else left over to explain. What is that “something else” that is left over that needs explaining (Steve M. asks)?

 

3. It is at this juncture that the discussion either reverts back to the semantic thesis or it
needs to be advanced into a new metaphysical realm.

 

C. Metaphysical Thesis

 

Dummy sortals do not pick out any  properties or universals (monadic or relational) except via the mediation of genuine sortals. i.e., there are no properties over and beyond those picked out by genuine sortals.

 

1. Steven attempted to answer the challenge posed by the question at the end of B2 in one of his posts.
His answer is this: what is left over after all empirical explanations favored by Steve M. are assumed to have been given is a very general property, feature, or aspect that all CCBs, and only CCBs, have in common. So why shouldn't ‘Why-CCBs’ questions be understood as inquiring into an explanation of this general feature that all and only CCBs share? Call this alleged general feature ‘X’.

 

2. The dispute has turned to whether X has any content, i.e., Steve M. challenged the contention
that there is any phenomenon described by X that was not already accounted for by his favorite empirical explanations. Bill and Steven tried to articulate the content of X without (apparently) noticing that every such effort was rebutted by Steve M. either by appealing to the semantic thesis or to the explanatory thesis or both.

 

3. So what could X be? I suggest the following: X is the (second-order) property such that the
property of *is a contingent being* is instantiated (or something along these lines).  [I would put it this way:  X is the being-instantiated of the property of being a contingent being.]

 

4. Since the universal/property *is a contingent being* need not be instantiated, the fact that it is in fact instantiated in the actual world (i.e., that X holds) needs explaining (So claim Bill and Steven). And whatever is the explanation (including a “brute-fact” explanation) for this fact, it cannot take the form of an empirical explanation.

 

5. The Metaphysical Thesis I am attributing to Steve M. of course rules out that there is a property
such as X. Why? Two reasons: first, the property *is a contingent being* is not a sortal property; second, the predicate ‘is a contingent being’ (or any of its variants) contains a dummy sortal and therefore it does not pick out a property (nor does it have an extension) in the absence of a specific background presupposition of a specific sortal substituend.

 

D. Conclusion

  

Unless these three theses are clearly separated, the discussion will be going in circles. As one can see, the driving force behind the explanatory and metaphysical theses is ultimately the semantic thesis. No one challenged this thesis directly (except me in a comment that was ignored by everyone with the exception of Bill).

Stanislav Sousedik and the Circularity Objection to the Thin Theory

Daniel Novotny writes,

I have discovered (something like) the circularity objection in Sousedik's translation of Frege's "Dialog with Punjer on Existence" into Czech. It's about two pages; here are some snippets (very rough translation):

First we might find difficulties with the assertion that existence is a property of the second order, i.e. the property of "falling under a concept". This is not incorrect but we need to take notice of something that -- as far as I know -- has gone unnoticed, namely that this "property" is under closer scrutiny a relation. "To fall under" is evidently a two-place predicate expressing not the relation of the concept to the thing (as it seems from Frege's exposition) but rather of the thing to the concept.  ..."

. . . If we accept that "falling under" (or more precisely: "to have under") is a name of the relation, a sentence [e.g., "Men exist"] speaks not only of the concept of "men" but also of something that falls under this concept. . . . .

In order to say truthfully that the concept  F has under itself the individual x, the condition of x's existence needs to be satisfied. This seems obvious but the question arises what does this word "exist" express in this case? ... it cannot be the second-order property, since it is, as we have seen a relation; we ask here about existence which is presupposed by this second-order relational propery as its necessary condition.

Now I have never read anything by Professor Sousedik, and I would be very surprised if he has ever read anything by me.  So it is particularly gratifying to find that he is making points that are almost exactly the same as points I have made in published papers, my existence book, earlier posts and in a forthcoming manuscript, copies of which I sent to London Ed, Peter L., and a few others.  I will couch the points in my own preferred jargon.

1. The second-level property of being instantiated is a relational property, one logically  parasitic upon the  two-place relation  *___ instantiates ---* or *___ falls under ---*.  Being instantiated is like being married.  Necessarily, if a first-level concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, just as, necessarily, if a person is married, then he is married to someone (distinct from himself), the Fargo, North Dakota woman who 'married' herself notwithstanding. (We won't speculate on the question how such a self-marriage is consummated.)

2. It follows from #1 that the grammatical form of a sentence like 'Men exist' is not the same as its logical form.  Grammatically, it has a subject-predicate form.  Logically, however, it is relational: the concept man is instantiated by one or more individuals.  So not only is the sentence not about men, but about a concept; it is also refers -- with "studied ambiguity" to cop a phrase from Quine -- to one or more individuals.

3.  Now if concept F is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual that exists.  This is obvious, as Sousedik remarks.  What is less obvious, but still quite clear, is that the instantiating individuals cannot exist in the sense of being instantiated.  Obviously, no individual is instantiable; only concepts are instantiable.  If you insist that existence is the second-level relational property of being instantiated, then you obviously cannot say that the existence of Socrates is the second-level relational property of being instantiated.

