Maverick Philosopher

Nominalism Presupposes What it Denies

What makes a pair of shoes a pair and not just two physical artifacts? Nominalist answer: nothing in reality. Our resident nominalist tells us that it is our use of 'a pair' that imports a unity, conventional and linguistic in nature, a unity that does not exist in reality apart from our conventional importation. We are being told that out there in the world there are no ones-in-many, let alone any ones-over-many. If that is  right, then there are no sets. For a set is a one-over-many in this sense: it is one item distinct from its many members. (Let's not worry about the null set, which has no members and unit-sets or singletons which have exactly one member each. Here lies yet another rich source of aporiai, but one problem at a time.) 

If there are no sets, then there are neither finite sets nor infinite sets. There are just pluralities, and all grouping, collecting, subsuming under common rubrics, unifying, etc. is done in language by language-users. What I will try to show is that if you think carefully about all of this you will have to make distinctions that are inconsistent with nominalism. 

My aim is purely negative: to show that the nominalism of the resident nominalist is untenable. If you have read a good amount of what I have written you will recall that I am a solubility skeptic, which in this instance means that I am not endorsing any realist solution of the problem. I am not pushing an opposing theory. 

I will start with some data that I find 'Moorean,' i.e., rationally indisputable and pre-theoretical.  (Unfortunately, one man's datum is another man's theory.) The phrase 'a pair' has a sense that remains the same over time and space, a sense that is the same for all competent speakers of English whether here or abroad. The same holds for ein Paar in German, and similarly for all languages. The sense or meaning of an expression, whether word, phrase, sentence, etc. must be distinguished from the expression.  An expression is something physical and thus sensible. The sensible is that which is able to be sensed via one of our senses.  I hear the sound that conveys to me the meaning of 'cat,' say, or I see the marks on paper. Hearing and seeing are outer senses that somehow inform us or, more cautiously, purport to inform us of the existence and properties of physical or material things that exist whether or not we perceive them. But I don't hear or see the meaning conveyed to me by your utterance of  a sentence such 'The cats are asleep.' The sentence, being a physical particular, is sensible; the meaning is intelligible. That's just Latin for understandable. I hear the words you speak, and if all goes well, I understand their meaning or sense, thereby understanding the proposition you intend to convey to me, namely, that the cats are asleep. Note that while one can trip over sleeping cats, one cannot trip over that the cats are asleep.

There are two distinctions implicit in the above that need to be set forth clearly.  I argue that neither is compatible with nominalism

A. The distinction between the sense/meaning of a linguistic expression and the expression. Why must we make this distinction? (a) Because the same sense can be expressed at different times by the same person using the same expression. (b) Because the same sense can be expressed at the same and at different times by different people using the same expression. (c) Because the same sense can be expressed in different languages using different expressions by the same and different people at the same and at different times. For example the following sentences express, or rather can be used to express, the same sense (meaning, proposition):

The cat is black.
Il gatto è nero. 
Die Katze ist schwarz.
Kedi siyah.
Kočka je černá.

So the sense of a word or phrase or sentence is a one-in-many in that each tokening of the word or phrase expresses numerically the same sense.  A tokening, by definition, is the production of a token, in this case, a linguistic token.  One way a speaker can produce such a token is by uttering the word or phrase in question. Another way is by writing the word or phrase down on a piece of paper. (There are numerous other ways as well.)  This production of tokens therefore presupposes a further distinction:

B. The distinction between linguistic types and linguistic tokens. In the following array, how many words are there?

cat
cat
cat

Three or one? Is the same word depicted three times? Or are there three words? Either answer is as good as the other but they contradict each other. So we need to make a distinction: there are three tokens of the same type. We are forced by elementary exegesis of the data to make the type-token distinction.  If you don't make it, then you will not be able to answer my simple question: three words or one?

You see (using the optical transducers in your head, and not by any visio intellectualis) the three tokens. And note that the tokens you now see are not the tokens I saw when I wrote this entry. Those were different tokens of the same type, tokens which, at the time of your reading are wholly past. Linguistic tokens are in time, and in space, which is not obviously the case for linguistic types. I said: not obviously the case, not: obviously not the case.   You see the three tokens, but do you see the type of which they are the tokens? If you do, then you have powers I lack. And yet the tokens are tokens of a type. No type, no tokens. So types exist. How will our nominalist accommodate them? He cannot reduce types to sets of tokens since he eschews sets. No sets, no sets of linguistic tokens. Linguistic types are multiply instantiable. That makes them universals. But no nominalist accepts universals.  Nominalists hold that everything is a particular.  I grant that the rejection of sets and the rejection of universals are different rejections. But if one rejects sets because they are abstract objects, one ought also to reject universals for the same reason.

Now glance back at the first array. What we have there are five different sentence tokens from five different languages.  Each is both token - and type-distinct from the other four. 

To conclude, I present our nominalist with two challenges. The first is to give a nominalist account of linguistic types without either reducing them to sets or treating them as ones-in-many or ones-over-many. The second challenge is to explain the distinction between the sense or meaning of an expression, which is not physical/material and the expression which is.

Suppose he responds to the second challenge by embracing conceptualism according to which  meanings are mental.  Conceptualism is concept-nominalism, as D. M. Armstrong has maintained. My counterargument would be that the meaning/sense expressed by a tokening of 'The cats are asleep'  is objectively either true or false, and thus either true or false for all of us, not just for the speaker. Sentential meanings are not private mental contents.  Fregean Gedanken, for example, are not dependent for their existence or truth-value on languages or language-users.  

 

On Potential and Actual Infinity, and a Puzzle

Consider the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, . . . n, n +1, . . . ).  If these numbers form a set, call it N, then N will of course be actually infinite.  This because a set in the sense of set theory is a single, definite object, a one-over-many, distinct from each of its members and from all of them.  N must be actually infinite because there is no greatest natural number, and because N contains all the natural numbers. 

It is worth noting that 'actually infinite set' is a pleonastic expression. It suffices to say 'infinite set.'  This is because the phrase 'potentially infinite set' is nonsense. It is nonsense (conceptually incoherent) because a set is a definite object whose definiteness derives from its having exactly the members it has.  A set cannot gain or lose members, and a set cannot have a membership other than the membership it actually has. Add a member to a set and the result is a numerically different set. In the case of the natural numbers, if they form a set, then that set will be an actually infinite set with a definite transfinite cardinality. Georg Cantor refers to that cardinality as aleph-zero or aleph-nought.

I grant, however, that it is not obvious that the natural numbers form a set.  Suppose they don't.  Then the natural number series, though infinite, will be merely potentially infinite.  What 'potentially infinite' means here is that one can go on adding endlessly without ever reaching an upper bound of the series.  No matter how large the number counted up to, one can add 1 to reach a still higher number. The numbers are thus created by the counting, not labeled by the counting.  The numbers are not 'out there' in Plato's topos ouranios waiting to be counted; they are created by the counting.  In that sense, their infinity is merely potential.  But if the naturals are an actual infinity, then  they are not created but labeled.

Moving now from arithmetic to geometry, consider a line segment in a plane.  One can bisect it, i.e., divide or cut it into two smaller segments of equal length.  Thus the segment AB whose end points are A and B splits into the congruent sub-segments AC and CB, where C is the point of bisection. The operation of bisection is indefinitely ('infinitely') iterable in principle.  The term 'in principle' needs a bit of commentary. 

Suppose I am slicing a salami using a state-of-the-art meat slicer. I cannot go on slicing thinner and thinner indefinitely.  The operation of bisecting a salami is not indefinitely iterable in principle.  The operation is iterable only up to a point, and this for the reason that a slice must have a certain minimal thickness T such that if the slice were thinner than T it would no longer be a slice.   But if we consider the space the salami occupies -- assuming that space is something like a container that can be occupied -- then  a longitudinal (non-transversal) line segment running from one end of the salami to the other is bisectable indefinitely in principle.

For each bisecting of a line segment, there is a point of bisection. The question can now be put as follows: Are these points of bisection only potentially infinite, or are they actually infinite?  

A Puzzle

I want to say that from the mere fact that the operation of bisecting a line segment is indefinitely ('infinitely') iterable in principle, it does not follow that the line segment is composed of an actual infinity of points. That is, it is logically consistent to maintain all three of the following:  (i) one can always make  another cut; (ii) the number of actual cuts will always be finite; and that therefore (iii) the number of points in a line will always be finite, and therefore 'infinite' only in the sense that there is no finite cardinal n such that n is the upper bound of the number of cuts. 

At this 'point,' however, I fall into perplexity which, according to Plato, is the characteristic state of the philosopher. If one can always make another cut, then the number of possible cuts cannot be finite. For if the number of possible cuts is finite, then it can longer be said that the line segment has a potentially infinite number of points of bisection.  It seems that a potential infinity of actual cuts logically requires an actual infinity of possible cuts.

But then actual infinity, kicked out the front door, returns through the back door.

I have just posed a problem for those who are friends of the potentially infinite but foes of the actual infinite. How might they respond?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Problem of Mirror Images

In an e-mail, a correspondent poses a problem that I will put in my own way. 

BV is alone in a room facing a standard, functioning mirror and he is looking at a man, the man in the mirror.  Call that man MM.  So in this situation, BV is looking at MM.  The question is this. Is BV numerically the same as MM? Or is BV numerically different from MM?

Surely it would be absurd to claim that there are two men in the room, the one facing the mirror and the one in (or behind) the mirror. The sensible thing to say is that MM is a mere image of a man, not a man.  And of course it is the image of BV, not of any other man. Accordingly, when BV looks into the mirror, he sees himself via a mirror image. Now most people will stop right here and go on to something else. But philosophers are a strange breed of cat.  They sense something below the mundane surface and want to bring it into the light.  

Suppose BV points in the direction of the mirror and exclaims, "That's me! Look how beat-to-hell I've become!" But if MM is a mere image of a man, and not a man, then BV is not pointing at himself, the man BV, but at a mere image.   This suggests, contrary to the point made in the immediately preceding paragraph, that there is a man in the mirror and that he is identical to BV! In the situation described, we seem to have good reason to affirm both of the following propositions despite their collective inconsistency:

1) BV is pointing at an image, not a man. (Because there is only one man in the room.)

2) BV is pointing at a man. (Because BV is pointing at himself, and BV is a man.)

This has got to be a pseudo-problem, right?  Well then, dissolve it!

A Variant Puzzle

Perhaps the following variant of the puzzle is clearer. BV holds up his right hand  and looks at it in the mirror. With the index finger of his left hand BV points to the hand in the mirror and says, "That is a beautiful hand!" With that same index finger he then points to the hand he is holding up and says the same thing. Pointing as he is in two different directions, BV is pointing at two different things, each of which is a hand.  But then BV has two left hands and one right hand, for a total of three hands -- which is absurd. Why two left hands? Because the hand in the mirror is a left hand being the incongruent counterpart of the right hand BV is holding up.

Incongruent counterparts are discussed by Kant in no less than four places, twice in his pre-Critical writings and twice after 1781. More on this later.

Trope Troubles: An Exercise in Aporetics

Elliot C. asked me about tropes. What follows is a re-post from 30 March 2016, slightly emended, which stands up well under current scrutiny.  Perhaps Elliot will find the time to tell me whether he finds it clear and convincing and whether it answers his questions.

................................

A reader  has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology.  He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me.   He espies 

. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.

How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this?  Can she? [My use of the feminine third-person singular pronoun does not signal my nonexistent political correctness, but is an anticipatory reference to Anna-Sofia Maurin whom I will discuss below.  'Anna-Sofia'! What a beautiful name, so aptronymic. Nomen est omen.)

What are tropes?

It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties.  This is a pre-philosophical observation.  In making it we are not yet doing philosophy.  If things have properties, then there are properties.  This is a related pre-philosophical observation.  We begin  to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they?  What is their nature?  How are we to understand them?  This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties?  The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, nor is it the question what properties there are, but the question what properties are.

On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard  bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory championed by C. B. Martin which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in.  So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.'  Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology.  Or at least that is what it is in my book.  More on instantiation in a moment.

Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.

It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances.  A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter.  First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a.  (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but  nonsymmetrical.  Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica.  Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance.  It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual.  On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise.  There is his being snub-nosed, etc.  Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments. 

Tropes are simple, not complex.  (See Maurin, here.)  They are not further analyzable.  Property instances, however, are complex, not simple.   'The F-ness of a'  --  'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. -- picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.'  Therefore, tropes are not property instances.

A second, related,  argument.  Tropes are in no way proposition-like.  Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them.  Ergo, tropes are not property instances. 

One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution.  Here is one problem.

How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?

Properties are predicable items.  So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items.  If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,'  is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.'  On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.'  Thus the parsing: Tom/is red.  But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function.  Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex.  But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple.  Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:

a. Tropes are simple.
b. Tropes are predicable.
c.  Predicable items are complex.

The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. Individually plausible, collectively inconsistent. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).

We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red.  On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names.  'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular.  ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.)   As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities. 

A tomato is not a predicable entity.  One cannot predicate a tomato of anything.  The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything.  Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes.  If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item -- a trope --  be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable?  Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:

d. Tropes are predicable items.
e. Tropes are not predicable items.

Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true:  ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance."  If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.

How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad?  Consider again Tom and the redness trope R.  To say that R is predicable of Tom  is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part.  To say that R is impredicable or  a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence.  Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.

It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction.  The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable.  They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.

Which came first: the whole or the parts?

But wait!  This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.   For now we bang up against the above Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:

f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars.
g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.

This looks like an aporia in the strict and narrow sense: an insoluble problem.  The limbs cannot both be true.  And yet each is an entailment of standard (bundle) trope theory.  If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are logically prior to what they spell out.  But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part.  For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same. 

Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical (as opposed to Quinean) sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum.  But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.

Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface. 

Pictured below, left-to-right:  Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008.  It was a cold night.

Related articles

Armstrong, Quine, Universals, Abstract Objects, and Naturalism

Peter van Inwagen, "A Theory of Properties," Exposition and Critique

Atheism and Ontological Simplicity: A Retraction and a Repair

God and Mann: Divine Simplicity and Property-Instances

God, Simplicity, and Tropes

Tropes as Truth-Makers? Or Do We Need Facts?

In a Philosophical Conversation, Three's a Crowd

 

Elliot C. asked me about tropes. What follows is a re-post from 30 March 2016, slightly emended, which stands up well under current scrutiny.  Perhaps Elliot will find the time to tell me whether he finds it clear and convincing and whether it answers his questions.

................................

A reader  has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology.  He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me.   He espies 

. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.

How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this?  Can she? [My use of the feminine third-person singular pronoun does not signal my nonexistent political correctness, but is an anticipatory reference to Anna-Sofia Maurin whom I will discuss below.  'Anna-Sofia'! What a beautiful name, so aptronymic. Nomen est omen.)

What are tropes?

It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties.  This is a pre-philosophical observation.  In making it we are not yet doing philosophy.  If things have properties, then there are properties.  This is a related pre-philosophical observation.  We begin  to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they?  What is their nature?  How are we to understand them?  This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties?  The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, nor is it the question what properties there are, but the question what properties are.

On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard  bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory championed by C. B. Martin which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in.  So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.'  Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology.  Or at least that is what it is in my book.  More on instantiation in a moment.

Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.

It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances.  A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter.  First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a.  (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but  nonsymmetrical.  Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica.  Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance.  It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual.  On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise.  There is his being snub-nosed, etc.  Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments. 

Tropes are simple, not complex.  (See Maurin, here.)  They are not further analyzable.  Property instances, however, are complex, not simple.   'The F-ness of a'  --  'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. -- picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.'  Therefore, tropes are not property instances.

A second, related,  argument.  Tropes are in no way proposition-like.  Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them.  Ergo, tropes are not property instances. 

One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution.  Here is one problem.

How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?

Properties are predicable items.  So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items.  If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,'  is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.'  On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.'  Thus the parsing: Tom/is red.  But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function.  Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex.  But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple.  Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:

a. Tropes are simple.
b. Tropes are predicable.
c.  Predicable items are complex.

The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. Individually plausible, collectively inconsistent. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).

We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red.  On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names.  'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular.  ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.)   As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities. 

A tomato is not a predicable entity.  One cannot predicate a tomato of anything.  The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything.  Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes.  If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item -- a trope --  be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable?  Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:

d. Tropes are predicable items.
e. Tropes are not predicable items.

Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true:  ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance."  If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.

How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad?  Consider again Tom and the redness trope R.  To say that R is predicable of Tom  is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part.  To say that R is impredicable or  a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence.  Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.

It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction.  The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable.  They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.

Which came first: the whole or the parts?

But wait!  This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.   For now we bang up against the above Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:

f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars.
g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.

This looks like an aporia in the strict and narrow sense: an insoluble problem.  The limbs cannot both be true.  And yet each is an entailment of standard (bundle) trope theory.  If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are logically prior to what they spell out.  But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part.  For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same. 

Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical (as opposed to Quinean) sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum.  But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.

Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface. 

Pictured below, left-to-right:  Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008.  It was a cold night.

Related articles

Armstrong, Quine, Universals, Abstract Objects, and Naturalism

Peter van Inwagen, "A Theory of Properties," Exposition and Critique

Atheism and Ontological Simplicity: A Retraction and a Repair

God and Mann: Divine Simplicity and Property-Instances

God, Simplicity, and Tropes

Tropes as Truth-Makers? Or Do We Need Facts?

In a Philosophical Conversation, Three's a Crowd

The Analysis of Qualia

London Ed sends the following for our rumination and delectation:

       This is not mine (Lycan's). But it is tricky:

1) Bertie is experiencing a green thing.

2) Suppose that there is no physical green thing outside Bertie’s head. But

3) There is no physical green thing inside Bertie’s head either.

4) If it is physical, the green thing is either outside Bertie’s head or inside it. Thus,

5) The green thing is not physical. [1,2,3,4] Thus,

6) Bertie’s experience contains a nonphysical thing. [1,5] Thus,

7) Bertie’s experience is not, or not entirely, physical. [6]

The argument seem to presuppose an act-object analysis of experiencing. Accordingly, there is the experiencing and there is that which is experienced, a green item, a green quale.  If the quale is not physical, then the experiencing is not, or is not entirely, physical.   The argument goes through. But then the experiencing cannot be a brain process (which I think is what Bill Lycan would want to maintain).

On an adverbial analysis of experiencing, however, it may be possible to uphold the view that experiencings are brain processes.   Accordingly, my sensing a green quale is my sensing green-ly. Thus there is no green object that appears: 'green' functions here not as an adjective that modifies a noun, but as an adverb that modifies the present progressive form of the verb 'to experience.'

The main problem with the adverbial analysis is that it gets the phenomenology wrong. If I see a green item, I see something that is green.  I do not see a green sensing or a sensing-greenly. This is so even if the green something I see does not exist! Ed will baulk here given that he upholds the dubious thin theory of existence. But surely I do not see a sensing-greenly, whatever that might mean. And that is the second problem. The locution 'sense-greenly' just makes no sense, unless it is replaceable salva significatione with 'sense something green.' The point is that 'sense-greenly' has no independent or irreducible sense. Since it does not, the adverbial theory is a non-starter.

'She ate quiche' makes sense, and so does 'She ate quickly.' But she ate-quiche-ly' means nothing unless it is a weird way of saying 'She ate quiche.'

Once again we seem to have landed in an aporetic 'pickle.'

Perception: An Inconsistent Triad

London Ed writes,

I am making great progress on the perception book. I have borrowed your idea of an aporia, which I use to illustrate the central problem of perception:

(1) Transparency: This is the surface of my desk.

(2) Continuity: When I shut my eyes, the surface of my desk does not cease to exist

(3) Discontinuity: When I shut my eyes, this ceases to exist

Here is how I 'see' it.  The problem concerns the nature and status of the referent of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' when uttered by a person as he looks at a physical object such as a desk and says, 'This is the surface of my desk.'  To what, exactly, does 'this' refer? There are two main possibilities.  Roughly, either 'this' refers to something physical that exists in itself or it refers to something non-physical or mental that does not exist in itself.

P1. The referent of the pronoun is a proper physical  part of a physical thing that exists whether or not any person is looking at it. (Note that if the thing exists whether or not perceived, then so do its parts.)

P2. The referent of the pronoun is not a physical part of the desk but an item that exists only as a correlate of the act of visual awareness of the person who is looking at the desk at a given time.  This correlate is an epistemic intermediary that has (or encodes) all and only the properties of the desk the person has before his mind at the time of his perceiving.  

On (P1), the solution to the aporetic triad  is by rejecting (3) while accepting (1) and (2). On (P2), the solution is by rejecting (2) while accepting (1) and (3)

I assume that Ed will plump for (P1).  That makes Ed a kind of direct realist. The other type of view can be developed in a realist way as a type of indirect realism or in an idealist way. But no more about that for now.

Well, why not be a direct realist?  Are there any considerations that speak against it?

Semirealism about Facts: An Exchange with Butchvarov

Facts are the logical objects corresponding to whole declarative sentences, or rather to some of them. When it comes to facts, Panayot Butchvarov appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism. For the realist, there are facts. For the anti-realist, there are no facts. Let us briefly review why both positions are attractive yet problematic. We will then turn to semirealism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.

Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to the sentence that contributes to its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person, or anything like that. 'Al is fat' is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true -- given that it is not true in virtue either of its logical form or ex vi terminorum -- we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I myself, a realist, don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.

Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? It can't be Al by himself, and it can't be fatness by itself. Nor can it be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, but the first does not instantiate the second. What's needed, apparently, is the fact of Al's being fat. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse is not enough. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. Truth-makers cannot be 'things' or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. (Or at least this is so for the simple predications we are now considering.)

The argument I have just sketched, the truth-maker argument for facts, is very powerful, but it gives rises to puzzles and protests. There is the Strawsonian protest that facts are merely hypostatized sentences, shadows genuine sentences cast upon the world. Butchvarov quotes P. F. Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: “If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . .” (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, 174)  Strawson again: “The only plausible candidate for what (in the world) makes a sentence true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is not something in the world.” (174)

Why aren't facts in the world? Consider the putative fact of my table's being two inches from the wall. Obviously, this fact is not itself two inches from the wall or in any spatial position. The table and the wall are in space; the fact is not. One can drive a nail into the table or into the wall, but not into the fact, etc. Considerations such as these suggest to the anti-realist that facts are not in the world and that they are but sentences reified. After all, to distinguish a fact from a non-fact (whether a particular or a universal) we must have recourse to a sentence in the indicative mood: a fact is introduced as the worldly correlate of a true sentence. If there is no access to facts except via sentences, as the correlates of true sentences, then this will suggest to those of an anti-realist bent that facts are hypostatizations of true declarative sentences.

One might also cite the unperceivability of facts as a reason to deny their existence. I see the table, and I see the wall. It may also be granted that I see that the desk is about two inches from the wall. But does it follow that I see a relational fact? Not obviously. If I see a relational fact, then presumably I see the relation two inches from. But I don't see this relation. And so, Butchvarov argues (175) that one does not see the relational fact either. The invisibility of relations and facts is a strike against them. Another of the puzzles about facts concerns how a fact is related to its constituents. Obviously a fact is not identical to its constituents. This is because the constituents can exist without the fact existing. Nor can a fact be an entity in addition to its constituents, something over and above them, for the simple reason that it is composed of them. We can put this by saying that no fact is wholly distinct from its constituents. The fact is more than its constituents, but apart from them it is nothing. A third possibility is that a fact is the togetherness of its constituents, where this togetherness is grounded in a a special unifying constituent. Thus the fact of a's being F consists of a, F-ness, and a nexus of exemplification. But this leads to Bradley's regress.

A fact is not something over and above its constituents but their contingent unity. This unity, however, cannot be explained by positing a special unifying constituent, on pain of Bradley's regress. So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact. But what in the world could that be? Presumably nothing in the world. It would have to be something outside the (phenomenal) world. It would have to be something like Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. I push this notion in an onto-theological direction in my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. But by taking this line, I move away from the realism that the positing of facts was supposed to secure. Facts are supposed to be ontological grounds, extramental and extralinguistic. If mind or Mind is brought in in any form to secure the unity of a truth-making fact, then we end up with some form of idealism, whether pschological or transcendental or onto-theological. 

So we are in an aporetic pickle. We have good reason to be realists and we have good reason to be anti-realists. (The arguments above on both sides were mere sketches; they are stronger than they might appear. ) Since we cannot be both realists and anti-realists, we might try to mediate the positions and achieve a synthesis. My book was one attempt at a synthesis. Butchvarov's semi-realism is another. I am having a hard time, though, understanding how exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism achieves the desired synthesis. Butchvarov:

Semirealism regarding facts differs from realism regarding facts by denying that true sentences stand for special entities, additional to and categorially different from the entities mentioned in the sentences, that can be referred to, described, and analyzed independently of the sentences. [. . .] But semirealism regarding facts also differs from antirealism regarding facts by acknowledging that there is more to truth than the sentences . . . that are true. (180)

In terms of my simple example, semirealism about facts holds that there is no special entity that the sentence 'Al is fat' stands for that is distinct from what 'Al and 'fat' each stand for. In reality, what we have at the very most are Al and fatness, but not Al's being fat. Semirealism about facts also holds, however, that a sentence like 'Al is fat' cannot just be true: if it is true there must be something that 'makes' it true, where this truth-maker cannot be another sentence (proposition, belief, judgment, etc.) or somebody's say-so, or something merely cultural or institutional or otherwise conventional. And let's not forget: the truth-maker cannot be Al by himself or fatness by itself or even the pair of the two. For that pair (ordered pair, set, mereological sum . . .) could exist even if Al is not fat. (Suppose Al exists and fatness exists in virtue of being instantiated by Harry but not by Al.)

How can semirealism avoid the contradiction: There are facts and there are no facts? If the realist says that there are facts, and that anti-realist says that there aren't, the semi-realist maintains that 'There are facts' is an “improper proposition” (178) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper. In explaining the impropriety, Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing. Obscurum per obscurius? Let's see.

The idea seems to be that while one can show that there are facts by using declarative sentences, one cannot say or state that there are facts by using declarative sentences, or refer to any particular fact by using a declarative sentence. If there are facts, then we should be able to give an example of one. 'This page is white is a fact,' won't do because it is ill-formed. (179) We can of course say, in correct English, 'That this page is white is a fact.' But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase. Not being a sentence, it cannot be either true or false. And since it cannot be either true or false, it cannot refer to a proposition-like item that either obtains or does not obtain. So 'that this page is white' does not refer to a fact. We cannot use this noun phrase to refer to the fact because what we end up referring to is an object, not a fact. Though a fact is not a sentence or a proposition, it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. No object, however, is proposition-like. To express the fact we must use the sentence. Using the sentence, we show what cannot be said.

On one reading, Butchvarov's semirealism about facts is the claim that there are facts but they cannot be named. They cannot be named because the only device that could name them would be a sentence and sentences are not names. On this reading, Butchvarov is close to Frege. Frege held that there are concepts, but they cannot be named. Only objects can be named, and concepts are not objects. If you try to name a concept, you will not succeed, for what is characteristic of concepts, and indeed all functions, is that they are unsaturated (ungesaettigt). And so we cannot say either

The concept horse is a concept

or

The concept horse is not a concept.

The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The concept horse' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason. Similarly, we cannot say either

The fact that snow is white is a fact

or

The fact that snow is white is not a fact.

The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The fact that snow is white' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason.

It is the unsaturatedness of Fregean concepts that makes them unnameable, and it is the proposition-like character of facts that makes them unnameable.

Semirealism about facts, then, seems to be the view that there are facts, but that we cannot say that there are: they have a nature which prevents us from referring to them without distorting them. But then the position is realistic, and 'semirealism' is not a good name for it: the 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological.

Other things Butchvarov says suggest that he has something else in mind with 'semirealism about facts.' If he agrees with Strawson that facts are hypostatized declarative sentences, and argues against them on the ground of their unperceivability, then he cannot be saying that there are facts but we cannot say that there are. He must be denying that there are facts. But then why isn't he a flat-out antirealist?

Can you help me, Butch? What am I not understanding? What exactly do you mean by 'semirealism about facts'?

BUTCHVAROV RESPONDS:

Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding
“other minds” (page 166).

The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.

Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).

I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.

Butch

Posted by: Panayot Butchvarov | Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 10:53 AM

Butch,

Thanks for the response. You never say "There are facts and there are no facts." But it seems to me that you give good arguments for both limbs of this (apparent) contradiction. Because the arguments on both sides are impressive, we have a very interesting, and vexing, problem on our hands, especially if you hold, as I think you do, that there are no true contradictions.

I was under the impression that the doctrine of semirealism (about facts) was supposed to eliminate the contradiction and show it to be merely apparent. It seems to me that if we distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being, then we could say that while facts do not exist in the way their constituents do, they are not nothing either -- they don't exist but subsist. This would seem to be a way between the horns of the dilemma. In your brilliant formulation, "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true." On the other hand, there are the Strawsonian and other arguments against facts. On this way of looking at things, semirealism comes down to a doctrine of modes of Being.

What I don't understand however, is how this is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.

On p. 76 of Anthropocentrism you refer to the existence-subsistence distinction. But then on p. 77 you say that this distinction is not the same as W's distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown -- though it resembles it in motivation.

So here is my criticism: you are not using 'semirealism' univocally. If a subsistent, a number say, is semireal, then that is clear to me since I myself advocate (against most contemp. anal. phils.) distinctions between modes of Being. But if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'

Why? Because one could take the say-show line while holding that there are no modes of Being, and vice versa.

So I have two problems. One is that you seem to equivocate on 'semireal.' The other is that W's say-show distinction is not clear to me. So if you explain semirealism in terms of the latter, then we have a case of *obscurum per obscurius.*

Posted by: BV | Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 03:03 PM

Butch,

Here is another concern of mine.

>>Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,”<<

You assimilate these to each other. But I see a crucial difference. Meinong employs a paradoxical formulation for literary effect, a formulation that expresses a proposition that is in no way contradictory. All he is saying is that some items are beingless which you will agree is non-contradictory. In other words, the proposition, the thought, that Meinong is expressing by his clever formulation is non-contradictory despite the fact that the verbal formulation he employs is either contradictory (assuming that 'there are' is used univocally) or equivocal.

But what is going on in "The concept *horse* is not a concept" is quite different. What Frege is saying in effect is that we cannot refer to concepts in a way that preserves their predicative function, their unsaturatedness. 'The concept *horse*' is a name, and only objects can be named. So when we try to say anything about a concept we must fail inasmuch as a reference to a concept transforms it into an object thereby destroying its predicative function.

Frege anticipates Wittgenstein in this. I can say '7 is prime' but not 'Primeness is instantiated by 7.'

This is similar to the problem we have with propositions and facts (which have a proposition-like structure).

As you point out, 'Snow is white is true' is ill-formed. But 'That snow is white is true' is false inasmuch as 'That snow is white' is a nominal phrase that picks out an object, and no object can be true.

At his point someone might propose a disquotational-type theory according to which 'true' in 'That snow is white is true' does not express a property of something but merely serves to transform the nominal phrase back into the sentence 'Snow is white.'

What refutes this is your point that "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true."

Posted by: BV | Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 03:40 PM

I am answering two posts. As to the one about Anscombe and GeacH, I agree completely, Bill. I’ve always marveled that philosophers like Anscombe and Geach were so easily influenced by Russell’s attacks on Meinong. Russell of course did know what Meinong meant and initially even agreed with him but then invented his theory of definite descriptions that allowed him to “analyze away” Meinong’s examples.

Now I come to the other post. I am not sure there is genuine disagreement between us. Regarding existence and subsistence, we might look at [Gustav]Bergmann. He “renounced his earlier distinction between existence and subsistence, subscribing now to the seeming paradox that ‘whatever is thinkable exists.’ Yet he acknowledged that ‘the differences among some of the several existents…are very great indeed…momentous, or enormous,’ thus acknowledging the rationale for the distinction” (page 142 of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). Whether we “distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being” or say that everything (‘thinkable’) exists though the differences among some existents are enormous seems to me a matter of words. I am uneasy about using the phrase “modes of Being” because it has had numerous other applications, e.g., matter and mind, universals and particulars, infinite and fine, and so on.
As to the meaning of “semireal,” let me begin with a quotation from the Introduction: “[I]n the case of metaphysical antirealism, numerous qualifications, distinctions, and explanations are needed. No metaphysical antirealist denies the reality of everything, just as no metaphysical realist asserts the reality of everything, including, say, the Easter Bunny. The solipsist says, ‘Only I exist,’ not ‘Nothing exists.’ Berkeley denied that there are material objects, he called them ‘stupid material substances,’ but he insisted on the existence of minds and their ideas. According to Kant.... material objects are ‘transcendentally ideal,’ dependent on our cognitive faculties, but they are nonetheless ‘empirically real,’ not mere fancy. Bertrand Russell distinguished between existence
and subsistence: some things do not exist, yet they are not nothing – they subsist; for example, material objects exist but universals only subsist. According to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, some things cannot be “said,” i. e., represented in language,but they “show” themselves in what can be said. Among them, he held, are those that matter most in logic, ethics, and religion” (page 15).

