E. J. Lowe on Existence and Substantial Change: Critical Remarks

We have seen that and how Lowe reduces property change to existential change. The latter is the change that occurs when something comes into existence and passes out of existence.  What of the reverse reduction, the reduction of existential change to property change?  What are its prospects?   Could we say that when an individual substance (an individual, for short) comes to exist it does so by acquiring the property of existence, and that when it passes out of existence it loses this property? This notion is fraught with difficulties which I will not rehearse. Lowe, like many philosophers, rejects the idea that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals.

So what then is it for an object to exist, if not to possess the property of existing? Some philosophers would answer: It is for it to be the case that something is (identical with) that object. The contention, in other words, is that . . . 'E!a' ('a exists') is equivalent in meaning to '∃x(x = a).' ("How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), pp. 275-293, 277)

I deny that the expressions have the same meaning, but I cheerfully accept their logical equivalence. (Logical equivalence is equivalence across all broadly logically possible worlds. It is the necessitation of material equivalence.) I concede that, for example,

1) Necessarily, Max exists iff Max is identical to something.

'Something' here is elliptical for 'something or other.'  The idea is not that each thing that exists exists iff it is identical to some one thing; that would lead straightaway to an intolerable monism. The idea is that each thing exists iff it is self-identical.  Unless one is a Meinongian, one will accept as true all biconditionals of the form of (1).   Lowe continues:

One way to express this idea is to say that the predicate 'exists' in fact expresses or denotes a second-level property, that is, a property of first-level properties: to wit, the property of having at least one instance. Thus, it may be said, 'a exists' expresses the thought that the property of being identical with a has at least one instance . . . . (277)

There are at least two problems with this view that Lowe sees and that I have mentioned many times before. First, there are no haecceity properties.  For example, there is no such property as Socrateity, the property of being identical with Socrates.  Second, even if there is the property, identity-with-a, a's existence cannot be explained by saying that the haecceity property has an instance. This is because identity-with-a, or a-ness, cannot have an instance unless the instance exists.  One moves in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one maintains that for a to exist is for a-ness to be instantiated when a-ness cannot be instantiated unless a exists. I therefore agree with Lowe:

. . . the notion of an object's existing seems to be more basic than that of a (first-level) property's having an instance, whence the former notion cannot really be explained in terms of the latter. (277)

Seems? Nay, 'tis! The upshot for Lowe and me is that existence can be neither a first-level nor a second-level property.  Lowe concludes that existence is not a property at all. A property, whether it is a universal or a trope (mode), is an entity within the totality of entities. But neither existence nor identity "figure in an ontological inventory of the entities that reality as a whole comprehends." (278)  So existence is not one of the things that exists. Existence does not exist, as it would if it were a property. Existence is not a property, but a concept, a "formal ontological concept." Such concepts do not "pick out beings or entities of any sort." (278)  What's more, existence is a "primitive" and "indefinable" concept.  It cannot be analyzed in terms of more basic concepts.

But now trouble looms.  I quoted Lowe above: "what then is it for an object to exist?" An excellent question! He rightly rejects two answers. The first is that an object exists in virtue of possessing the first-level property of existence. The second is that an object exists in virtue of the instantiation of its haecceity property. Lowe concludes that existence is not something that exists in reality, an item that would have to be listed in an adequate ontological inventory.  Objects exist, but existence does not exist. So he says that existence is a concept, and indeed a "primitive" and "indefinable" one.

But if existence is indefinable, then it cannot be explicated in terms of temporal presentness, which is plainly what Lowe is attempting to do.  Every presentism maintains, at least with respect to items in time, that only temporally present items exist simpliciter.  For Lowe, the items include objects and their tropes, but not times and events.  But no matter: he answers his own question by maintaining that for an object to exist is for an object to be temporally present.

But if existence is not a property, then neither is temporal presentness.  Temporal presentness is time itself. For what is past is nothing, having been annihilated, and what is future is also nothing, not having been created. Time, in turn, is temporal passage. Temporal passage is real, objective, mind-independent. Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." ("Presentism and Relativity," 137)  Lowe insists more than once that the italicized phrases be taken seriously and literally: what passes out of existence is absolutely annihilated.  The wholly past is nothing.

Well, what is this existence into which things come and out of which they go? It cannot be a concept. It cannot be subjective. It is not something we add to the world; it is the world itself in its temporal reality. Existence, existing, is some sort of metaphysical process, an ongoing upsurge of the Now and of Being, a continual Presencing that combines the temporal sense of 'presence' with the existential sense.   This seems to be the root metaphor that underlies Lowe's presentist vision of time and existence: a continual upsurge of presencing.  Of course, sober analyst that he is, Lowe would not use such romantic language as I am now using, language reminscent of a Continental philosopher like Sartre.