4.  What this shows is that the 'Fressellian' attempt to reduce existence to instantiation fails miserably.  It ends up presupposing as irreducible what it tries to reduce, namely, genuine (pound the lectern, stamp the foot!) existence.  Another way of saying that the account presupposes what it tries to reduce is by saying that it is circular.  We want to know what existence is.  We are told that existence is a  property of concepts, the property of being instantiated.  Reflection on this property, however, reveals it to be relational and thus parasitic upon the dyadic relation of instantiation.  For this relation to hold, however, its terms must exist, and not in the sense of being instantiated.  So we are brought back to what we were trying to reduce to instantiation, namely, the existence that belongs to individuals.

Despite the clarity of the above, Peter L. balks, and London Ed baulks.  It is high time for both of them to cry 'uncle' and admit that I am right about this. Or must I sic the Czech contingent on them? [grin]

Farewell to Krauss, A Universe From Nothing

The book is due back at the library today, and good riddance.  A few parting shots to put this turkey to bed.  The book is a mishmash of bad philosophy, badly written, and popularization of contemporary cosmology.  I cannot comment on the accuracy of the popularization, but the philosophy is indeed bad and demonstrates why we need philosophy: to debunk bad philosophy, especially the scientistic nonsense our culture is now awash in.  I am tempted once more to quote some Kraussian passages and pick them apart.  But besides being a waste of time, that would be the literary equivalent of beating up a cripple or rolling a drunk.

In my post of 29 April I put my finger on the central problem with the book: the 'bait and switch.'  Krauss baits us with the old Leibniz question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' (See On the Ultimate Origin of Things, 1697.)  Having piqued our interest, he switches to a different question, actually to several different questions, one of which is: "Why is there ‘stuff’, instead of empty space?" (Click on above link for reference.)  Apparently our man forgot that empty space is not nothing.

Bait and switch.  I recall an old Tareyton cigarette commercial  from the '60s:  I'd rather fight than switch.  Apparently Krauss would rather switch than fight an intellectually honest fight.

Here are links to my more substantial, but no less polemical, Krauss posts.

Ed Feser picks up on the 'bait and switch' theme in his cleverly titled First Things review, Not Understanding Nothing.

Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

Letting 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent beings,' we may formulate the modified Leibniz question as follows: Why are there any CCBs at all?  We have been discussing whether this question is a pseudo-question.  To be precise, we have been discussing whether it is a pseudo-question on the assumption that it does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions: questions that can be answered by natural science.

My thesis is that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions.

I

Consider a universe that consists of a beginningless actually infinite series of contingent beings. Let us assume that each CCB in this universe is (deterministically)  caused by a preceding CCB.  The beginninglessness of the series insures that every CCB has a cause.  Since every CCB has a cause, each has a causal explanation in terms of an earlier one. And since each has a causal explanation, the whole lot of them does. (Some may smell the fallacy of composition in this last sentence, but let's assume arguendo that no fallacy has been committed.)  Accordingly, the totality of CCBs, the universe, has an explanation in virtue of each CCB's having an explanation. 

Some will say that on this scenario the modified Leibniz question has received a naturalistic  answer.  Why are there CCBs as as opposed to no CCBs?  Because each CCB is causally explained by other CCBs, and because explaining each of them amounts to explaining the whole lot of them.  And since the question has this naturalistic or universe-immanent answer, the specifically philiosophical form of the question, the question as Leibniz intended it, is a pseudo-question.

Others, like me, will insist that on the scenario sketched the question has not been answered.  We will insist that a legitimate question remains:  why is there this whole infinite system of contingent beings?  After all, it is contingent, just as its parts are contingent whether taken distributively or collectively.  There might not have been any concrete contingent beings at all, in which case there would not have been any CCBs to cause other CCBs.  And nothing is changed by the fact that the series of CCBs is actually  infinite in the past direction.  The fact that the series always existed does not show that it could not have failed to exist.  The temporal 'always' does not get the length of the modal 'necessarily.'  If time is infinite in both directions, and the universe exists at every time, it does not follow that the universe necessarily exists.  But if it contingently exists, then we are entitled to ask why it exists.

It is no answer to be told that each member of the universe, each CCB, is caused by others.  I may cheerfully grant that but still sensibly ask: But what accounts for the whole causal system in the first place?

Please note that a possible answer here is: nothing does.  The existence of the universe is a brute fact.  Nothing I have said entails a theistic answer. My point is simply  that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that cannot be answered by invoking causal relations within the universe.

II

There another line of attack open to me, one that focuses on the connection between causation and existence.  It seems to me that the naturalist or 'immanentist' must assume that if x causes y, then x causes y to exist.  The assumption, in other words, is that causation is existentially productive, that the cause brings the effect into existence.  But on what theory of causation that the naturalist is likely to accept is  causation productive?

This is a huge topic and I can only begin to explore it in this post.  Suppose our naturalist, good empiricist that he is, subscribes to a Humean or regularity theory of causation along the following lines:

RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.

 If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect.  On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event.  It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events. 

Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation.  But then he ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of CCBs.

For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443.  

The Modified Leibniz Question, Maitzen's Critique of its Meaningfulness, and My Response

It is the thesis of Stephen Maitzen's Stop Asking Why There's Anything that the Leibniz question, 'Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all?' is ill-posed as it stands and unanswerable.  Maitzen's point is intended to apply not only to the 'wide-open' formulation just mentioned but also to such other formulations as 'Why are there any concrete contingent beings at all?'  I will discuss only the latter formulation.  It is defensible in ways that the wide-open question is not.  Call it the modified Leibniz question.  For Maitzen it is a pseudo-question.  For me it is a genuine question.  On my classificatory scheme, Maitzen is a rejectionist concerning the modified Leibniz question.  The question is not to be answered but  rejected as senseless, because of an internal semantic defect that renders it necessarily unanswerable and therefore illegitimate as a question.