I try to explain Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing as follows: “The distinction has a straightforward, noncontroversial application even to ordinary pictures, say, paintings and photographs, indeed to representations generally. And the [associated] picture theory [of meaning] is merely a subtler version of the traditional theory of meaning and thought, which was unabashedly representational, ‘pictorial’: thought involves ‘ideas,’ often explicitly understood as mental images or pictures, and the meaning of an expression is what it stands for” (page 67).”

“In a painting, much is shown that is not and cannot be pictured by the painting or any part of it. For example, the painting may represent a tree next to a barn, each represented by a part of the painting, and the spatial relation between the parts of the painting that represent the tree and the barn would represent their relation of being next to each other. But nothing in the painting represents that relation’s being a relation, nothing ‘says’ that their being next to each other is a relation (rather than, say, a shape or color). Yet the painting shows this, indeed must show it in order to represent what it does represent. What it shows cannot be denied as one might deny, for example, that the painting is a portrait of Churchill. The absence from the painting of what it only shows would not be like Churchill’s absence. Of course, paintings do not consist of words, and sentences are only ‘logical’ pictures. But like all pictures, physical or mental, paintings are logical pictures, though not all logical pictures are paintings” (page 68).

You write, “What I don't understand however, is how this [the distinction between real and semireal] is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.” My concern is with logical semirealism, and Wittgenstein applied his distinction mainly to logical expressions. If some things cannot be said but show themselves, neither calling them real nor calling them unreal would be quite right. So I opted for calling them semireal. Of course, nothing of philosophical importance hangs on what word is chosen.

You write, “if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'” I have offered no view about numbers, though Wittgenstein did include “number” in his list of formal concepts: “’Object,’ ‘complex,’ ‘fact,’ ‘function,’ ‘number’ signify formal concepts, represented in logical notation by variables, for example, the pseudo-concept object by the variable ‘x’ (Tractatus 4.1272). The properties they appear to stand for are formal, internal, such that it is unthinkable that what they are attributed to should not possess them (4.123). For this reason it would be just as nonsensical to assert that something has a formal property as to deny it (4.124).” But Wittgenstein was aware that the status of numbers is far too complicated an issue to be resolved by just saying that “There are numbers” cannot be “said.” Much later he wrote his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.

Please forgive me for resorting to such lengthy quotations. I tried to avoid them but found what I was writing inferior to what I had already written.

Posted by: Panayot Butchvarov | Sunday, November 01, 2015 at 01:31 AM

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes the dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' -- to give it a name -- can get your irenic self killed.

As desirable a desideratum as peaceful coexistence is, it is inconsistent with totalitarian systems. This is why communism and Christianity cannot coexist assuming that they remain true to their defining principles.  (Or at least they cannot coexist in one geographical area over the long term.) They are mutually exclusive worldviews. And of course they are not just comprehensive views of the world and the people in it, but practical systems of prescriptions and proscriptions oriented toward the guidance of human action.  The actional side is paramount in both systems. Old Karl said that the philosophers had variously interpreted the world when the point was to change it. (Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach).  A serious Christian could say that the philosophers had variously theorized and speculated when the unum necessarium was the salvation of one's immortal soul.  "For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?" (Matthew 16-26)  A library of learned disquisitions on the nature of the soul is of no avail if one in the end suffers its loss.

Christianity and Islam are also quite obviously mutually exclusive on both  doctrinal and  practical planes. Note that both in their ideological purity are totalitarian. (Christianity in the West has of course been liberalized to a great extent and is thus no longer ideologically pure.) The two in their pure forms make a total claim on the lives of their adherents. They cannot peacefully coexist in the same geographical area over the long term. The Muslim says to the infidel: either convert to the truth faith, or accept dhimmitude, or be put to the sword. That, for a Christian, is indeed a trilemma: you will be impaled on one of three horns, but you are free to choose which one. 

Can classical liberalism, the touchstone of which is toleration, coexist with any totalitarian ideology, religious or secular? No again. The classical liberal can and will tolerate any ideology as long as it respects the principle of toleration; it cannot, however, tolerate the rejection of this very principle, the principle that defines it. The rub, for the totalitarian, is that if he accepts the principle of toleration, he can no longer remain totalitarian: he will have to adjust his tenets in various ways. Classical liberalism and totalitarian systems are mutually exclusive. 

So where does this leave us? There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, onesidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or ne cancelled in one livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

Existence, Time, Property-Possession, and the Dead

Here are four propositions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

1) For any x, temporal or atemporal, if x has a property, then x exists.

2) For any temporal x, if x exists, then x exists at present.

3) Frege, a temporal item, does not exist at present.

4) Frege has properties at present.

(1) is plausible: how could anything have a property if it is not 'there' to have it? This use of 'there' is non-locative.  I assume that to exist = to be, and that Meinongian nonentities, "beyond being and nonbeing," are unintelligible.

(2) is plausible: the past is no longer, the future not yet; the present alone is real/existent!  It is important to note, however, that the plausibility of (2) is not that of a tautology. Tautologies are plausible in excelsis; substantive metaphysical claims are not. One cannot reasonably controvert a tautology; one can reasonably controvert a substantive metaphysical claim. What (2) formulates, call it 'presentism,' is somewhat plausible but surely not logically true. So the senses of 'exist(s)' and 'exist(s) at present' are distinct. If I say that a thing exists, I say nothing about when it exists; I say only that it is 'there' in the non-locative sense among the 'furniture of the world.' Indeed, 'x exists' leaves open whether the thing is in time at all. 'God exists' is noncommittal on the question whether God is temporal or atemporal. 

(3) is plausible: (a) Frege is temporal in that he cannot exist without existing in time; (b) Frege does not now exist.

(4) is plausible: Frege is now famous and he is dead. Those predicates are true of him: he has (instantiates) the properties they express. 

The tetrad is collectively inconsistent. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. By my lights, that proposition is (2). To reject (2) is to reject presentism. But if presentism is false, it does not follow that eternalism is true!  

Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad

Try this  foursome on for size:

1) Memory is a source of knowledge.

2) Whatever is known, exists.

3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.

4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense.  It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory.  Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter.  In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.

The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.

1*) Some of what is remembered is known.

2*) All that is known, exists.

Therefore

2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.

3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.

Therefore

3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.

Therefore 

~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)

A Kantian Aporia?

This just in:

I know you like puzzles in aporetic form, so here you are.

1. My perception involves (though is not necessarily limited to) the immediate awareness of mental phenomena.

2. When I look at the visible surface of this desk, all I am immediately aware of is the visible surface of this desk.

3. The visible surface of this desk is not a mental phenomenon.

All three cannot be true. If (1) is true then my perceiving the desk involves the awareness of mental phenomena. Note that this does not assert that the visible surface of this desk is a mental phenomenon, only that, if it is not, then I must be immediately aware of some mental phenomena in addition to my awareness of the desk.

But (2) says that the visible surface of this desk is all I am immediately aware of. Hence (3) cannot be true.

Likewise, if (2) and (3) are true, (1) is false, and if (1) and (3) are true, (2) is false.

Nicely presented. I agree that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. But there is an interesting problem here only if the propositions are, in addition,  individually plausible.  The more plausible, the tougher the problem. 

(3) is plausible to a high degree. (Plausibility, unlike truth, comes in degrees.)  A desk is a physical thing. The surface of a desk is a physical part of a physical thing. A mind, its states, and its contents are none of them physical.  An occurrent episode of visual perceiving is a mental phenomenon.  So, yes, (3) is highly plausible and I would rank it as the most plausible of the three propositions.  

(2) is the least plausible of the three. It is true that when I look at my desk I do not see my visual perceiving of the desk or of some part thereof.  But it does not follow that I am not aware of my perceiving.  Right now, as I stare at my desk, I am not only visually aware of  (part of) the desk; I am also aware of being visually aware of it.  This is what Franz Brentano calls innere Wahrnehmung, inner perception, which he distinguishes from innere Beobachtung, inner observation. This ongoing inner perception, or rather perceiving, is a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary 'outward' visual awareness of the (surface of) the desk.

This inner awareness of being outwardly aware of something is not the same as full-blown reflection which one could, but need not, express by saying 'I am now seeing the surface of a desk.'  It also must be distinguished from the type of awareness in which I am outwardly aware of something without being aware of being aware of it at all. Suppose you have been driving for some time, stopping at the red, going at the green, negotiating turns, etc. when you suddenly realize that you have no memory of doing any of those things. And yet your present physical integrity shows that you must have been aware of all those traffic changes. You were outwardly aware via the five outer senses without being explicitly aware of being aware or implicitly aware via Brentano's inner perception. 

And so I solve the above problem by rejecting (2).  (2) is the least plausible of the three and a very strong case can be made for its being false.

(1) leaves something to be desired as well. Later on this.

So we don't have an aporia in the strict sense, an intellectual impasse, or insoluble problem.  And even if we did, it is not clear what this has to do with Kant.

Can a Sentence be Named?

One thing we do with words is make assertions, as when I assert that snow is white. I use those words, but I can also talk about them, refer to them, mention them. You are all familiar with the use-mention distinction. 'Boston' is disyllabic, but no city is. 

One way to mention an expression is by enclosing the words in single quotation marks, thus: 'Snow is white.' One can then go on to say things about that sentence, for example, that it is true, that it is in the indicative mood, that it consists of three words, that it is in the present tense, and so on.  But a puzzle is soon upon us. Try this aporetic triad on for size:

1) No name is either true or false.

2) 'Snow is white' is the name of a sentence.

3) 'Snow is white' is true.

The propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Which will you reject? 

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

Hi Dr. Vallicella,

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. 

 

Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM

 

Best,

Chandler

 

What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas.   I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.

 

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The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' -- the secularist will assure us -- there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The very notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed  nonsense.  We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.  

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

Parallel Problems of God and Evil, Mind and Matter

For Bradley Schneider.

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It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are collectively logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both (objectively) true, then they are collectively logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be collectively logically consistent. This is so whether or not anyone, any finite or ectypal intellect,  is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be logically consistent. It is presumably otherwise with the intellectus archetypus. 

For if such-and-such is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or any mortal's inability, to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. There is no valid move from ignorance as to how something is possible to its not being possible. Such an inferential move would be tantamount to the ad ignorantiam fallacy. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are collectively logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The logical point I have just made is rock-solid.  I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists, the problem of reconciling the belief that God exists with the belief that evil exists.  The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that everything concrete is material.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."  Or he could simply repeat (something like) what I said above, namely, "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent;  this is so whether or not  a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing  both that God exists and that evil exists; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender my theism."

Atheists and materialists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshal? Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or the unity of consciousness with materialism, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."

Or he could proffer a structural analog of what I put in the mouth of theist: "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent;  this is so whether or not  a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing  both that intrinsic intentionality exists and that everything concrete is material in nature; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender either my belief that there are genuine intentional states or my materialism about the mental."

Both theist and materialist could take a more extreme tack. They could 'go mysterian.' They could say, "Look, it's just beyond our ken and will remain so. Our cognitive architecture is such as to disallow insight into how apparently contradictory propositions are in reality non-contradictory."

The theist might say that is is not given to us to understand how God and evil are both real; it's a mystery!  The materialist about the mind might say that it is not possible for us to understand how intentionality (and the other phenomena of mind) are real given that everything concrete is physical. It's a mystery!

The ultimate extreme would be to 'go dialetheic' and embrace true contradictions. Some argue that the Incarnation is a true contradiction. If so, why couldn't the incarnation of mind in matter be a true contradiction?  I myself fight shy of this extreme. I cleave to the law of non-contradiction and embrace solubility skepticism -- not warmly but coolly, tentatively and skeptically.  And therefore self-consistently.

Mark Sainsbury on Intentional Relations

Following A. N. Prior, Sainsbury sets up the problem of intentionality as follows:

We are faced with a paradox: some intentional states are relational and some are not. But all intentional states are the same kind of thing, and things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.  (Intentional Relations, 327)

Cast in the mold of an aporetic triad:

1) Some intentional states are relational and some are not.

2) All intentional states are the same kind of thing.

3) Things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.

These propositions are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. Sainsbury solves the problem by rejecting (1).  He maintains that all intentional states are relational.  Whether I am thinking about Obama, who exists, or about Pegasus, who does not exist, a relation is involved.  In both cases, the relation connects the subject or his mental state to a representation. The representation, in turn, either represents something that exists 'in the world' or it does not.  In the first case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept OBAMA, and the man himself in the external world.  In the second case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept PEGASUS, and that's it: there is nothing in reality that the Pegasus representation represents.  

Sainsbury is not saying that when I think about Obama, I am thinking about a representation. Plainly, I am thinking about a man, and a man is not a representation in a mind.  While Sainsbury advocates a representationalist theory of mind (RTM), he essays to steer clear of ". . . a disastrous turn that a representationalist view may take: instead of saying that the intentional states are about what their representations are about, the fatal temptation for British Empiricist thinkers (and others) is to regard the intentional states as about the representations (“ideas”) themselves." (330)  On Sainsbury's RTM,

For representationalists, all intentional states, including perceptual states, are relational, but the representations are not the “objects” of the states in the sense of what the states are about. Rather, the representations are what bring represented objects “before the mind”. Analogously, we see by using our eyes, but we do not see our eyes. Using our eyes does not make our vision indirect. (330)

This implies that representations are not representatives or stand-ins or epistemic deputies or cognitive intermediaries interposed between mind and world. They are not like pictures. A picture of Obama is an object of vision just as Obama himself is.  But Sainsburian representations "neither react appropriately with light nor emit odiferous molecules." (330)  Pictures of Obama and Obama in the flesh do both. Representations are in the mind but not before the mind. They are "exercised" in intentional states without being the objects of such states:

Intentional states are not normally about the representations they exercise. The representation is not the state’s “object”, as that is often used. Rather, the state’s object is whatever, if anything, the representation refers to, or is about. The notion of “aboutness” needed to make this true is itself intensional: a representation may be about Pegasus, and a thought about Pegasus involves a representation about him. (338)

Sainsbury's solution to the problem codified in the above inconsistent triad involves two steps. The first is to reject (1) and hold that all intentional states are relational.  They are genuine relations, not merely relation-like. The second step is to import relationality into the mind: every intentional state is a relational state that connects two intramental existing items, one being the intentional state itself, the other being the representation, whether it be a truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a thought, or a non-truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a concept.  

It is easy to see that one could take the first step without taking the second. One could hold that all intentional states are relations but that these relations tie intentional states to mind-transcendent items, whether existent, like Obama, or nonexistent, like Pegasus. But this is the way of Meinong or quasi-Meinong, not the way of Sainsbury. He argues in the paper in question against Meinong for reasons I will not go into here.

In sum, intentional states are relations, but they are neither relations to mental objects nor are they relations to extramental objects.  They are relations to representations which are neither.  A mental object is (or can be) both in the mind and before the mind.  And extramental object is (or can be) before the mind but not in the mind. A Sainsburian representation is in the mind but not before the mind (except in cases of reflection as when I reflect on the concept OBAMA as opposed to thinking about him directly).

The article ends as follows:

Metaphysical relationality is the fundamental feature of intentional states, the nature they all share. In the original puzzle, it was claimed that Raoul’s thinking about Pegasus is not relational, since there is no such thing as Pegasus, whereas his thinking about Obama is relational, since there is such a thing as Obama. But in both cases the claims are made true by Raoul being in a two-place relational state, involving a Pegasus-representation in one case and an Obama representation in the other. The metaphysical underpinning of thinking about Pegasus is just as relational as his thinking about Obama. For the Pegasus case, that is not because there really is such a nonexistent object as Pegasus, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept PEGASUS. For the Obama case, the state is relational in the relevant way not because there is such an object as Obama, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept OBAMA.