So, while existence is not an existent among existents, existence in the end does exist as this primal Presencing.  There is a structural similarity with the view I arrived at in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer, 2002): both Lowe and I think of existence in its difference from existence as a paradigm Existent. In the end, existence exists for both of us, but not as a property or any existent among existents. It is logically and ontologically prior to the Quinian inventory.

Comments

[David Gudeman]

Bill, I enjoyed the post (and comment thread) on haecceity properties; do you have a link to your argument that existence as a second-order property requires such properties?

I would have thought it does not because existence as a second-order property seems to naturally accompany a theory of reference in which the meaning of a name is a concept that involves beliefs about the thing named and/or a historical chain of reference to the thing named. For example, the meaning of "Socrates" is something like "the man who lived 2500 years ago, who taught Plato, who was condemned to death, who is the original referent of the historical chain of references culminating with the current use of 'Socrates'". According to this notion of reference, "Socrates exists" would mean that the above concept is instantiated, not that some abstract haecceity property is instantiated.

[BV]

David,

Note that there is a difference between general and singular existentials, the difference, e.g., between 'Cats exist' and 'Max exists.' No haecceity properties are needed for the analysis of general existentials. The property of being a cat is not a haecceity. The reason, of course, is that it is multiply instantiable.

But if 'Max' is a proper name, as opposed to a definite description in disguise, then haecceities are needed.

Suppose that Max is the wimpiest cat in Arizona. The property of being the wimpiest cat in Arizona, although it has exactly one instance in the actual world, has other instances in other possible worlds. It is therefore not an haecceity property. But if 'Max' is a proper name, then it is a rigid designator: it picks out the same item in every possible world in which the item exists.

From what I have said you should be able to see that the second-level analysis of 'Max exists' requires an haecceity property. One can then render the sentence as 'Maxity is instantiated' where Maxity is the property of being identical to Max.

[Cyrus]

I'm still reading, but there is something "off" about the claim that Lowe is trying to explicate existence in terms of presentness. Here is a quote from page four of More Kinds of Being:

Now, this still leaves one other important use of ‘is’ to which I have not yet alluded: the ‘is’ of existence, as in ‘The Dodo is no more’. I take this use of ‘is’ also to be logically primitive, but I do not follow current orthodoxy in identifying its role with that played in symbolic logic by the so-called (but in my view misnamed) existential quantifier, ‘∃’. That is to say, I do not regard ‘is’, in the sense of ‘exists’, as being a second-level predicate, although relatively little in this study depends crucially on my taking it to be a first-level one. One thing that I should especially stress in this connection, however, is that I most emphatically do not wish the title of this study to convey the impression that I postulate different kinds of existence, as opposed merely to different kinds of thing that exist. ‘Exist’ is univocal. This, it should be noted, is not inconsistent with my acceptance, a few moments ago, that individuals and kinds may enjoy different manners of existing, for this was not intended to imply any ambiguity in the term ‘existence’. Rather, what I intended to accede to was such relatively uncontroversial claims as that concrete individuals exist at specific times and places, whereas kinds, being universals, are not spatiotemporally localized in their existence.

However, Lowe includes and argues for abstract propositions in his ontology.* Hence, prima facie Lowe believes in non-temporal existents as well as present existent. Hence, since Lowe thinks there is only one kind of existence, prima facie he must think the relationship between presence and existence more complicated than your post suggests (e.g. "existence . . . does exist as this primal Presencing").

*Here is Lowe's definition of abstract:

The next thing I want to do is to return to a distinction that I touched on earlier, to see how it bears on the range of application of the concept of an object: this is the distinction between concrete and abstract entities. To be precise, there is more than one such distinction to be found in works on metaphysics, but I am at present exclusively concerned with the sense of the term ‘abstract entity’ in which it is supposed to denote something which does not exist in space or time, paradigm examples being such putative entities as numbers, sets, and propositions. (The Four-Category Ontology, 81)

See 11.2 of The Four-Category Ontology for examples of Lowe claiming abstract propositions for his ontology.

[David Gudeman]

But if 'Max' is a proper name, then it is a rigid designator: it picks out the same item in every possible world in which the item exists.

But you are just insisting on your own (somewhat controversial) theory of reference. To put it another way, your argument establishes that a theory of reference in which a name is a direct extensional reference to an object is incompatible with a theory of existence in which existence is a second-order property. But that was always obvious, wasn't it? In order for existence to be a second-order property, it must be the case that in any sentence of the form "X exists", X must have an intensional meaning so that "X exists" can be interpreted as "the intensional meaning of X has an extension".