My defense of the meaningfulness of the modified Leibniz question does not commit me to any particular answer to the question such as the theistic answer.  For there are several possible types of answer, one of them being the 'brutal' answer:  it is simply a brute fact that concrete contingent beings (CCBs) exist.  When Russell, in his famous BBC debate with the Jesuit Copleston, said that the the universe is just there and that is all, he was answering the question, not rejecting it.  His answer presupposed the meaningfulness of the question.

1. Getting a Sense of What the Dispute is About

Maitzen's paper is in the context of a defense of naturalism and an attack on theism.  So I have to be careful not to assume theism or anything that entails or presupposes theism.  Defining 'naturalism' is a tricky business but it suffices for present purposes to say that naturalism entails the nonexistence of God as classically conceived, and the nonexistence of immortal souls, but does not entail the nonexistence of abstracta, many of which are necessary beings. 

To make things hard on theists let us assume (contrary to current cosmology)  that the universe has an actually infinite past. Hence it always existed. Let us also assume that the each total state of the universe at a time is (deterministically) caused to exist by an earlier such state of the universe. A third assumption is that the universe is nothing over and above the sum of its states. The third assumption implies that if each state has a causal explanation in terms of earlier states (in accordance with the laws of nature), then all of the states have an explanation, in which case the universe itself has a causal explanation. This in turn implies that there is no need to posit anything external to the universe, such as God, to explain why the universe exists. The idea, then, is that the universe exists because it causes itself to exist in that later states are caused to exist by earlier states, there being no earliest, uncaused, state. We thereby explain why the universe exists via an infinite regress of universe-immanent causes and in so doing obviate the need for a transcendent cause.

If this could be made to work, then we would have a nice neat self-contained universe whose existence was not a brute fact but also not dependent on anything external to the universe.  We would also have an answer to the modified Leibniz question.  Why are there any CCBs given the (broadly logical) possibility that there not be any?  Because each is caused to exist by other CCBs.

The five or so assumptions behind this reasoning can all be questioned. But even if they are all true, the argument is still no good for a fairly obvious (to me!) reason. The whole collection of states, despite its being beginningless and endless, is (modally) contingent: it might not have existed at all.  So, despite every state's having a cause, we can still ask why there are any states in the first place.

The fact that U always existed, if it is a fact, does not entail that U must exist. If I want to know why this universe of ours exists as opposed to there being some other universe or no universe at all, it does no good to tell me that it always existed. For what I want to know is why it exists at all, or 'in the first place.'   I am not asking about its temporal duration but about its very existence. Why it exists at all is a legitimate question since there is no necessity that there be a universe in the first place.  There might have been no universe, where 'universe' stands for the sum-total of concrete contingent beings all of which, on the assumption of naturalism, are physical or material beings.  And it seems obvious that the fact, if it is a fact, that every state has a cause in earlier states does not explain why there is the whole system of states.

The dispute between Maitzen and me can now be formulated.

BV:  The question 'Why are there any CCBs at all? is a legitimate question ( a meaningful question) that cannot be answered in a universe-immanent or naturalistic way as above where every CCB is causally explained by other CCBs. 

SM:  The question 'Why are there any CCBs at all?' is not a legitimate question (not a meaningful question) except insofar as it can be reformulated as a question whose answer can take a universe-immanent or naturalistic form.

2. Maitzen's Argument For the Meaninglessness of the Modified Leibniz Question

The argument begins with considerations about counting.  Maitzen arrives at a result that I do not question.  We can counts pens, plums and penguins, but we cannot count things, entities, or concrete contingent beings.  Or at least we cannot count them under those heads.  The reason is quite simple.  The first trio of terms is a trio of sortals, the second of dummy sortals. Sortals encapsulate individuative criteria that make possible the counting of the items to which the sortals apply.  Thus it makes sense to ask how many cats are on my desk.  The answer at the moment is two.  But it makes no sense to ask how many CCBs are on my desk at the moment. For to answer the question I would have to  be able to count the CCBs, and that is something I cannot do because of the semantic indeterminacy of 'CCB.'  When one counts cats one does not count the proper parts of cats for the simple reason that the proper parts of cats are not cats. (Pre-born babies inside a mother are not proper parts of the mother.)  In fact, it occurs to me now that a necessary condition of a term's being a sortal is that it be such that, if it applies to a thing, then it does not apply to the proper parts of the thing.  When I set out to count CCBs, however, I get no guidance from the term: I don't know whether to count the proper parts of the cat as CCBs or not.  It is not that I or we contingently lack the ability to count them, but that the semantic indeterminateness of 'CCB' makes it impossible to count them.  Things get even hairier -- you will forgive the pun -- when we ask about undetached arbitrary parts (e.g., Manny minus his tail) and mereological sums (e.g., Manny + the cigar in the ashtray).

All of this was discussed in greater detail in earlier posts. For now the point is simply that the question 'How many CCBs are there?' cannot be answered due to the semantic indeterminateness of 'CCB.'  And since it cannot be answered for this semantic reason, the question is senseless, a pseudo-question.