CRITIQUE

Does this solve our problem? I don't see that it does.  First of all, we are left with the problem of the intentionality of representations. What makes an Obama representation about Obama?  Sainsbury's solution to the Prior puzzle is to reject the first limb of the aporetic triad by maintaining that ALL intentional states are relational.  But since these relations are all intramental we are left with the problem of external reference.  We are left with no account of the of-ness or aboutness of representations.  We need an account not only of noetic intentionality but of noematic intentionality as well, to press some Husserlian jargon into service.

Second, it is not clear from this article what exactly representations are. We are told that "representations are what bring represented objects 'before the mind'." How exactly?  Talk of the "exercise" of representations suggests that they are dispositions.  Is the concept OBAMA in Raoul his being disposed to identify exactly one thing as Obama?  But how could an occurrent episode of thinking-of be accounted for dispositionally? Besides, the concept OBAMA would have to be a haecceity-concept and I have more than once pointed out the difficulties with such a posit.

 

On Death: Objective and Subjective Views

Death viewed objectively seems normal, natural, and 'acceptable.' And not evil. Is it evil that the leaves of deciduous trees fall off and die in the autumn? There are more where they came from. It is nature's way.  Everything in nature goes the way of the leaves of autumn. If this is not evil, why is it evil when we fall from the Arbor Vitae?  Are we not just bits of nature's fauna? Very special bits, no doubt, but wholly natural nonetheless.

Viewed subjectively, however, the matter looks decidedly different. Gaze at someone you love at a moment when your 'reasons' for loving the person are most in evidence. Then give unblinkered thought to the proposition that the dearly beloved child or spouse will die and become nothing, that the marvellous depth of interiority that has revealed  itself as unique to your love will be annihilated, utterly blotted out forever, and soon. 

Now turn your thought back on yourself  and try to confront in all honesty and without evasion your upcoming annihilation as a subject of experience and not as just another object among objects. Focus on yourself as a subject for whom there is a world, and not as an object in the world.  Entertain with existential clarity the thought that you will not play the transcendental spectator at your demise and cremation.

The horror of nonexistence from which Epicurus wanted to free us comes into view only when we view death subjectively:  I as subject, not me as object, or as 'one.'  No doubt one dies. But it is not possible that one die unless it is is possible that I die or you die, where 'you' is singular.  Viewing myself objectively, I am at a distance from myself and thus in evasion of the fact I as subject  will become nothing. 

That the self as subject should be annihilated ought to strike one as the exact opposite of normal, natural, and acceptable. It should strike one as a calamity beyond compare. For there are no more where the dearly beloved came from.  The dearly beloved, whether self or other, is unique, and not just in the 0ne-of-kind sense. For there is no kind whose instantiation is the dearly beloved.  

Which view is true? Can either be dismissed? Can they be 'mediated' by some dialectical hocus-pocus?  These are further questions. 

But now it is time for a hard ride as Sol peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridge line.

More on the Riddle of Intentionality with the Help of Molnar

  According to George Molnar,

The fundamental feature of an intentional state or property is that it is directed to something beyond itself . . . All mental states and processes have an internal reference to an object. The identity of the intentional state is defined in terms of this intentional object. . . . Since intentionality constitutes the identity of mental phenomena, it follows that the nexus between the mental state or process in question and its intentional object is non-contingent. (Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 62, second and third emphases added.)

Molnar is right: the directedness beyond itself to an object is an internal feature of the intentional state. Consider an act (intentional state) of seeing a particular green paloverde tree. What makes the mental act a consciousness of that very object? Some will be tempted to say that the tree in reality, outside the mind, causes the mental state both to be directed and to be directed  to the very object  to which it is directed.  But then the object-directedness would not be an internal feature of the intentional state.  The curious thing about the nexus of intentionality is that mental acts are intrinsically directed to their objects.  They refer beyond themselves by their very nature. So it is not in virtue of an external relation to an external thing that a mental state is object-directed.  As I argued earlier, object-directedness is not to be confused with object-dependence. One should not allow the prevalence of various forms of externalism over the last 35 years or so to blind one to the predominance of internalism in intentionality theory from Brentano on.  (This is not to say that there are no object-directed states  whose identity does not require the existence of an external referent.)

If one were to suppose that the object-directedness of every act requires the existence of external things, then (i) there would no object-directedness in the case of acts directed to nonexistent objects such as the merely possible golden mountain and the impossible round square, and (ii) an intentional state would lose its intentionality should the external thing to which it is directed cease to exist.  In the case of (i), what either does not or cannot exist cannot do any causing, and in the case of (ii), what no longer exists cannot do any causing either.

Consider again my Washington Monument (WM) example. If, unbeknownst to me, it ceases to exist while I am merely thinking about it, but not sense-perceiving it either directly by ordinary vision or indirectly via television, the directedness (intentionality) of my thinking is in no way affected by the WM's ceasing to exist: my conscious state remains directed, and it remains directed to the very object to which it was directed, and indeed in exactly the same way, say, under the incomplete description 'monolithic marble obelisk.' But what object is that? Which object is the intentional object? Is it the transcendent WM itself? Or is it an immanent object? There is a puzzle here that cannot be solved  by stipulative definition of 'intentional object.' Two possibilities.

P1. One possibility is that the intentional object (IO) is the WM itself.  There is good phenomenological reason to maintain this. After all, when I think of the Washington Monument, my thinking is directed beyond itself to something other than itself: I am not thinking about some intermediary item or epistemic deputy or surrogate such as a sense datum, idea, image, way of being appeared to, representation, guise, noema, or whatnot.  My thinking goes straight to the transcendent thing itself; it does not stop short at some immanent item that plays a mediating role.  It seems we ought to say that the IO is the transcendent thing itself.  

If so, the WM is my act's IO both while the WM exists and after it ceases to exist.  Don't forget that it is a phenomenological datum that the IO remains self-same over the interval despite the fact that during that interval the WM ceases to exist. Now the WM is in no way immanent to consciousness; it is neither a real content thereof in Husserl's sense of  reeller Inhalt, nor is it immanent in the manner of an Husserlian noema.  No wholly determinate 550-foot-tall marble obelisk resides in my head or in my mind. It cannot be in or before my mind because my mind, and yours too, is finite: it cannot 'wrap itself around' the entirety of the massive monolith. Only a tiny fraction of the WM's parts, properties, and relations are before my mind when I think of it.  That would also be the case were I standing in front of the monument looking at it.

So on (P1), the WM is the IO of my act, and the WM, both before and after it ceases to exist, is one and the same transcendent  item.  After it ceases to exist, however, it is a nonexistent transcendent item without ceasing to be the IO of my act of thinking.  That is to say: my ongoing thinking  of the WM has available to it an IO over the entire interval, an IO that has and then loses the property of existence.  Note the difference between 'My thinking has no object' and 'My thinking has an object that lacks existence.'

(P1) thus lands us in the Meinongian predicament of having to affirm that some items are both transcendent of consciousness and thus in no way mind-dependent, and without existence. (I am assuming the untenability of any distinction between being and existence; hence there is no escape by this route.)  I will say that an item that has neither existence nor being of any sort is 'beingless.' It is a pure 'what,' a pure Sosein bereft of Sein. It is ausserseiend. 

I myself find the notion that some items are beingless unintelligible although I do understand how the notion is arrived at. Some will dismiss my finding of unintelligibility as a merely autobiographical remark, but by my lights it is more than that.  It just makes no sense to say that there are, in an ontically unloaded or non-committal sense of 'there are,' definite items actually possessing properties and thus numerically different from one another that are both transcendent of consciousness and jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing." 

Therefore, while there is good phenomenological reason to maintain that the intentional nexus puts us in touch with  the thing itself and thus that the intentional object of an act is the thing itself, this plausible view entangles us in seemingly  insuperable Meinongian difficulties.  My thinking of the WM does not become objectless  half-way through the interval. That is phenomenologically obvious. Therefore, if the WM  is the IO of my act, then the WM becomes a nonexistent object by the end of the interval.  As I noted earlier, Husserl in the 'Jupiter' passage in the Logical Investigations seems headed in a Meinongian direction.

We face a serious problem if Meinongianism is to be avoided. We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  We want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But the problem of nonexistence (not inexistence! pace so many historically ignorant analytic philosophers) throws a spanner in the works.  One could say, and it has been said, that when the IO exists, the act gets at it directly; when the IO doesn't exist, the act terminates at a representation in a mind.  This is an option that needs discussing in a separate post.  For now I am assuming that in every case, the IO is either a transcendent item or an immanent item. I have argued that on the first alternative the upshot is Meinongianism, an upshot that by my lights is unacceptable. 

P2. The other possibility (theoretical option) given the assumption just stated is that the IO of my ongoing act  of thinking of the WM during an interval in which it passes from existence to nonexistence is not a transcendent item, but an immanent item.  Two sub-possibilities (theoretical sub-options) suggest themselves.

P2a.  On the first sub-option, the IO is a representation R in the mind.  To say that the IO exists is to say that R represents something in the external world. To say that the IO does not exist is to say that R does not represent anything in the external world.  So when I am thinking about the WM, during the entire time I am thinking about it, what I have before my mind is a representation R_wm which at first represents something and then ceases to represent anything but without prejudice to its being one and the same representation during the entire interval. This suggestion accommodates the fact that, phenomenologically, nothing changes during the interval.  But it succumbs to other objections. Husserl fulminates against representationalism and its notion that consciousness is like a box with pictures in it of things outside the box.  See Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness.If an intentional state is directed to what is beyond itself, as Molnar rightly states above, then it is not representations to which consciousness is directed, but the  things themselves.

P2b. On the second sub-option, the IO is an immanent item, but not  a representation. It is an ontological 'part' of the thing itself.  Suppose the tree I see is a synthetic unity of noemata.  The transcendence of the tree is constituted in the potential infinity of the series of noemata, but each noema is inseparable from a noesis. This leads to idealism which is arguably untenable. But I cannot say more about this now. 

The intentional nexus as non-contingent

Molnar tells us above that the link between act and object is non-contingent. The reason is that acts are individuated by their objects: every act has an object, and what makes an act the act it is is its object.  Since an act cannot be without an object, an object that makes it the very act it is, the nexus between act and object is non-contingent.

But if in every case an act cannot exist and be the very act it is without an object, then, if the external thing does not exist,  as in the case of the Roman god Jupiter, the object must  be a Meinongian nonexistent object.

The intentional object may or may not exist

"The intentional object can be existent or non-existent." (Molnar, 62) He infers from this that the intentional relation cannot be a genuine relation given that a genuine relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist.

But we should note an ambiguity in Molnar's formulation. The formulation uses the modal word 'can.' But is the point non-modal or modal? Are we being told that some IOs exist and some do not? Or that every IO is such that, if existent, then possibly nonexistent, and if nonexistent, the possibly existent?   I should address this in a separate post.

We should also note the following. If the intentional nexus is not a relation (because some IOs exist and some do not), and the act-object nexus is non-contingent such that, necessarily, every act has an intentional object,  then in the cases where the IO does not exist, and Meinongianism is false, the IO must be an immanent object.  So at least some IOs are immanent objects given the internality and non-contingency criteria cited by Molnar.  But if some IOs are immanent, then the pressure is on to say that they all are, which leads us either to representationalism or to transcendental idealism, both of which are deeply problematic.

The indeterminacy of intentional objects

Finally, among the non-linguistic criteria of intentionality, Molnar mentions the fuzziness or indeterminacy of intentional objects (p. 62). It is clear that some intentional objects are, as Molnar says, "seriously indeterminate." Suppose that I am expecting a phone call soon.  To expect is to expect something. The object expected, the phone call,  is indeterminate with respect to the exact time of its arrival. It is indeterminate with respect to other properties as well. But is every intentional object indeterminate?  The WM exists, and whatever exists is wholly determinate.  But when I think of it or remember it or expect to see it or perceive it, what is before my mind is not the WM with all of its parts, properties, and relations. Given the finitude of our minds, it would be impossible to have the whole of it before my mind. The WM, precisely as presented, cannot be the WM itself.  The former is indeterminate in many but not all respects whereas this is not true of the latter.  What this suggests, given the internality and non-contingency criteria is that the intentional object is not the thing itself, but an immanent object.  

Aporetic conclusion

We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  It is a phenomenological feature of intentional states that they purport to reveal things that do not depend for their existence on consciousness.  My visual perception of  the tree in my backyard purports to make manifest a thing in nature that exists and has many of the properties it has whether or I or anyone ever perceives it.  That purport is built into the phenomenology of the situation. We therefore want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But then we bang up against the problem of intentional nonexistence.  

We seem to face a dilemma. Either the IO  is the thing itself or it is not. To hold to the identity of the IO and the thing itself, we must enter Meinong's jungle. We have to embrace the unintelligible notion that there are transcendent nonexistent items in those cases in which the IO does not exist. On the other hand, if we hold that the IO is an immanent item, then the problem of its relation to the thing itself arises. Is the IO a representation of the thing itself? Or is it an ontological part of the thing itself? Either way there is trouble.

 

Relations and Nonexistents

 Consider the following two sentences: 

a) Lions are smaller than dragons.
b) Mice are smaller than elephants.

From this datanic base a puzzle emerges. 

1) The data sentences are both true.
2) 'Smaller than' has the same sense in both (a) and (b).
3) In both (a) and (b), 'smaller than' has the same reference: it refers to a dyadic relation.
4) No relation holds or obtains unless all its relata exist.

What we have here is an aporetic tetrad. The four propositions just listed are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. What we have, then, is a philosophical problem in what I call canonical form. Any three  of the above four, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  Which limb of the tetrad should we reject?

One might reject (4) while upholding (1), (2), and (3).  Accordingly, some relations connect existents to non-existents.  It is true that lions are smaller than dragons despite it being the case that dragons do not exist.  The sense of 'smaller than' is the same in both (a) and (b).  And 'smaller than' picks out one and the same dyadic relation in both (a) and (b).

The idea here is that there is nothing in the nature of a relation to require that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata.  Contrast thinking about the Trevi Fountain in Rome and thinking about the Fountain of Youth. Some will say that in both cases the intentional nexus is a genuine relation since there is nothing in the nature of a relation (to be precise: a specific relatedness) to require that all of its relata exist.  It is the same relation, the intentional relation, whether I think of an existing item or think of a non-existent item.

If you don't like this solution you might try rejecting (2) while upholding the remaining limbs: 'smaller than' does not have the same sense in our data sentences. Accordingly, 'are smaller than' in (b) picks out a relation that actually connects mice and elephants.  But in (a), 'are smaller than' does not pick out that relation.  In (a), 'is smaller than' has the sense  'would be smaller than.'  We are thus to understand (a) as having the sense of 'Lions would be smaller than dragons if there were any.'

(2)-rejection arguably falls afoul of Grice's Razor, to wit: one ought not multiply senses beyond necessity. Here is what Grice himself says:

[O]ne should not suppose what a speaker would mean when he used a word in a certain range of cases to count as a special sense of the word, if it should be predictable, independently of any supposition that there is such a sense, that he would use the word (or the sentence containing it) with just that meaning. (Grice, 1989, pp. 47-48, Quoted from Andrea Marchesi, "A radical relationist solution to intentional inexistence," Synthese, 2021.)

Pick your poison.

 

Tennyson Strikes a Chord

The bolded passage below is a beautiful poetic summation of  my philosophical position.

IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5
As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 10
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 15
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,
Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,
Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.
And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 20
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

‘And since—from when this earth began—
The Nameless never came
Among us, never spake with man, 25
And never named the Name’—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 30
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 35
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith
She reels not in the storm of warring words, 40
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 45
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

The Ancient Sage

The Ought-to-Do, the Ought-to-Be, and the Aporetics of "Be Ye Perfect"

Could one be under a moral obligation to perfect oneself?  Substack latest.

Notes on Nicholas Rescher, "Nonexistents Then and Now"

0. This entry is relevant to my ongoing dialog with Dr. Novak about reference to the nonexistent. I hope he has the time and the stamina to continue the discussion. I have no doubt that he has the 'chops.' I thank him for the stimulation. We philosophize best with friends, as Aristotle says somewhere. But to the Peripatetic is also attributed the thought that amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas. 