So far, so good.  But then on p. 56  of Maitzen's paper we find the following sudden but crucial move: "These considerations, I believe, also show that the question ‘Why is there anything?' (i.e., ‘Why is there any thing?’) confuses grammatical and logical function and hence necessarily lacks an answer . . . . "  The main weakness of Maitzen's paper, as I see it, is that he doesn't adequately explain the inferential connection between the counting question and the explanation question, between the 'How many?' question and the 'Why any?' question.  I cheerfully concede that it is senseless to ask how many CCBs there are if all we have to go on is 'CCB' as it is commonly understood.  (Of course there is a difference between 'thing,' say, and 'concrete contingent being.'  The first is a bit of ordinary English while the second is a term of art (terminus technicus).  But this difference does not make a difference for present purposes.)  But why should the fact that 'CCB' is a dummy sortal also make the 'Why any?' question senseless?  For that is precisely what Maitzen is claiming.  'Why is there anything?' is senseless because "the question's reliance on the dummy sortal 'thing' leaves it indeterminate what's being asked." (p. 56)

But wait a minute.  What is being asked about CCBs in the second question is not how many, but why they exist at all.  Why should the fact that we cannot assign a precise number to them render the second question senseless?  I know that there are at least two CCBs.  Here is one cat, here is another (he said Mooreanly).  Each is a concrete contingent being.  So there are at least two.  If there are at least two, then there are some. If there are some, then 'CCBs exist' is true.  Since it is true, it is meaningful. (Not every meaningful proposition is true, but every true proposition is meaningful.) 

To put it another way, 'CCBs exist' is a (closed) sentence.  It expresses a complete thought, a proposition.  It is not an open sentence like 'Xs exist.'  The latter is no more a sentence than a dummy sortal is a sortal.  Unlike 'CCBs exist,' it cannot be evaluated as either true or false.  So, while 'CCB' lacks the semantic determinacy of a sortal, it is not wholly semantically indeterminate like the variable 'X.'  It makes a semantic contribution to the sentence 'CCBs exist.'

Now if it is meaningful to assert that CCBs exist, despite their number being indeterminate, then it is also meaningful to ask why CCBs exist, despite their number being indeterminate.  Now it is meaningful to assert that CCBs exist.  Therefore, it is meaningful to ask why they exist, despite their number being indeterminate.

Although the uncountability of CCBs is a good reason to think that 'How many CCBs are there?' is senseless, it is not a good reason to think that 'Why are there any CCBs?' is also senseless.

My point is that it is a non sequitur for Maitzen to move from

a. 'How many CCBs are there?' is  a senseless question

to

b. 'Why are there any CCBs?' is a senseless question.

(a) is true.  But one can hold (a) consistently with holding the negation of (b).

How might Maitzen respond?

3. 'Concrete Contingent Being' as a Mere Covering Term

For Maitzen, 'CCB' is "only a covering term for pens, plums, penguins . . . ." (p. 57)  and other instances of sorts.  It doesn't refer to anything distinct from pens, plums, penguins, cats, human births, explosions, and so on. In other words, 'CCB' does not pick out a special sort -- an uber-sort, if you will -- the instances of which are distinct from the instances of genuine sorts.  And so 'CCB' does not pick out a sort whose instances elude natural-scientific explanation and therefore EITHER require some special explanation by God or some other entity transcendent of the physical universe OR are such that their existence is a brute fact.  As Maitzen puts it, "there aren't any contingent things whose explanations outstrip the explanations available for the individuals covered by the covering term 'contingent things.'" (p. 58)  The 'Why any?' question "has no content until we replace referentially indeterminate words with genuine sortals." (p. 59) 

If Maitzen is telling us that CCBs are not a sort of thing distinct  from ordinary sorts, then he is right, and I agree.      Suppose we we have a complete list of all the sorts of thing in the universe: pens, plums, pussycats, penguins, and so on.  It would be absurd if someone were to object: "But you forgot to list the concrete contingent beings!"  That would be absurd since each pen, plum etc. is a CCB, and there is no CCB that is not either a pen or a plum or, etc. But it doesn't follow that a sentence in which 'CCB' occurs is without content. 

It is simply false to say that the 'Why any?' question "has no content until we replace referentially indeterminate words with genuine sortals." (p. 59)   Right here is where Maitzen makes the mistake that invalidates the move from (a) to (b).  He conflates the partial semantic indeterminacy of dummy sortals with the total semantic indeterminacy of variables. Compare:

• Why are there any penguins?
• Why are there any concrete contingent beings?
• Why are there any Xs?

 The first two questions are genuine, despte the fact we can count only penguins.  The third question is pseudo since it has no definite sense.

Note finally that we cannot replace the second question with a long disjunctive question like 'Why are there either penguins or plums or pussycats or pens, or . . . ?'  For suppose you had a complete naturalistic answer to the latter question.  You could still meaningfully ask why there are any CCBs at all as opposed to none at all, and why these rather than some other possible set.

There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day, and brevity is the soul of blog.

Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?

I recently considered and rejected the suggestion that a universe with a metrically infinite past has the resources to explain its own existence.  But what if, as the cosmologists tell us, the universe is only finitely old? Could a variant of the first argument be nonetheless mounted?  Surprisingly, yes.  Unsurprisingly, it fails.