 

 

The Rescher text under scrutiny is from a chapter in his Scholastic Meditations, Catholic UP, 2005, 126-148.

1. One objection I have is that Rescher tends to conflate the epistemological with the ontological. A careful reading of the following passage shows the conflation at work.  I have added comments in brackets in blue. Bolding added, italics in original.  

To begin, note that a merely possible world is never given. It is not something we can possibly encounter in experience. The only world that confronts us in the actual course of things is the real world, this actual world of ours -- the only world to which we gain entry effortlessly, totally free of charge. [This is practically a tautology.  All Rescher is saying is that the only world we can actually experience is the actual world, merely possible worlds being, by definition, not actual.]  To move from it, we must always do something, namely, make a hypothesis -- assumption, supposition, postulation, or the like. The route of hypotheses affords the only cognitive access to the realm of nonexistent possibility. [Rescher's wording suggests that there is a realm of nonexistent possibility and that we can gain cognitive access to it.]  For unlike the real and actual world, possible worlds never come along of themselves and become accessible to us without our actually doing something, namely, making an assumption or supposition or such-like. Any possible world with which we can possibly deal will have to be an object of our contrivance -- of our making by means of some supposition or assumption. [In this last sentence Rescher clearly slides from an epistemological claim, one about how we come to know the denizens of the realm of nonexistent possibility, to an ontological claim about what merely possible worlds and their denizens ARE, namely, objects of our contrivance.](131)

Rescher wants to say about  the merely possible what he says about the purely fictional, namely, that pure ficta are objects of our contrivance.  But this too, it seems to me, is an illicit conflation.  The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized.  What cannot be actualized is not possible; it is impossible. Sherlock Holmes is an impossible item.  He is impossible because he is incomplete. Only the complete (completely determinate) is actualizable. Sherlock is incomplete because he is the creation of  a finite fiction writer: Sherlock has all and only the properties ascribed to him by Conan Doyle. Not even divine power could bring about the actualization of the Sherlock of the Conan Doyle stories.   What God could do is bring about the actualization of various individuals with all or some of Sherlock's properties. None of those individuals, however, would be Sherlock. Each of them would differ  property-wise from Sherlock.

2. The conflation of the merely possible with the purely fictional is connected with another mistake Rescher makes.  Describing the "medieval mainstream," (129) Rescher lumps mere possibilia and pure ficta together as entia rationis.  For this mistake, Daniel Novotny takes him to task, explaining that "Suarez and most other Baroque scholastics considered merely possible beings to be real, and hence they were not classified as beings of reason." (Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel, Fordham UP, 2013, p. 27)   Entia rationis, beings of reason, are necessarily mind-dependent impossible objects.  Mere possibilia are not, therefore, entia rationis.

3. As I understand it, the problem of the merely possible is something like this.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs are not nothing, nor are they fictional.  And of course their possibility is not merely epistemic, or parasitic upon our ignorance.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs have some sort of mind-independent reality.  But how the devil can we make sense of this mind-independent reality given that the merely possible, by definition, is not actual?  Suppose we cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a. The merely possible is not actual.

b. The merely possible is real (independently of finite minds).

c.  Whatever is  real is actual.

Clearly, the members of this trio cannot all be true.  Any two of them, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the last two propositions entails the negation of the first.

What are the possible solutions given that the triad is  genuinely logically inconsistent and given that the triad is soluble?  I count exactly five possible solutions.

S1.  Eliminativism.  The limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent, which is to say: there are no mere possibilia.  One could be an error theorist about mere possibilia.  On this solution we deny the common presupposition of (a) and (b), namely, that there are merely possible individuals and states of affairs. 

S2.  Conceptualism.  Deny (b) while accepting the other two limbs.  There are mere possibilia, but what they are are conceptual constructions by finite minds. This is essentially Rescher's view.  See his A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Theory of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1975). He could be described as an artifactualist about possibilities: "A possible individual is an intellectual artifact: the product of a projective 'construction' . . . ." (p. 61)

S3.  Actualism/Ersatzism.  Deny (a) while accepting the other two limbs.  One looks for substitute entities -- actual entities -- to go proxy for the mere possibles.  Thus, on one approach, the merely possible state of affairs  of there being a unicorn is identified with an actual abstract entity, the property of being a unicorn.  For the possibility to be actual is for the the property to be instantiated. 

On this version of actualism, the mind-independent reality of the merely possible is identified with the mind-independent reality of certain actual abstract items. In this way one avoids both eliminativism and constructivism.

S4. Extreme Modal Realism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  David Lewis.  There is a plurality of possible worlds conceived of as maximal merelogical sums of concreta.  The worlds and their inhabitants are all equally real.  But no world is absolutely actual.  Each is merely actual at itself.   In this world, I am a philosopher. On extreme modal realism, the possibility of my being an electrical engineer instead is understood as various counterparts of me being electrical engineers in various possible worlds.

S5. Theologism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  We bring God into the picture to secure the reality of the possibles instead of a plurality of equally real worlds.   Consider the possibility of there being unicorns.  This is a mere possibility since it is not actual.  But the possibility is not nothing: it is a definite possibility, a real possibility that does not depend for its reality on finite minds.  There aren't any unicorns, but there really could have been some, and the fact of this mere possibility has nothing to do with what we do or think or say.  The content of the possibility subsists as an object of the divine intellect, and its actualizability is grounded in God's power.  We could perhaps say that possibilia enjoy esse intentionale in or before the divine intellect, but lack esse reale unless the divine will actualizes them. 

4.  Part of Rescher's support for his constructivism/conceptualism/artifactualism is his attack on the problem of transworld identity.  For Rescher,  "the issue of transworld identity actually poses no real problems -- a resolution is automatically available."   Rescher's argument is hard to locate due to his bloated, meandering, verbose style of writing.  Rescher rarely says anything in a direct and pithy way if he can  pad it out with circumlocutions and high-falutin' phraseology.  (I confess to sometimes being guilty of this myself.)

But basically such argument as I can discern seems to involve equivocation on such terms as 'individuation' and 'identity' as between epistemological and ontological senses.  He gives essentially the following argument on p. 141.  This is my reconstruction and is free of equivocation.

A. All genuine individuals are complete.

B.  All merely possible individuals are complete only if completely describable by us.

C.  No merely possible individuals are completely describable by us.

Therefore

D. No merely possible individuals are genuine individuals.

But why should we accept (B)? Why can't there be nonexistent individuals that are complete?  Rescher just assumes that the properties of such individuals must be supplied by us.  But that is to beg the question against those who believe in the reality of the merely possible.  He just assumes the truth of artifactualism about the merely possible.  Consider the following sentences

d. Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham.

e. Bill Clinton remained single.

f. Bill Clinton  married someone distinct from Hillary Rodham.

Only the first sentence is true, but, I want to say, the other two are possibly true: they pick out merely possible states of affairs.  There are three possible worlds involved: the actual world and two merely possible worlds.  Now does 'Bill Clinton' pick out the same individual in each of these three worlds?  I am inclined to say yes, despite the fact that we cannot completely describe the world in which our boy remains single or the world in which he marries someone other than Hillary.  But Rescher will have none of this because his conceptualism/constructivism/ artifactualism bars him from holding that actual individuals in merely possible worlds or merely possible individuals have properties other that those we hypothesize them as having.  So, given the finitude of our hypothesizing, actual individuals in merely possible worlds, or merely possible individuals, can only be incomplete items, multiply realizable schemata, and thus not genuine individuals.  But then the possible is assimilated to the fictional.

5, How solve the triad?  Novak will put God to work and adopt something along the lines of (S5).  I am inclined to say that the problem, while genuine, is insoluble, and that the aporetic triad is a genuine aporia.

The Aporetics of Existence: Do Existing Things Have Existence?

A reader inquires,

I have been wondering about whether existing things have existence. This seems obvious to me, but Bradley's regress makes me think twice. For if existing things have existence, then given that existence exists, existence also has existence. And since this latter existence also exists, it also has existence. And so on.

 

What do you make of this problem?

There is a problem here, but since Bradley's regress concerns relations, we can leave Mr. Bradley out of it.  And there is a problem even if there is no vicious infinite regress.  (Not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, at least benign.) Here is the problem as I see it.  We start with a datum and we end with a paradox.

 

1) This table in front of me exists. 

 

2) The table exists, but it might not have, which is to say that it exists contingently.   There is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.

 

3) What accounts for the contingency of the thing's existence?  Equivalently, what accounts for the real possibility of the thing's nonexistence? (A real possibility is one that is not epistemic or factitious.)

 

4) A classical answer is in terms of a distinction between the thing and its existence/existing.  This distinction is not merely excogitated by us but corresponds to a difference in reality; it is therefore called a real distinction.  'Real' is from res, thing. A contingent being, then, is one in which essence and existence are really distinct in the sense that, in reality or extra-mentally, the existence/existing of the being is no part of what the thing is.  A non-contingent being is one that is either impossible or necessary, and a necessary being is one whose existence is part of what the thing is.  God is the prime example of a necessary being. In God essence and existence are one, which is to say: in God, there is no real distinction between essence and existence.

 

5) Pace Giles of Rome, however, the real distinction between a thing and its existence is not a distinction between two things metaphysically capable of independent existence.  A thing metaphysically  capable of independent existence is by definition a substance.  Clearly, my table is not a collection of two substances, one its essence, the other its existence.  Hence the distinction between a thing and its existence is not at all like the distinction between my eye glasses and my head or that between my table and the chair in front of it. They are really distinct and separable. The table and its existence are really distinct but inseparable. The latter distinction is more like the distinction between the concavity and convexity of a lens.  It is a real distinction, but neither term of the distinction can exist without the other. 

 

Therefore

 

6) If the individual essence of the table (its whaness or quiddity in the broad sense) is the concrete table  taken in abstraction from its existence, then,  pace Avicenna and his latter-day colleague Alexius von Meinong,  this essence does not itself exist.  The same holds for the existence of the table: it does not itself exist. What exists is the concrete table which is composed of essence and existence as mutually dependent ontological factors.  If you think otherwise, and think of essence and existence as substances in their own right, then you have committed the fallacy of hypostatization or reification. (The only difference is that between Greek and Latin.) 

 

7) If the existence of the table does not itself exist, is the existence of the table nothing at all?   The existence of a thing is that in virtue of which it exists. If you say that the existence of a thing is nothing at all, then either (i) the table does not exist, contrary to fact, or (ii) the existence of the table is (identically) the table, in which case we have no account of the contingency of the thing. Argument for (i): the existence of my table is that in virtue of which my table exists; ergo, if the existence of my table is nothing at all, then my table is nothing at all and does not exist, which is contrary to our datanic starting point.  Argument for (ii):  For the table to be contingent, it must be really distinct from its existence: if its essence were identical to its existence it would be a necessary being. (God is a necessary being precisely because there is no distinction in him between essence and existence. Of course, we cannot think about God without distinguishing God's essence or nature and God's existence;  but this distinction finds no purchase in God: it is a necessary makeshift in the sense that without it we cannot think of God.)  

 

8) The paradox is now upon us. With respect to contingent beings, we seem forced to say that the existence of such a being both is (exists) and is not (does not exist).  Both limbs of this aporetic dyad are reasonably asserted.  But of course a contradiction cannot be true. Of course. That is why the dyad is an aporia, an impasse that the discursive intellect cannot negotiate. No way, man!

 

Limb One. To explain the contingency of the table we have to distinguish the (individual) essence of the concrete table from its existence.  It would avail nothing to bring in talk of possible worlds and say that a contingent being is one that exists in some but not all possible worlds. For 'possible worlds' are merely a representational device to render graphic modal relationships.  (I cannot explain this any further now.  See my Modality category.) So if we want to explain the contingency of concrete particulars and not leave it unexplained, then it seems we must distinguish between the thing (or the essence of the thing) and the thing's existence.  Therefore, the thing's existence/existing cannot be nothing.  It must exist.

 

Limb Two. There are no bare existents: necessarily, whatever exists has a nature or at least some quidditative properties.  So if the existence of my table itself exists, then it has a nature. The nature it would have, presumably would be that of a table, not that of a turnip or a valve-lifter.  But then we have two tables, which is absurd.  The pressure is on to say that the existing of the thing is nothing at all.

 

The paradox is that both halves of the contradiction are rationally defensible.

 

Is there a solution?

 

If there is a solution, I'd like to know what it is.  Please don't say that the existence of the table is one of its properties, a property that does not exist on its own, and is therefore not a substance, but only in the table in the manner of an accident or in the manner of an immanent universal.  If S is a substance, and A is an accident of S, then  A cannot be the existence of S for the simple reason that S must already (logically speaking) exist if it is to support any accident, including the putative accident of existence. Similarly if you try to assay existence as an immanent first-level universal.   If a property is defined as an instantiable entity, then existence cannot be understood as a property of existing particulars. This is because the particular must already exist to be in a position to instantiate any properties including the putative property of existence.  (Bear in mind what I said above about Avicenna and Meinong.)  Existence is not a first-level property.  I have given just one argument among several.

 

And please don't say that existence is a property of properties, the property of being instantiated.   This is the Frege-Russell theory which I have subjected to thorough critique many times on this blog and in print.  Here is one very simple argument. If the existence of a concrete particular a is some property's being instantiated, the only property that could fill the bill is the haecceity property a-ness. But there are no haecceity properties.  Ergo, etc.

 

We are stuck with our paradox: The existence/existing of an existing thing neither is (exists) nor is not (does not exist).

 

A bowl of menudo and a Corona if you can solve it.   

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

 

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing.  If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing  will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains.  And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

Which Side Are You On?

A snatch of dialog in illustration of the aporetics of our political predicament:

A. It's a war! Don't say anything bad about our guys! Which side are you on? Don't preface your defense of Trump by conceding that he has these and these negative qualities. Don't give ammo to the enemy!  In a gunfight against a home invader  would you allow your enemy time to re-load, in the interests of a fair fight? Hell no! He is in the wrong and you are in the right. He is out to kill you. You must stop him, and if that ends up killing him, so be it.

B. But then truth and objectivity go out the window. Onesidedness and blind partisanship rule. Oppositions intensify. Polarization increases. Polarization issues in demonization. We need to come together and work together. Trump is deeply flawed. How can you blind yourself to his flaws?

A. This is a war, not a gentlemanly discussion, or an attempt at an objective personality assessment.  You cannot be objective and conciliatory in a war. You must defeat the enemy before he defeats you. Trump is all we have. Can't you see that? Your attempt to be fair and conciliatory and reasonable and 'moral' will be taken as a sign of weakness and will only embolden our enemies on the Left.  We cannot 'come together' with them because there is no common ground on which to do so.  They do not share out values. The enemy is committed to our destruction.

B. So you are OK with any and all means sufficient to destroy the enemy?  Do the ends justify the means? Were the Allied atrocities during World War II justified by the good outcome?

A. I don't like saying yes, yes, and yes, but I fear that I have to. This is the problem of dirty hands. The buck stopped with President Harry Truman. Would you not have ordered the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese population centers? Or, comfortable in your ivory tower, would you have taken the position of Elizabeth Anscombe possibly sacrificing civilization itself to a just war THEORY?  Which is better known, the premises on which Just War doctrine depends, or the consequences of Allied defeat and Axis victory?

B. This is scary stuff. Isn't there some alternative to war?

A.  And what might that be?  I see only three alternatives to war, none of them good.  One can attempt to WITHDRAW from the fight. Head for the hills. Build alternative communities and hope to be left alone.  Unfortunately, the totalitarians, being totalitarians, won't leave us alone. That's not 'who they are.'

Or one can accept POLITICAL DHIMMITUDE.

Finally, one can attempt the POLITICAL EQUIVALENT OF DIVORCE, whether through secession, partition, a return to federalism, or something else.

B. Those are the only options?

A. As far as I can see.

Related:

Is Disunion in Our Future?

 

Something about Nothing

Consider the following contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false.  So much for truth value. What about modal status?  Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true.  If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that nothing exist?   Is it possible that there be nothing at all?  Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.

A strict Pyrrhonian would have to say that there is an argument that cancels out the one just given.

Is there?

A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

M.M. writes,

I understand that your method is aporetic - you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below. 

 

[. . .]

 

My question is: do you think that  -- even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems -- we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options? 

Yes.  Not all problems are insoluble; not all questions are unaswerable.   Let the question be: Are there beliefs?  Along comes an eliminativist who give the following argument:

 

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But any reasonable person should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead more reasonably taken to be a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  a scientistic  ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states. (I am assuming that we accept both (2) and (3).)

 

I conclude that not all problems are such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out so as to leave an intellectually honest person in a state of doxastic equipoise.  I hold that this is the case only for a set of core problems, the great problems as my reader calls them, the problems that have humbled the greatest minds.

 

Contrast the question of the existence of beliefs with the question of the existence of God. Deny beliefs and I show you the door. Deny God, and I listen attentively to your arguments.

Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?

Can presentism navigate between the Scylla of tautology and the Charybdis of absurdity? Let's see.  We begin with a datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:

DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.

For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date.  For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.

It follows that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present.  But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away.  It cannot be the case that the event of Kennedy's assassination was always past and never present.  There was a time when it was present and a time before that when it was future. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his assassination was future; when Johnson was sworn in, his asassination was past.

Bear in mind that presentism is an A-theory.  This implies that among times there is a  privileged time that is absolutely or non-relationally present.  So while every time is present at itself, only one time is present absolutely. This time instantiates the monadic (non-relational) property of absolute temporal presentness.  This absolute property is temporary, not permanent. 

So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining that

P-Taut: Only present items presently exist

for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's  substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that

P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter.

For this is solipsism of the present moment, a bizarre if not lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, all that exists, and all that will ever exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment, the moment at which I am writing and you are reading.  If our presentist pals are not solipsists of the present moment, then they cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, and so they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists.  Thus

P-Always: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.

This seems to do the trick.  What is says is that, at every time t, only what is temporally present at  t belongs in the ontological inventory, the catalog of what there is.

Thinking a little deeper, however, (P-Always) seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Always) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.

It is obvious that (P-Taut)  and (P-Solip) are nonstarters.  So we are driven to (P-Always).  But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items.  To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to quantify over times that are not present in order to achieve a formulation that avoids both (P-Taut) and (P-Solip).

The presentist needs the 'always' to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, but it doesn't keep him from drowning. He is forced to jump out of his privileged temporal perspective from within time and view matters sub specie aeternitatis. He is forced into an illict combination of a privileged perspective within time with a view from No When, a view from outside of time.  The perspectives cannot be integrated, and therein lies the root of the problem.

My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense.  This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems. 

Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle

One type of presentism makes a double-barreled claim about the Being of all beings:  All beings are (i) in time (ii) at the present time. There is nothing 'outside' of time, and the there is nothing 'outside' of the present time.  To be just is to be temporally present.  Being = Presentness.  Since identity is symmetrical, the property identity proposition expressed by the immediately preceding sentence  does not fully convey what I want to convey.  What I want to convey is that Being reduces to Temporal Presentness on the type of presentism now being considered.   (If A reduces to B, it does not follow that B reduces to A.)

The presentism under discussion is involved in a double restriction:  Items in general are restricted to temporal items, and then temporal items are restricted to present items. And all of this as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

What then do we say about the Berlin Wall? It is wholly past. Being past, it is in time. For, by definition, an item is in time just in case it is the subject of a temporal predicate, whether a monadic A-determination, or a relational B-property.  The Wall is the subject of the predicate 'past', which is true of it; ergo, the Wall is in time.  To put the point B-theoretically, the Wall is such that, every time at which it existed is a time earlier than the present time. Ergo, the Wall is in time.

On the other hand, being past, the Wall is nothing. Presentism implies that the passage of time has consigned the Wall to the abyss of nonbeing. For if Being reduces to Presentness, and an item is wholly past, then said item is nothing. But if the Wall is nothing, then it has no properties, including the monadic property of being past, and the relational property of being earlier that the present, whence it follows that the Wall is not in time.

So the Wall is both in time and not in time. It is in time, because 'wholly past' is true of it.  It is not in time for the reason given in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Presentism, as a thesis about the very Being of all beings, restricts everything to the present time, including the temporal modes, past and future. In so doing, presentism negates itself by eliminating time. For there is no time if there are no distinctions among past, present, and future.

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Presentism and the Determinacy of the Past

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter.  But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists. 

If our presentist cannot accommodate the reality of the past, then his position is hopeless. He might say this:  the past is real, but its reality is wholly contained in the present.  The causal traces of past events in the present constitutes the entire reality of the past.  Will this work? No. There simply aren't enough causal traces!

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate.

Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It was, and I would add: it actually was. When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities.

Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her. There is a loose sense in which both events belong to the past. It is clear that he was engaged to Olsen. We also know that he did not marry her. But he might have. This possible event belongs to the past in the sense that, had it been actual, it would have belonged to the actual past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility. This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.

To make a slogan out of it: the past is fact, not fiction; actuality not possibility.

One point to keep in mind is that if the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. (Bourne 2006, 50 f.)

Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause. Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do. My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso on New Year's Day, 1940, assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker.

So it looks as if our presentist is in a serious bind. The following cannot all be true:

1) Presentism is true: whatever exists at all, exists at present.

2) The past is real.

3) The past is determinate.

4) There are countless events that really happened that no one remembers and for which there is not a shred of evidence in the present.

It seems to me that the obvious solution to this aporetic tetrad is to deny (1).

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation' (2020 Version)

This from a reader:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation.  These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed.  Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

I once cataloged twelve different meanings of 'world.' By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing.  (Don't confuse this sense of 'world' with the sense of 'world' as the term is used in the 'possible worlds' semantics of modal discourse.) Now if  God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone."  For if we could add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we would have more beings.  We would have a totality T that is larger than T minus God.  If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality. (Not wanting to fall afoul of Georg Cantor, I assume that the number of (concrete) creatures is finite.)

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing  in the same way having both God and creatures as members.  When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible.  God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation -- events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners, 1936, p. 96.  Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to my Protestant friends Dale Tuggy, Alan Rhoda, and James Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence.  We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification.   If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being.  There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are.  Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness.  For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing.  God is all in all. God alone is. 

Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65)  If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64)  That's exactly right. (I will add in passing that this metaphysical conclusion underwrites the contemptus mundi of the old-time monk and his world flight.) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  God cannot be a being among beings.  "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84)  We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.  (It is important in these discussions to observe the distinction between Being and beings, between esse and ens, between das Sein und das Seiende.  Hence my use of the majuscule when I refer to the former and the miniscule when I refer to the latter.)

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not.  But then  the One lacks the many.  Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and to the intellect.  The plural world cannot be gainsaid.  In theological terms: If God alone is, then creatures are not, even in those possible worlds in which God creates. But then what is the difference between possible worlds in which God creates and those in which he does not?

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not.  But then the many lacks the One.  Not good: the many is the many of the One.  A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make.  The world is one, really one. It is One in itself, not merely by our conceptualization.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy.  God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity.  Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways.  God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.'  Creatures exist by participation.  These are radically different modes of existence. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way.  We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes.  It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96):  ". . . every participation supposes that the participator  both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96)  How so?

I exist, but contingently.  That is: I exist, but at every moment of my existence it is possible that I not exist. There is no necessity that I exist at any moment of my existence. I am not the source or ground of my own existence.  No existential boot-strapping! Assuming that I cannot exist as a matter of brute fact, my Being (existence) is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself.  So my Being, as wholly received from another, is God's Being.  But I am not God or anything else.  I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else.  So I am and I am not that in which I participate.

To formulate the contradiction in a somewhat clearer form: My existence is MY existence, and as such 'incommunicable' to any other existing item AND my existence is NOT MY existence in that it is wholly derivative from Gods existence.

In terms of the One and the Many: Each member of the Many is itself and no other thing; its unity is its own and 'incommunicable' to any other thing, AND each member of the Many derives its ownmost unity and ipseity from the One without which it would be nothing at all, lacking as it would unity.

In terms of creation:  Socrates is not a character in a divine fiction; he does not exist as a merely intentional object of the divine mind; his mode of Being is esse reale, not esse intentionale, AND Socrates receives from his creator absolutely everything: his existence, essence, and properties as well as his free and inviolable ipseity and haecceity that make him an other mind, a Thou to the divine I, and a possible rebel against divine authority. So Socrates both is and is not a merely intentional object of the divine mind.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around these sorts of contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many.  Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many.  The One is transcendent of the many.  But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings."  The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many.  The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many.  The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many.  The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.  He is both transcendent and immanent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect?  That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects?  If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

The Question

God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which is acceptable. Thus we speak of the 'horns' of a dilemma, and of being 'impaled' on its horns.

Bear in mind the following tripartite distinction. For any agent that issues a command, there is (i) the commanding, (ii) that which is commanded (the content of the act of commanding), and (iii) the relevant normative property of the content.   Contents of commands can be either permissible, impermissible, or obligatory.  Note the ambiguity of 'command' as between the act of commanding, and the content commanded. And note that while finite agents sometimes command what is morally impermissible, this is never the case with God. Everything God commands is morally obligatory.  The question is whether the divine commanding makes the action obligatory, or whether it is obligatory independently of God's command.  In the latter case, God is at most the advocate and enforcer of an obligation but not its legislator.

Horn One

If God commands an action because it is obligatory, then the obligatoriness of the action is not due to God's command, but is logically antecedent to it. God is then subject to an independently existing system of norms that are not in his control. He is then an advocate of the moral order and its enforcer, but not its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty.  God is the Absolute, and the Absolute cannot be dependent on anything external to it for its existence, nature, modal status, or anything else, including the justification of its commands.  The sovereign God is the absolute lord of all orders, including the moral order.

Horn Two

If an action is obligatory because God commands it, then the normative quality of the action -- its being obligatory -- derives from a fact, the fact of God's commanding the action. This is puzzling: how can the mere fact that an agent issues a command make the content of the command objectively binding?  Of course, God is not any old agent: he is morally perfect.  So you can be sure that he won't command anything that is not categorically obligatory. Still, the  move from fact to norm is puzzling. The puzzle is heightened if the agent is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  If God is free in this sense, libertarianly free, then he might not have commanded the action, in which case it would not have been obligatory.  This is an unacceptable result.  If it is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, and obligatory to refrain from such an action, normative properties cannot derive from any being's free will.  For that would make morality arbitrary. The normative proposition It is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, if true, is necessarily true. Its truth value cannot then depend on a contingent command even if the one who commands is God.

Constraints on a Solution

We are assuming that God exists, that morality is objective and not up to the whim of any being, and that God is sovereign over the moral order, and indeed, absolute lord of all orders.  So we cannot solve the dilemma by denying that God exists, or by grasping one or the other of the horns, or by limiting divine sovereignty.  We must find a way between the horns.  If we succeed, we will have shown that the dilemma is a false alternative.  

The problem has two sides. First, how do we get from a fact to a norm? To be precise, how do get from the facticity of a commanding to the normativity of the content commanded? Second, how do we ensure that the norm is absolute?  We would have a solution if it could be shown that the fact just is the norm, and the fact could not have been different.

William Mann's Solution via Divine Simplicity

Mann's solution is built on the notion that, with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn, and arbitrarity, is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the moral order if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, Oxford UP, 2015,168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is nonetheless  free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. God then is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer or advocate.  God is not subject to the moral order; he is the source of it. Indeed, he is identical to it. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? It would seem so. This doctrine implies that knowing and willing are identical in God.  If so, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths, including necessary moral truths, cannot be otherwise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.

On the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, the Euthyphro Dilemma turns out to be false dilemma: the simplicity doctrine allows for a third possibility, a way between the horns.*  God is Goodness itself, not a good being among others. As such, he just is the content of morality.  The moral order is not external to him nor antecedent to him logically or ontologically: he is not subject to it.  Sovereignty is preserved. Arbitrarity is avoided because God cannot will any moral contents other than the ones he wills.

Problem Solved?

If God is absolutely sovereign, as he must be to be God, then he is sovereign over every order including the MODAL order.  It is cogently arguable, however, that the simplicity doctrine entails the collapse of modal distinctions and thus the collapse of the modal order. 

It looks as if we can solve the Euthyphro problem, but only by generating a different problem. The Euthyphro problem is solved by saying that (i) the obligatory is obligatory because God commands it, but (ii) the contents of the divine commands could not have been otherwise. They could not have been otherwise because these contents are contained within the unchangeable divine nature.  Hence  God is neither subject to an external moral order, nor the arbitrary creator of it.  God is the moral order. In God, the facticity of the commanding and the normativity of the contents commanded are one. 

But if God, because he is absolutely sovereign, cannot be subject to a logically prior MORAL order, then he also cannot be subject to a logically prior MODAL order. As absolutely sovereign, God must be sovereign over all orders. It cannot be that the possible and the necessary subsist in sublime independence of God.  It cannot be that creation is the selective actualization of some proper subset of self-subsisting  mere possibles, or the actualization of one among an infinity of possible worlds.   Creation is not actualization. For then God would not be creating out of nothing, but out of possibles the Being of which would be independent of God's Being. 

God, then, cannot be subject to a modal order independent of him. So one might think to import into God the modal distinctions, for example, the distinction between the merely possible and the actual.  This importation would parallel the importation into the divine nature of the various contents of divine commands. Perhaps it is like this. God entertains mere possibles which, as merely possible, subsist only as accusatives of his thinking, but actualizes some of them, super-adding existence to them.  The mere possibles that need an act of divine actualization in order to exist would then contingently exist, which is of course the result we want.  Unfortunately, the contingency of actual creatures (Socrates, for example, as opposed to his merely possible brother Schmocrates)  entails the possibility of no creatures and of other creatures who remain merely possible. But then we have in God a distinction between his actual and his merely possible creative decisions.  This conflicts with DDS and its commitment to God's being purely actual (actus purus).

Conclusion

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) allows for a solution of the Euthyphro dilemma with the following advantages: it upholds the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, the non-arbitrarity of the divine will, and God's sovereignty over the moral order. But God, to be God, must be the absolute lord of all orders, including the modal order.  The simplicity doctrine, however, needed to solve the Euthyphro dilemma entails the collapse of the modal order in which case it is not there to for God to be sovereign over. The objectivity of the modal distinctions needs to be upheld just as much as the objectivity of morality. But this is impossible if DDS is true. So while God must be simple to be God, he cannot be simple if if he is the creator of our universe, a universe whose contingency is the point of departure for the ascent to the divine absolute.

Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute!

________________________________

* A dilemma is said to be false if there is a third possibility, and thus a way between the horns.  The contemporary Thomist, Edward Feser, maintains that the Euthyphro dilemma is false:

Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him. 

 

Schlick's Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick?  He wrote, "All real problems are scientific  questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty).  The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific  in the way that the natural sciences are scientific.  Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.  

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

Pain and Time: An Aporetic Triad

Here are three extremely plausible propositions that cannot all be true:

1) A wholly past (felt) pain is not nothing: it is real.

2) For (felt) pains, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.

3) Wholly past (felt) pains are not perceived.

Ad (1): To say that an item is wholly past is to say that it does not overlap the present. A felt or phenomenal pain is a pain exactly as it is experienced  from the first-person point of view of the one who endures it, with all and only the properties it appears to have from the point of view of the one who endures it.  It is not to be confused with the physical cause of the pain if there is one. Now yesterday's excruciating migraine headache, which is wholly past, is not nothing: it happened. It is now an object of veridical memory. Since the memory is veridical, its intentional object cannot be unreal.  The pain  is also a subject of presently true past-tensed statements such as 'The pain was awful.' Given that veritas sequitur esse, that no true statement is about what is wholly unreal or nonexistent, yesterday's migraine pain cannot be unreal or nonexistent. The remembered wholly past pain is actual not merely possible; factual not fictional; real not imaginary.  Of course, it is not temporally present. But it is real nonetheless.  It is or exists. It is included in the ontological inventory.  To deny this is to deny the reality of the past. 

Ad (2): The being or existence of a felt pain is just its being-perceived.  A felt pain cannot exist apart from its being experienced. Again, it is not to be confused with an external, objective, physical cause of the pain sensation, if there is one.  Esse est percipi is not true of the physical cause of the felt pain.  But surely it is true of the pain precisely as it is endured from the first-person perspective of the one who endures it.

Ad (3): Yesterday's particular pains are over, and thank goodness: they are not being perceived or felt or experienced by anyone.  