The following also fleshes out a version of what I called Cosmologism and listed recently as one possible type of response to the Leibniz question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Written in the summer of 1999. Submitted to The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 25 January 2000. The acceptance letter is dated 14 February 2000. Published in Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612. Copyright held by The Royal Society of Philosophy,  London.  Philosophy pagination is provided  in brackets, e.g., [P 604]. Endnote numbers are also given in brackets, e.g., [1].

ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's  argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop'  arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

The 'How Many?' and the 'Why Any?' Questions and Their Connection

This post continues the ruminations begun here which were inspired by Stephen Maitzen's intriguing paper Stop Asking Why There's Anything (Erkenntnis 77:1 (2012), 51-63).

Let 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent being.'  For present purposes, the 'How many?' question is this: How many CCBs are there?  And for present purposes the 'Why any?' question is this: Why are there any CCBs?  There might have been none, but there are some, so why are there some?  (I take that to be equivalent to asking why there are any.)

What I want to get clear about is the connection between these two questions.  In particular,  I want to see if the senselessness of the first, if it is senseless, entails the senselessness of the second.

I think it is clear that 'CCB,' like 'thing,' 'entity,' 'existent,' object,' etc. is not a sortal expression.  There are different ways of explaining what a sortal is, but for present purposes a sortal

• supplies a criterion for counting the items to which the term applies
• provides a criterion of identity and non-identity among the items to which the term applies
• gives a criterion for the continued existence of the items to which the term applies.

'Pen' and 'penguin' are examples of sortals.  I can count the pens and penguins on my desk.  There are five pens and zero penguins. (It's a tad warm for penguins here in the Sonoran desert.)  The penguins in Antartica are countable as well, in principle if not in practice.  (This use of 'countable' is not to be confused with its use in set theory.  A countable (uncountable) set is an infinite set the members of which can be (cannot be) placed in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.)

'CCB' 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.  Is a pen together with its cap one CCB  or two?  And what about the particular blackness of the cap?  Presumably it too is a CCB. Are we now up to three CCBs?  And so on.

Maitzen concludes that the 'How many?' question is a pseudo-question because ill-formed, and its is ill-formed because   it features a dummy sortal, a term that functions grammatically like a sortal, but is not a sortal.  As senseless, the question is to be rejected, not answered.

From this result Maitzen straightaway (without any intermediate steps) infers that the 'Why any?'' question is also senseless and for the same reason, namely, that it harbors a dummy sortal.  It is not clear, however, why the fact that the second question features the dummy sortal 'CCB' should render the second question senseless.  We need an argument to forge a link between the two questions.  Perhaps the following will do the trick.

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.  (It cannot  be true both that there are penguins and that there is no definite number of penguins.) Therefore:
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.  But:
3. It makes no sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of CCBs. Therefore:
4. It makes no sense to claim that CCBs exist. (2, 3, Modus Tollens)
5. If it makes no sense to claim that CCBs exist, then it makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist.  Therefore:
6. It makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist. (4, 5 Modus Ponens)

I suspect that some such argument as the foregoing is running behind the scenes of Maitzen's text.  The crucial premise is (3).  But has Maitzen established (3)?  I agree that WE cannot count CCBs.  We cannot count them because 'CCB' is not a sortal.  And so FOR US the number of CCBs must remain indeterminate.  But from a God's Eye point of view -- which does not presuppose the actual existence of God --  there could easily be a definite number (finite or transfinite) that is the number of CCBs.

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.  What is to stop the IRS from computing the number of CCBs?  We can't do the computation because we are at sea when it comes to the true ontology.  All we have are a bunch of competing theories, and the English language is no help: 'CCB' does not supply us with a criterion for counting.

In short, we must distinguish the question whether the number of CCBs is indeterminate in reality or only indeterminate for us.  If the latter, then we cannot move from the senselessness of the 'How many?' question to the senselessness of the 'Why any?' question.  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.

 

Must We Stop Asking Why There's Anything?

1. A Pseudo-Question:  How Many Things are There?

A while back, in response to a reader's question, I argued that one cannot count things as things.  I can count the cats in my house, the tiles on my roof, and 'in principle' the subterranean termites within two feet of my foundation.  What I cannot do is count things (entities, beings, existents, items, objects, etc.) as things. The reason, briefly, is that 'thing,' unlike 'cat,' is not a sortal.  It is a dummy sortal.  It is a term that functions grammatically like a sortal, and can serve as a placeholder for a sortal, but is logically unlike a sortal in that it supplies no criteria of identification and re-identification for the things to which it applies.  I can count the cats in my house because I know what it is to be a cat; I know what 'counts' as a cat and what does not 'count' as a cat: the lifespan of a cat is not a cat; the location of a cat is not a cat; the posture of a cat is not a cat; the parts of a cat are not cats; the properties and relations of a cat are not cats, etc.

But I can't count the things in my house because I don't know what all counts as a thing, and what all doesn't.  Are only middle-sized specimens of dry goods things?  Or are persons also things?  Are my cats things?  Is their blackness a thing? Everything black is colored.  So do I count the cat as one thing, its blackness as a second thing, the being colored of the cat as a third thing?  If I have a cat on my lap, do I have at least three things on my lap, or only one, or perhaps a countable or (heaven forbid) an uncountable infinity of things on my lap?  And what about the parts of the cat, and the parts of the parts, and how far do we go with that?  To the molecular level. the atomic level. the quark level?