Each of these propositions is extremely plausible if not self-evident. Each is, or is very close to being, a Moorean fact, a datum, a given, something not reasonably denied. I myself am inclined to say that each of the limbs of the triad is true. But of course they cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction.  Any two limbs of the triad entail the negation of the remaining limb. For example, The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  What we have here, then, is a paradigmatic philosophical problem: apparent data in logical conflict.

To avoid a logical contradiction, we must reject or revise one or more of the propositions in a principled way, i.e., by endorsing a theory that excludes the proposition.  Here are four solution strategies:

A. Deny (1) by Adopting Presentism. This is the view that all and only what exists now, exists.  This is not the tautology that all and only what exists now exists now, or exists in the present-tensed sense of 'exists.' It is a substantive (non-tautological) and highly controversial metaphysical thesis that restricts the ontological inventory to temporally present items.  To avoid tautology, we can formulate it like this: all and only the temporally present exists simpliciter.  (What exactly 'simpliciter' means here is of course part of the problem. Tenseless existence is presumably the best candidate for existence simpliciter.) Presentism entails that wholly past and wholly future items do not exist, are not real. So yesterday's pain does not exist simpliciter, and (1) is false. Problem solved.  The past pain, being wholly past, is nothing at all. It is not just that it is now nothing at all -- which is a mere tautology given the standard meanings of  'past,' 'present,' and 'now' -- but that it is nothing at all, period!

But of course the problem is solved only if presentism makes sense and is true.  And that is a big 'if.'

B. Deny (1) by Rejecting Veritas Sequitur Esse. 'JFK was assassinated' is past-tensed but presently true.  It is true now that he was assassinated. But there are no truths about what does not exist. So I reason: since 'JFK was assassinated' is true, and is about JFK, he must (tenselessly) exist: wholly past items exist (are real, have being) despite being temporally non-present. You might resist my conclusion by making a Meinongian move: there are truths about beingless items and one can refer to such items.  Even though JFK has ceased to exist, he is still in some sense available to serve as an object of reference and a subject of true statements.

C. Deny (2) by Adopting  Materialism about the Mental. A token-token identity theorist will say that a particular pain episode is just a brain state. Now such a state, being wholly objective, can exist without being felt by anyone, in which case (2) is false. The eliminative materialist proposes a more radical solution: there are no mental states at all. Therefore, there are no felt pains and (2) is false.  

D. Deny (3) by Adopting 'Eternalism.'  This is a position in the philosophy of time entailed by the B-theory of time. The B-theorist denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  All times and their occupants are both temporally and existentially equal. 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 mind-independent 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 just now (which is trivial) but at all.  The B-theory leads to what is known in the trade as 'eternalism' according to which the catalog of what exists is not exhausted by present items, but includes past and future ones as well.  See here for more.

If eternalism is true, then (3) above is false. The third limb of our antilogism states that past felt pains are not perceived. But if not perceived, then they do not exist. But on eternalism they do exist, tenselessly, whence it follows that yesterday's headache is tenselessly being perceived, whatever that might mean.

In a thorough discussion, I would then proceed to argue that each of these four attempts at a solution requires theories that are as problematic as the original problems.  Once that case is made, a case will have been made that the above problem is an aporia in a strict sense, a problem that is fully intelligible and genuine, but insoluble by us.

Addendum (11/18)

Jonathan Barber writes, 

I think you could distinguish between (a) the quale of pain (the raw sense data) and (b) the experience of pain – the mental effect produced by the raw sense data. Past qualia are not real - they simply do not exist. Past experiences are real. So in proposition 1 of your aporetic triad you are using 'pain' in sense (b), whereas in propositions 2 and 3 you are using 'pain' in sense (a).

Response.  Barber's criticism, in terms I find more congenial, would go like this. There is a difference between a pain experience and its content, where the latter is the sensory quale. Past qualia are not real. Past experiences are real.  'Felt pain' in (1) refers to the experience whereas in 'felt pain' in (2) and (3) refer to the quale. I would say in response that while one can distinguish in thought between experience and quale, neither can exist in reality without the other.  So if the past pain experience exists, then so does its qualitative content.

Democratic Socialism?

The label smacks of an oxymoron. Essential to socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialists will presumably want to distinguish socialism from statism, which may be defined as state control of the economy, where the state control is not in turn democratically controlled. Historically, however, the tendency is for supposedly collective, democratic control to transmogrify into control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it -- and 'the people' be damned.

The tendency, then, is for socialism to terminate in statism and totalitarianism. Power to the people? Hardly. 'The people' end up among the socially planned and not among the social planners. Either that or they end up in a gulag.

Addendum 8/31. London Ed comments:

Good post, and the seed of an answer to the ‘No true Marxist’ argument. As you say, collective ownership of the means of production is essential to socialism, not just a mere accident.

The next step in the proof would be to show that it is essential, not just accidental, to collective ownership that supposedly collective, democratic control will inevitably transmogrify into ‘control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it’. Hence, the bad history of Marxism is not a mere accident, despite what its supporters claim.

This would be the next step in the proof if a proof in the strict sense could be had. Here socialists enjoy some 'wiggle room.' A strict proof is not available. My first point above is non-negotiable since it is merely a consequence of the definition of 'socialism.' But how do we prove that collective ownership necessarily and inevitably issues in statism and totalitarianism?  Of course, repeated failure is a good inductive argument for an ideal's being unrealizable. But induction is not demonstration. Without a demonstration, we cannot deny the socialist his 'wiggle room.' 

The Chesterton Move

The true-believing socialist will most likely make what I will call the 'Chesterton move.'  G. K. C. famously asserted,  or at least implied, that Christianity hasn't failed; it's never been tried.  "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ch. 1.5)

The idea here is that Christianity is a  realizable ideal, but that we simply haven't realized it.  Now if an ideal is realizable, then its never having been realized is no apodictic proof of its not being a genuine ideal, one  that we ought to try to realize.  Our democratic socialist can say something similar. Insufficient attempts have been made properly to implement the socialist ideal; the fact that it has never been achieved is no knock-down argument against the ideal.  We have to organize and make a concerted effort and suppress the evil capitalist greed-heads who stand in our way.

The Chesterton Move and the 'No True Marxist' Fallacy

Now if our democratic socialist has available to him the Chesterton Move, then he is in a position to deny that 'No True Marxist' is a fallacy.  He can say that true Marxism, or rather true socialism, will not lead to totalitarian tyranny. If it does, then it was not true socialism!

A Deeper Issue

Can we know from experience the natures of things and thus what is possible and impossible?  Can we know a posteriori that socialism without totalitarian tyranny is impossible?

The conservative will presumably answer this question in the affirmative, but he won't be able to prove that he is right. Or so say I.

The Aporetics of the Situation

1) An ideal that has never been realized, despite repeated attempts to realize it, cannot be realized.

2) An ideal that cannot be realized is no (genuine) ideal at all

3) Democratic socialism  is a genuine ideal.

The above is known in the trade as an antilogism or an inconsistent triad. The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

If you are not willing to accept that the triad is a genuine aporia or insolubilium, then you must reject/modify one of the constituent propositions.   I don't believe that (2), an analog of the 'Ought implies Can' principle, can be reasonably rejected. So we either reject (1) or (3). I reject (3). The democratic socialist would have to reject (1).

Can I refute him? No. Can he refute me? No. And yet we must act. So I battle socialism and stand with Donald Trump:

America will never be a socialist country!

Watch the video and check out the expression on Bernie Sanders' face. And how about the tribal females all in white?

On Ceasing to Exist: An Aporetic Tetrad

John F. Kennedy ceased to exist in November of 1963.  (Assume no immortality of the soul.) But when a thing ceases to exist, it does not cease to be an object of reference or a subject of predicates. If this were not the case, then it would not be true to say of JFK that he is dead. But it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK is dead.  Equivalently, 'dead' is now true of JFK.  But this is puzzling: How can a predicate be true of a thing if the thing does not exist?  After a thing ceases to exist it is no longer around to support any predicates. What no longer exists, does not still exist: it does not exist.

I am of the metaphilosophical opinion  that the canonical form of a philosophical problem is the aporetic polyad. Here is our puzzle rigorously set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

1) Datum: There are  predicates that are true of things that no longer exist, e.g., 'dead' and 'famous' and 'fondly remembered' are true of JFK.

2) Veritas sequitur esse: If a predicate is true of an item x, then x exists.

3) Presentism: For any x, x exists iff x is temporally present.

4) The Dead: For any x, if x is dead, then x is temporally non-present.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  To solve the tetrad, then, we must reject one of the propositions. It can't be (1) since (1) is a datum. And it can't be (4) since it, on the mortalist assumption, is obviously true. (To avoid the mortalist assumption, change the example to an inanimate object.) Of course, if an animal dies, its corpse typically remains present for a time; but an animal and its corpse are not the same. An animal can die; a corpse cannot die because a corpse was never alive.

One cannot plausibly reject (2) either. To reject (2) is to maintain that a predicate can be true of a thing whether or not the thing exists. This is highly counter-intuitive, to put it mildly.  Suppose it is true that Peter smokes.  Then 'smokes' is true of Peter.  It follows that Peter exists.  It seems we should say the same about Kennedy. It is true that Kennedy is dead. So 'dead' is true of Kennedy, whence it follows that Kennedy exists. Of course, he does not exist at present. But if he didn't exist at all, then it could not be true that Kennedy is dead, famous, veridically remembered, and so on.  Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications.

There remains the Anti-Presentist Solution.  Deny (3) by maintaining that it is not only present items that exist. One way of doing this by embracing so-called eternalism, the view that past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

But what is it for a temporal item, an item in time, to exist tenselessly?  The number 7 and the proposition 7 is prime exist 'outside of time.'  They exist timelessly.  If the number and the proposition are indeed timeless or atemporal items, then it it makes clear sense to say that 7 tenselessly exists and that 7 is prime both tenseless exists and is tenselessly true.  But it is not clear what it could mean to say that an item in time such as JFK exists tenselessly or is tenselessly dead or famous, etc.

The tenseless existence of a temporal item is not timeless existence. Nor is tenseless existence the same as  omnitemporal/sempiternal existence: Kennedy does not exist at all times.  He existed in time for a short interval of time.  So what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly?  Try this:

X exists tenselessly iff X either existed or exists (present tense) or will exist.

But this doesn't help. The disjunction on the right-hand side of the biconditional, with 'Kennedy' substituted for 'X' is true only because the past-tensed 'Kennedy existed' is true. We still have no idea  what it is for a temporal item to exist or have properties tenselessly.  Presumably, 'Kennedy exists tenselessly' says more than what the tensed disjunction says. But what is this more?

Interim Conclusion.  If we can't find a way to make sense of tenseless existence, then we won't be able to reject (3) and we will be stuck with our quartet of inconsistent plausibilities.  More later.

Excluded Middle, Presentism, Truth-Maker: An Aporetic Triad

Suppose we acquiesce in the conflation of Excluded Middle and Bivalence.  The conflation is not unreasonable.  Now try this trio on for size:

Excluded Middle: Every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false.
Presentism: Only what exists at present, exists.
Truth-Maker: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Why inconsistent?

I will die. This future-tensed sentence is true now. It is true that I will die. Is there something existing at present that could serve as truth-maker? Arguably yes, my being mortal. I am now mortal, and my present mortality suffices for the truth of 'I will die.' Something similar holds for my coat. It is true now that it will cease to exist.  While it is inevitable that I will die and that my coat will cease to exist, it is not inevitable that my coat will be burnt up (wholly consumed by fire).  For there are other ways for it to cease to exist, by being cut to pieces, for example, or by just wearing out.

By 'future contingent,' I mean a presently true future-tensed contingent proposition.  The following seems to be a clear example: BV's coat will sometime in the future cease to exist by being wholly consumed in a fire. To save keystrokes: My coat will be burnt up.

By Excluded Middle, either my coat will be burnt up or my coat will not be burnt up. One of these propositions must be true, and whichever one it is, it is true now. Suppose it is true now that my  coat will be burnt up. There  is nothing existing at present that could serve as truth-maker for this contingent truth.  And given Presentism, there is nothing existing at all that could serve as truth-maker.  For on Presentism, only what exists now, exists full stop.  The first two limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the third, Truth-Maker.  The triad is therefore inconsistent.

So one of the limbs must be rejected. Which one?

An Objection

You say that nothing that now exists could serve as the truth-maker of the presently true future-tensed  contingent proposition BV's coat will be burnt up. I disagree.  If determinism is true, then the present state of the world together with the laws of nature necessitates every later state.   Assuming the truth of the proposition in question, there is a later state of the world in which your shabby coat is burnt up. The truth-maker of the future contingent proposition would then be the present state of the world plus the laws of nature.  So if determinism is true, your triad is consistent, contrary to what you maintain, and we will not be forced to give up one of the very plausible constituent propositions.

Question: Is there a plausible reply to this objection? No. I'll explain why later.

Another Round on (Semantic) Presupposition: An Inconsistent Pentad

Ed writes,

p = *Socrates has just stopped talking*

q  = *Socrates was talking just now*

1. p presupposes q

2. If p presupposes q, then (p or not-p) entails q

3. It is necessary that p or not-p

4. It is necessary that q

5. It is not necessary that Socrates was talking just now

We agree with (1) in some sense. In (2), we try to sharpen that sense, i.e. of ‘presupposition’. (3) is a logical truth. So is (4): if the antecedent is necessary, so is the consequent. (5) is obviously true (unless we hold the necessity of the past, but the example could be changed with the same problematic result).  

My feeling is that we are not being sharp enough about ‘presupposition’. What exactly is it?

.....................................................

The above propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  But there is a philosophical problem only if all of the propositions are plausible. (2), however, is not at all plausible and seems to reflect a blunder on Ed' s part.  The idea behind semantic presupposition is that if p presupposes q, then both p and its negation entail q. What Ed should have written is

       2* If p presupposes q, and p is true, then p entails q, and if p is false, then not-p entails q.

For example, if I stop talking at time t, then my stopping entails my talking immediately before t; if I keep talking at t, then that also entails my talking immediately before t.  The proposition presupposed is the same whether I stop talking or keep talking.

Clearly (2) and (2*) are different propositions. So I solve the pentad by rejecting (2) and its consequences.

If Nothing Exists, is it True that Nothing Exists? Well Yes, but Then . . .

Here is a puzzle for London Ed and anyone else who finds it interesting. It is very simple, an aporetic dyad.

To warm up, note that if snow is white, then it is true that snow is white.  This seems quite unexceptionable, a nice, solid, datanic starting point. It generalizes, of course: for any proposition p, if p, then it is true that p.  Now the connection between antecedent and consequent is so tight that we are loathe to say that it just happens to hold.  It holds of necessity.  So here is the first limb of our aporetic dyad:

a) Necessarily, for any p, if p, then it is true that p.

Equivalently: there is no possible world in which both p and it is not true that p.  For example, there is no possible world in which both 7 + 5 = 12 and it is not true that 7 + 5 = 12.

Intuitively, though, there might have been nothing at all.  Is it not possible that nothing exists? Things exist, of course. But might it not be that everything that exists exists contingently? If so, then there might never have existed anything. Our second limb, then, is this:

b) Possibly, nothing exists.

Equivalently: There is at least one possible world in which nothing exists.

Both limbs of the dyad are plausible, but they can't both be true.  To see this, substitute 'nothing exists' for 'p' in (a) and drop the universal quantifier and the modal operator. This yields:

c) If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists.

But (c) can't be true in every world given (b).  For if (c) is true, then something does exist, namely, the truth (true proposition) that nothing exists. But (c) is true in every world given (a).

Therefore (a) and (b) cannot both be true: the dyad is logically inconsistent.

So something has to give, assuming we are not willing to accept that the dyad is an aporia in the strict sense, a conceptual impasse that stops the discursive intellect dead in its tracks.  A-poria: no way.  Do we reject (a) or do we reject (b)? If a solution is possible, then I am inclined to reject (b).

But then I must affirm its negation:

d) Necessarily, something (or other) exists.

(Note that if it is necessary that something exist, it does not follow that some one thing necessarily exists. If there is no possible world in which nothing exists, it does not follow that there is some one thing that exists in every world.)

Yikes! Have I just proven by a priori reasoning the necessary existence of something or other outside the mind?  Of course, I have not proven the necessary existence of God; I may have proven only the necessary existence of those abstract objects called propositions.

(Father Parmenides, with open arms, welcomes home his prodigal son?)