I trust the point is clear: one cannot count things (entities, etc.) as things.  It seems to follow that the question 'How many things are there?' is a pseudo-question.  It is a pseudo-question because it is unanswerable in principle.  'Many' and 'more than one' are not answers.  A Parmenidean monist might insist that there is exactly one thing, and a nihilist that there are none.

2. Why is There Anything at All?  A Pseudo-Question?

But now a vexing question arises:  does the fact that 'thing' is a dummy sortal, hence not a sortal, constitute a reason for holding that the question 'Why is there anything (any thing) at all?' is also a pseudo-question?  Stephen Maitzen answers in the affirmative in his paper, Stop Asking Why There's Anything. (Thanks to Vlastimil Vohanka for alerting me to the article.)

Maitzen seems to be reasoning along the following lines.  We can sensibly ask why there are apples, trees, plants, living things, and sensibly expect a natural-scientific answer.  But we cannot sensibly ask why there are things (existents, beings, etc.).  The same goes for the restricted question why there are any contingent beings.  This is because 'contingent being' is just as much a dummy sortal as 'being.'   Dummy sortals are referentially indeterminate unless replaced by a genuine sortal such as 'penguin.' 

Maitzen's point could be put as follows.  There are various sorts of thing, and of each sort we can sensibly ask: why are there things of this sort?  But we cannot sensibly ask: why are there things at all, or contingent things at all?  Things that are are not a sort of thing. And the same goes for things that are contingently.

So perhaps the point is simply this.  'Why is there anything at all?' is a pseudo-question because (a)  things that are are not a sort of thing, and (b) we can sensibly ask the 'why' question only about sorts of things.

3. Tentative Evaluation

Well, I think it is perfectly clear that things that are are not a sort of thing.  Aristotle said essentially that long ago when he said that being is not a genus (Metaph. 998b22, Anal Prior. 92b10).  We could put the point in formal mode by saying that 'being,' ens, das Seiende, are not sortal expressions.  (I am thinking of Heidegger's question, Warum ist das Seiende und nicht vielmehr nichts? )  But who ever said they were?

Maitzen's explanation of why people fall for the pseudo-question 'Why is there anything at all?' is because they confuse dummy sortals with genuine sortals.  But it seems to me that we can avoid the confusion and still sensibly ask the question.

Consider the question, 'Does anything exist?'  The question makes sense and has an obvious answer: 'Yes, things exist.'  Both the question and the answer make sense despite the presence in them of the dummy sortal 'thing.'  So why shouldn't it also make sense to ask why things exist?

Maitzen mistakenly assimilates the question 'Why does anything exist?' to the obviously senseless question 'How many things exist?'  This is the central weakness of his paper.  He never adequately explains the connection between the 'how many?' question and the 'why?' question.  The former is senseless and precisely for the reason that 'thing' is not a sortal.  But from the fact that 'thing' is not a sortal, how is it supposed to follow that the 'Why?' question is also senseless? 

The Thin Theory is Circular!

London Ed demands that I reduce my circularity objection to a sound bite.  No can do.  But at least I can combat this travesty he ascribes to me:

The thin conception of 'exists' is that 'An F exists' means the same as 'The concept *F* is instantiated'
But if *F* is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual that exists
Therefore the thin conception of 'exists' is circular.

So let me try once more.  I will try to be succinct.  But there is no way I can get my point across in just a few sentences.  Philosophy cannot be reduced to sound bites!

1. On the thin theory, 'An F exists' means the same as 'The concept *F* is instantiated.'
2. If a first-level concept such as *F* is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual.
3. Let the arbitrary constant 'a' denote an individual that instantiates *F.*

We now ask whether a exists, does not exist, both, or neither.  These are the only options.

4. By LNC, a cannot both exist and not exist.
5. By LEM, a must either exist or not exist.
6. If a does not exist, i.e., if a is a Meinongian nonexistent object, then the link expressed in (1) between existence and instantiation is broken.
Therefore
7. If  *F* is instantiated, then *F* is instantiated by an individual that exists.
Therefore
8. On the thin theory, 'An F exists' means the same as 'The concept *F* is instantiated by an individual that exists.'
9. A definition (analysis, account, theory, explanation ) is circular iff the term to be defined occurs in the defining term.
10. 'Exists' occurs both in (8)'s definiendum and its definiens.
Therefore
11. The thin theory is circular.

Summary:  Our question is: What is existence?  The thin theory maintains that existence reduces to instantiation.  The whole point of the theory is that existence is in no sense a property of individuals; what it is is a property of concepts, the property of having an instance.  But if a first-level concept is instantiated, it is instantiated by an individual that exists. Therefore, the attempt to reduce existence to instantiation ends up presupposing what was to be reduced, namely existence, and is a failed theory for this reason.

Objection.  (5) is false. Individual a neither exists nor does not exist.  To exist = to be instantiatiated, and no individual is either instantiated or not instantiated. 

Reply.  This objection begs the question.  The question is whether existence can be reduced to instantiation.  One cannot just assume that it can be so reduced.  Furthermore,it is a plain fact that individuals exist.  I exist. This cat exists.  And of course the existence of this cat is not its being instantiated.  Since I exist, and my existence is not my being instantiated, existence cannot be reduced to instantiation.

The point could be put as follows.  The thin theory tries to reduce singular existence to general existence.  But general existence presupposes singular existence: there cannot exist cats in general unless this or that individual is a cat and exists.  Therefore, singular existence cannot be reduced to general existence.

It may  that what London Ed is doing is simply stipulating that 'exist(s)' shall mean 'is instantiated.'  But an arbitrary stipulation gratuitously made can be gratuitously rejected.  That individuals exist is a plain fact, innocent until proven guilty.  The question about existence cannot be answered by any mere stipulative definition.

More on C. J. F. Williams on Existence

I have been arguing with London Ed, a.k.a. 'Ockham,' about existence for years.  Here is part of  a post from the old blog dated 25 January 2006.  Ed has never said anything to budge me from my position.  So why continue?  One reason is to clarify and deepen one's understanding of one's own position.  I am also fascinated by the problem of disagreement in general.  Why do intelligent and sincere people disagree?  What can be done about it?  What does protracted disagreement say about us and our condition?

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I reject nonexistent objects in Meinong's sense. (But note well: to reject Meinongian possibilia and
impossibilia is not to reject non-epistemic possibilities and impossibilities. One can be a modal realist without being a possibilist; one can be an actualist. I am an actualist.) Given my rejection of Meinongian nonexistent objects, I cannot take negative existentials at face value.

'Frictionless planes do not exist,' for example, cannot be interpreted to be about nonexistent frictionless planes; it must be interpreted in some other way. In the language of Bertrand Russell circa 1918, one might say this: The propositional function 'x is a frictionless plane' is never true. Or one could say that the concept frictionless plane has no instances. Or: the property of being a frictionless plane is not instantiated. The point here is that the property does exist, and so is there to have a property predicated of it, the second-level property of being uninstantiated.

So I agree with Williams and 'Ockham' that there are no nonexistent objects and that apparent reference to them must be paraphrased away. There is no individual of which  we can say: it does not  exist, is not actual, is not real. But why should it follow that there  is no individual of which we can say: it exists, is actual, is real?

In my book, this is a non sequitur.

Williams assumes a sort of symmetry thesis: if there are no individuals that do not exist, then there are no individuals that exist. But my A Paradigm Theory of Existence rejects this symmetry thesis (pp. 114-116). Here is the way I put it in my book:

     If an individual exists, then no doubt it instantiates properties,
     satisfies descriptions and saturates concepts. But its existence
     cannot consist in, be identical with, its doing any of those
     things. However, if a putative individual does not exist, then its
     nonexistence can easily consist in a property's being
     uninstantiated. For a nonexistent individual is not a genuine
     individual, contra Meinong, but the mere absence of something of a
     more or less complete description. Thus there is no individual
     Pegasus to lack existence or to have nonexistence. [ . . .]

     Nonexistence is therefore always general nonexistence as opposed to
     singular nonexistence. But existence is primarily singular
     existence, the existence of individuals. Thus the asymmetry of
     existence and nonexistence. There is singular existence (the
     existence of individuals) and general existence (the
     being-instantiated of concepts) which latter presupposes singular
     existence: a first-level concept cannot be instantiated unless
     there exists an individual that instantiates it. But there is no
     such thing as singular nonexistence, e.g., the nonexistence of
     Cerberus. Thereis only general nonexistence, which is a
     second-level property.

So to Williams and 'Ockham' I say: You are right that there are no nonexistent objects. But you are wrong to infer that existence cannot  belong to individuals. It is well-nigh self-evident that existence belongs to individuals and can be predicated of them, as I do when, enacting the Cartesian cogito, I conclude, sum, 'I exist.'It is therefore a mistake to think that 'exist(s)' can only be used as a second-level predicate.

'Exist(s)' has both legitimate second-level and legitimate first-level uses.  Suppose I spy a mountain lion in my back yard.  I exclaim, 'There are mountain lions around here.'  That is a general existential sentence.  I could just as well have said, 'Mountain lions exist around here.'  The latter sentence sports a second-level use of 'exist.'  The sentence is not about any particular mountain lion even though based on the observation of a particular such critter.  Suppose I dub the distinctive cat, 'Monty.'  I can then say 'Monty exists,' and if he dies, 'Monty no longer exists.'  These latter two sentences feature first-level uses of 'exists.'

The attempt to reduce all first-level uses to second-level uses is throughly wrongheaded and impossible to carry out.  For details, see C. J. F. Williams' Analysis of 'I Might Not Have Existed.'

Existence and Quantification: Does London Ed Beg the Question?

In his latest installment, London Ed writes:

Maverick argues:

Ed thinks that the assumption that the domain of quantification is a domain of existing individuals is a contingent assumption. But I didn't say that, and it is not. It is a necessary assumption if (1) [namely that ‘Island volcanos exist’ is logically equivalent to ‘Some volcano is an island.’] and sentences of the same form are to hold. [My emphasis]

But he then says that there is nothing in the nature of logic to stop us from quantifying over nonexistent individuals, which I don't follow at all. We start with the initial logical or definition[al] assumption about the meaning of the verb 'exists'.

 (1) 'A golden mountain exists' = 'Some mountain is golden.'

[. . . ]

I suppose I need to explain why there is nothing in the nature of logic to stop us from quantifying over nonexistent individuals.  There would be something to stop us if the notion of a nonexistent object were logically self-contradictory.  But I see no contradiction in it.  So let me put the question to Ed:  Do you think that the very idea of a nonexistent object is logically self-contradictory?  If you do think this, then I refer you to my November 2009 post, Is Meinong's Theory of Objects 'Obviously Self-Contradictory'? Van Inwagen Says 'Yes.'

There is also the issue of question-begging.  Ed needs to justify the slide from

a. 'A golden mountain exists' is logically equivalent to 'Some mountain is golden'

to

1. 'A golden mountain exists' = 'Some mountain is golden.'

Equivalence is not identity!  Not even logical equivalence is identity. Propositions p, q are logically equivalent iff there is no logically possible world in which p is true and q false, or vice versa.  Now Ed and I agree about (a).  But the inference from (a) to (1) is invalid.  Consider triangularity and trilaterality.  There is no logically possible world in which it is true that something is triangular but not true that something is trilateral.  So 'Something is triangular' and 'Something is trilateral' are logically equivalent.  But it doesn't follow that they express the same proposition or that the triangularity = trilaterality.

Likewise, it does not follow from (a) that existence = someness.  Every world in which cats exist is a world in which something is a cat.  No doubt.  But how is it supposed to follow that the 'property' of existence is identical to the syntactical 'property' expressed by *Some ___ is a ---*?

Ed begs the question against me by simply stipulating that the meaning of the verb 'exists' shall be identical to the meaning of 'Some ___ is a --.'   That is what I deny.

Another Round on the Circularity of the Thin Conception of Existence

London Ed quotes me, then responds.  I counterrespond in blue.

1. ‘Island volcanos exist’ is logically equivalent to ‘Some volcano is an island.’

Agree, of course.

2. This equivalence, however, rests on the assumption that the domain of quantification is a domain of existing individuals.

Disagree profoundly. The equivalence, being logical, cannot depend on any contingent assumption. From the logical equivalence of (1), it follows that ‘the domain of quantification is a domain of existing individuals’ is equivalent to ‘some individuals are in the domain’. But the equivalence is true whether or not any individuals are in the domain. E.g. suppose that no islands are volcanoes. Then ‘Some volcano is an island’ is false. And so is ‘island volcanos exist’, by reason of the equivalence. But the equivalence stands, because it is a definition. Thus the move from (1) to (2) is a blatant non sequitur.

Ed says that the move from (1) to (2) is a non sequitur.  But the move cannot be a non sequitur since (2) is not a conclusion from (1); it is  a separate premise.  In any case, Ed thinks that (2) is false while I think it is true.  (2) is the bone of contention.  To mix metaphors in a manner most atrocious, (2) is the nervus probandi of my circularity objection.

Ed thinks that the  assumption that the domain of quantification is a domain of existing individuals is a contingent assumption.  But I didn't say that, and it is not.  It is a necessary assumption if (1) and sentences of the same form are to hold.  Let me explain.

On the thin theory, 'exist(s)' has no extra-logical content.  It disappears into the machinery of quantification.  It is just a bit of logical syntax: it means exactly what *Some ___ is a ---* means.  But quantifiers range over a domain.  In first-order logic the domain is a domain of individuals.  That is not to say that the domain cannot be empty.  It is to say that the domain, whether empty or non-empty is a domain having or lacking individuals as opposed to properties or items of some other category.

Now there is nothing in the nature of logic to stop us from quantifying over nonexistent individuals.  So suppose we have a domain populated by nonexistent individuals only.  Supppose a golden mountain is one of these individuals.  We can then say, relative to this domain, that some mountain is golden.  But surely 'Some mountain is golden' does not entail 'A golden mountain exists.'  The second sentence entails the first, but the first does not entail the second.  Therefore, they are not logically equivalent.

To enforce equivalence you must stipulate that the domain is a domain of existing individuals only.  If 'some' ranges over existing individuals, then 'Some mountain is golden' does entail 'A golden mountain exists.'   In other words, you must stipulate that the domain be such that, if there are any individuals in it, then they be existent individuals, as opposed to (Meinongian) nonexistent individuals.  The stipulation allows for empty domains; what it rules out, however, are domains the occupants of which are nonexistent individuals in Meinong's sense.

I hope it is now clear that a necessary presupposition of the truth of equivalences like (1) is that the domain of quantification be a domain of existing individuals only.  Again, such a domain may be empty.  But if it is, it is empty of existent individuals -- which is not the same as its harboring nonexistent individuals.

In other words, we can eliminate 'exist(s)' in favor of the particular quantifier 'some,' but only at a price, the price being the stipulation that quantification is over a domain of existing individuals.  But then it should be clear that the thin theory is circular.  We replace 'exist(s)' with 'some,' but then realize that the particular quantifier must range over a domain of existing individuals.  The attempt to eliminate first-level existence backfires.  For we end up presupposing the very thing that we set out to eliminate, namely, first-level existence.  The circularity is blatant.

Ed's argument against all this is incorrect.  We agree that (1), expressing as it does a logical equivalence, is necessarily true.  As such, its truth cannot be contingent upon the actual existence of any individuals.  If existence reduces to someness, then this is the case whether or not any individuals actually exist.  My point, however, was not that (1) presupposes the existence of individuals, but that it presupposes that any individuals in the the domain of quantification be existent individuals as opposed to (Meinongian) nonexistent individuals.

(1) presupposes, not that there are individuals, but that any individuals that there are be existent individuals.  If you appreciate this distinction, then you appreciate why Ed's argument fails.