Can One Reasonably Hold that Abortion is Murder but Ought to be Legal?

Victor Reppert poses the following important question on his Facebook page:

What, if anything, is wrong with holding, at the same time that a) Abortion is murder, and b) abortion should be legal?

It's not a logical contradiction, is it? Is it merely counterintuitive? Is it un-Christian?

One way of reaching this position might be to hold that, given a metaphysical or religious perspective, you view abortion as murder, but, living in a society where large segments of the population don't share that perspective, you don't think it reasonable to pass laws imposing that view on the general public.

The propositions in question are not logically contradictory. But one can generate a logical inconsistency by adding an eminently plausible  proposition.  Consider the following antilogism:

a) Abortion is murder
b) Abortion should be legal
c) Murder should be illegal.

The triad is logically inconsistent: the constituent propositions cannot all be true.  

Now (c) is the least rejectable (the least rejection-worthy) of the three propositions. For if the law does not proscribe murder, what would it proscribe? The purpose of the State, at a bare minimum, is to protect life, liberty, and property. (Call it the Lockean triad.) If the State is morally justified, then its passing and enforcing of laws is morally justified. Among these laws are laws pertaining to the killing of human beings. Without going any deeper into it, I will just assert what most of us will accept, namely, that the intentional killing of innocent human being is morally wrong and therefore ought to be made illegal by a morally justified State.

In short, we ought not reject (c). Therefore, one who accepts (a) ought to reject (b). Transforming the antilogism into a syllogism, we get:

Murder should be illegal
Abortion is murder
Ergo
Abortion should be illegal.

Reppert ought to be persuaded by this argument since he accepts the minor and I have given a powerful argument for the major.

Reppert asks whether it is reasonable to pass laws against abortion in a society in which large segments of the population do not oppose abortion.  Well, was it reasonable to pass laws against slavery in a society in which large segments of the population did not oppose slavery?

Suppose we become even more morally depraved than we are now. We get to the point where the majority considers infanticide  morally acceptable. Would it be reasonable to do away with the laws proscribing it?  Or the laws proscribing child pornography? Or rape laws? Should the law merely reflect the going moral sentiment no matter how decadent it becomes?

I'll leave you with these questions.

God, Simplicity, Freedom, and Two Senses of 'Contingency'

Fr. Aidan Kimel wants me to comment on his recent series of posts about divine simplicity, freedom, and the contingency of creation. In the third of his entries, he provides the following quotation:

As Matthew Levering puts it: “God could be God without creatures, and so his willing of creatures cannot have the absolute necessity that his willing of himself has” (Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, p. 103). That is the fact of the case, as it were. Granted the making of the world by a simple, immutable, and eternal Deity, we have no choice but to accept the apparent aporia:

Indeed, there is no ‘moment’ in God’s eternity in which he does not will all that he wills; there is no God ‘prior’ to God’s will to create. In this sense, God can be said to will necessarily everything that he wills. The potency or possibility stems not from God’s will, but from the contingent nature of the finite things willed; they do not and cannot determine the divine will. (Levering, p. 103)

The problem is to understand how the following  propositions can all be true:

1) There is no absolute necessity that God create: "God could be God without creatures."

2) God created (better: ongoingly creates and sustains) the universe we inhabit.

3) God, being simple or metaphysically incomposite, is devoid of potency-act composition and unexercised powers: God is pure act.

4) The universe we inhabit, and indeed any universe God creates, is modally contingent: it does not exist of metaphysical necessity.

The problem, in brief, is to understand how a universe that is the product of a divine act of willing that is necessary (given God's simplicity) can yet be contingent. Levering's answer does not help at all. In fact, he seems to be confusing two senses of contingency when he says that "the contingent nature of the finite things willed" does not determine the divine will.  That's right, it doesn't and for the simple reason that the finite things willed depend entirely on the divine will and are in this sense contingent upon the divine will; but this is not the relevant sense of 'contingency.' Let me explain.

In the modal sense, a contingent item is one that is possible to be and possible not to be, as Aquinas says somewhere. In 'possible worlds' jargon, x is modally contingent =_df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  

In the dependency sense, x is dependently contingent =_df there is  some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x's existence. 

It is important to see that an item can be (a) modally contingent without being dependently contingent, and (b) dependently contingent without being modally contingent.

Ad (a). If the universe is a brute fact, as Russell (in effect) stated in his famous BBC debate with Copleston, then the universe exists, exists modally contingently, but has no cause or explanation of its existence.  If the universe is a brute fact, then of course it does not depend on God for its existence.  Its existence is a factum brutum without cause or explanation. It is contingent, but not contingent upon anything. It is modally but not dependently contingent.

Ad (b). Not all necessary beings are "created equal."  That is because one of them, God, is not created at all. The others are creatures, at least for Aquinas. (A creature is anything that is created by God.) The number 7 serves as an example, as does the proposition that 7 is prime.  That proposition is a necessary being. (If it weren't it could not be necessarily true.)  But it has its necessity "from another," namely, from God, whereas God has his necessity "from himself."  The doctor angelicus himself makes this distinction.

These so-called 'abstract objects' -- not the best terminology but the going terminology -- are creatures, and, insofar forth, dependent on God, and therefore contingent upon God, and therefore (by my above definition), dependently contingent. They are dependently contingent but modally necessary. 

Now let's apply the distinction to our problem. The problem, again, is this: How can the product of a necessary creating be contingent? One might think to solve the problem as follows.  God necessarily creates, but what he creates is nonetheless contingent because  what he creates is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment. But this is no solution because it involves an equivocation on 'contingent.'

The problem is: How can the product of a modally necessary creating be modally contingent? 

Think of it this way. (I assume that the reader is en rapport with 'possible worlds' talk.) If God is simple, and he creates U in one world, then he creates U in all worlds. But then U exists in every world, in which case U is necessary. But U is contingent, hence not necessary. Therefore, either God does not exist or God is not simple, or U is not a divine creation.  

Fr. Kimel wanted me to comment on his posts. One comment is that they are top-heavy with quotations.  Quote less, argue and analyze more.

Now I would like the good padre to tell me whether he agrees with me.  I think he just might inasmuch as he speaks of an aporia.  We have good reasons to believe that God is simple, and we have good reasons to believe that the created universe is modally contingent. Suppose both propositions are true. Then they must be logically consistent.  But we cannot understand how they could both be true. So what do we do?

One way out is to jettison the divine simplicity. (But then we end having to say that God is a being among beings and neither I nor Kimel will countenance that, and for good reasons.) A second way is by denying that the created universe is contingent, either by maintaining that it is necessary or by denying that there is any real modality, that all (non-deontic) modality is epistemic.  The second way leads to a load of difficulties.

A third way is by arguing that there is no inconsistency. But I have argued that there is both above and in other recent posts dealing with the dreaded 'modal collapse.'  And it seems to me that my argumentation is cogent.

Well suppose it is. And suppose that the relevant propositions are all true. There is yet another way out. We can go mysterian.  The problem is a genuine aporia. It is insoluble by us. God is simple; he freely created our universe; it is modally contingent.  How is this possible? The answer is beyond our ken. It is a mystery.

Now if Fr. Kimel is maintaining something like this, then we agree.

Corrigendum (9/25). A reader points out, correctly, that in the above graphic the gentleman on the left is not Fr. Copleston, but A. J. Ayer.

Millianism and Presentism: An Aporetic Pentad

A Millian about proper names holds that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. Thus the meaning of 'Socrates' is Socrates.  The meaning just is the denotatum. Fregean sense and reasonable facsimiles thereof  play no role in reference. If so, vacuous names, names without denotata, are meaningless.

Presentism, roughly, is the claim that present items alone exist. This implies that no past or future items exist in the sense of 'exists' that the presentist shares with the eternalist who maintains that past, present, and future individuals all exist.  What exactly this sense is is a nut we will leave for later cracking. 

Now Socrates is a wholly past individual: he existed, but he does presently exist. It follows on presentism that Socrates does not exist at all. The point is not the tautology that Socrates, who is wholly past, does not exist at present. The point is that our man does not exist, period: he is now nothing at all.  

We now have the makings of an aporetic pentad:

1) 'Socrates' has meaning. (Moorean fact)

2) The meaning of a proper name is its referent.  (Millian thesis)

3) If a name refers to x, then x exists.  (Plausible assumption)

4) 'Socrates' refers to a wholly past individual. (Moorean fact)

5) There are no past individuals. (Presentism)

It is easy to see that the pentad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot all be true. Which should we reject?

Only three of the propositions are candidates for rejection: (2), (3), (5).   Of these three, (3) is the least rejectable, (5) is the second least rejectable, and (2) the most rejectable.

So I solve the pentad by rejecting the Millian thesis about proper names.

You might budge me from my position if you can give me a powerful argument for the Millian thesis.

Here, then, we have an 'aporetic' polyad that is not a genuine aporia. It is soluble and I just solved it.

The Recalcitrant Ostrich will probably disagree.

Presentism, Truthmakers, and Ex-Concrete Objects: Some Questions for Francesco Orilia

 Here is an interesting little antilogism to break our heads against:

A. Presentism: Only what exists at present, exists.

B. Datum: There are past-tensed truths.

C. Truthmaker Principle: If p is a contingent truth, then there is a truthmaker T such that (i) T makes true p, and (ii) T exists when p is true.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  Any two of  the propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. 

For example, it is true, and true now, that Kerouac wrote On the Road. This truth is both past-tensed and contingent.  So, by (C),  this truth has a truthmaker that now exists. A plausible truthmaker such as the fact of Kerouac's having written On the Road  will have to have Kerouac himself as a constituent. But Kerouac does not now exist, and if presentism is true, he does not exist at all.  Assuming that a truthmaking fact or state of affairs cannot exist unless all its constituents exist, it follows that there is no present truthmaker of the past-tensed truth in question.  So if (C) is true, then (A) is false: it cannot be the case that only what exists now, exists.  I will assume for the space of this entry that (B) cannot be reasonably denied.

So one way to solve the antilogism is by rejecting presentism. Presentists will be loathe to do this, of course, and will try to find surrogate items to serve as constituents of present truthmakers.

Different sorts of surrogate items have been proposed. I will consider the surrogate or proxy favored by Francesco Orilia in his rich and penetrating "Moderate Presentism," Philosophical Studies, March 2016. (He would not call it a surrogate or a proxy, but that is what I think it is.)

Orilia's favored surrogates are ex-concrete objects. Consider the sentence

1) Garibaldi was awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m.

This sentence is past-tensed, and if true, then contingently true. So, if true, it needs a truthmaker. We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs -- Orilia uses these terms interchangeably, see p. 598, n. 1) - - consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m.  But of course Orilia does not mean that concrete Garibaldi himself presently exemplifies the property in question; he means that the ex-concrete object Garibaldi presently exemplifies it.  After all, concrete Garibaldi is long gone.

What is an ex-concrete object?

The emperor Trajan is a merely past object (particular). On typical (as opposed to moderate) presentism, his being past implies that he does not exist at all. For Orilia, however, "merely past objects have not really ceased to exist, but have rather become ex-concrete." (593) The idea seems to be that they continue to exist, but with an altered categorial status. Merely past objects were concrete  but are now ex-concrete, where this means that they are "neither abstract nor concrete." (593, quotation from T. Williamson.)

So when Trajan became wholly past, he yet continued to exist as an ex-concrete object. Hence Trajan still exists -- as an ex-concrete object.  And the same goes for Garibaldi. Since the statesman still exists as ex-concrete he is available now to exemplify such properties as the property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m. His exemplification of this property constitutes a present event or state of affairs that can serve as the truthmaker for (1).

Can an item change its categorial status?

Orilia is well aware that there is something dubious about the supposition that an item can change or lose its categorial status. For it seems as clear as anything that categorial features are essentially had by the items that have them. Numbers, sets, and (Fregean) propositions are candidate abstracta. There is little or no sense to the notion that the number 9, say, could become concrete or ex-abstract. For the number 9, if abstract, is abstract in every possible world, assuming, plausibly, that numbers are necessary beings. Similarly, it is difficult to understand how a  statue, say, if destroyed could could continue to exist as an ex-concrete object. It is not even clear what this means.

Pushing further

Orilia tells us that "backward singular terms should be taken at face value as referring to the very same objects they used to refer [to] when they were not, so to speak, backward." (593, emphasis added.)   So uses of 'Garibaldi' now refer to the very same object that uses of the name refereed to when Garibaldi was alive. But now the referent is an ex-concrete object whereas then it was a concrete object. So I ask: how can concrete Garibaldi be the same as ex-concrete Garibaldi when they differ property-wise? I now invoke the contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. 

If x, y differ property-wise, then they differ numerically; concrete Garibaldi and ex-concrete Garibaldi differ property-wise in that the former but not the latter is concrete; ergo, they cannot be numerically the same (one and the same).  If so, then the temporally forward and backward uses of singular terms such as "Garibaldi' cannot refer to the same object, contra what Orilia says.

Orilia will readily grant me that an haecceity of a wholly past concrete object, assuming there are haecceities,  is a presently existing surrogate of the individual. My question to him is: why is this not also the case for ex-concrete objects? Of course, they are not haecceities. But they too 'go proxy' in the present for past objects such as Garibaldi and Leopardi, and they too are  distinct from full-fledged concrete objects.

It seems to me that Orilia's position embodies a certain tension.  His moderate presentism denies that there are past events or states of affairs, in line with standard or typical presentism, but allows that there are past objects (589).  But these past objects are ex-concrete. The latter, then, are not past objects strictly speaking (as they would be on a B-theory) but proxies for past objects. So there may be some waffling here. Connected with this is the fact that it is not clear how concrete Garibaldi, say, relates to ex-concrete Garibaldi. We are told in effect that they are the same, but they cannot be the same. Their relation wants clarification.

Are ex-concrete objects subject to the 'aboutness worry'?

If I am sad that my classmate Janet Johnston has died and is no longer with us, presumably it is the loss of Janet herself that saddens me. There is no comfort in the thought that ex-concrete Janet is still 'with us,' any more than there would be at the thought that her haecceity, now unexemplified, is still 'with us.'

Truthmaking troubles

Yesterday I drank some Campari. What makes this past-tensed, contingent truth true?  Note the difference between:

2) BV's having yesterday drunk Campari (A case of a present object's past exemplification of an untensed property) 

and

3) BV's being such that he drank Campari yesterday (A case of a present object's present exemplification of a past-tensed property.)

(2) is a past event or state of affairs, while (3) is a present event or state of affairs. Since Orilia's moderate presentism rejects past (and future) events, he must take (3) to be the truthmaker of the truth that yesterday I drank some Campari. But it seems to me that the truthmaker of 'Yesterday I drank some Campari' is not (3), but (2).  This sentence is true because yesterday I exemplified the untensed property of drinking Campari, not because today I exemplify the past-tensed property of having drunk Campari yesterday. Why? Well, I can have the past-tensed property today only because I had the untensed property yesterday.  The latter is parasitic upon the former. 

The same problem arises for Orilia's sentence (1). We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Ex-concrete Garibaldi cannot now have the time-indexed past tense property unless concrete Garibaldi had the untensed property of being awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Or so it seems to me.

To conclude, I am not convinced that Orilia (the man in the middle, below) has provided us with truthmakers for past-tensed truths.

Image credit: Francesca Muccini, 5 June 2018, Recanati, Italy.  The philosopher to the left of Francesco is Mark Anderson, Francesca's husband.

 

Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality

Reader R. B. writes:

I have been enjoying your posts about immigration because they are insightful. I'm on the border (haha) about the issue for the most part. I work with illegals from Mexico (in a restaurant) so you can imagine how that plays into my thinking. The problem as I see it is this: it is extremely difficult to gain citizenship in America and extremely expensive; most immigrants do not have the money and are trying to escape their shitty situation in Mexico. They are left with a nasty choice of returning to Mexico or purchasing an illegal visa (which the majority of the time is a scam for a large amount of their money). I am a Christian so I think it's important to think about how God treats the other--the outcast, the poor, and the immigrant. 

 

A professor friend has written an interesting paper on the subject, entitled "Love and Borders."  If you have time let me know what you think. 

My overall view is as follows.  Maybe later I'll discuss the details of the paper in question.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

The article referenced above is Thomas M. Crisp, Love and Borders. 

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' -- the secularist will assure us -- there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity. Put him under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say you are talking nonsense.  You are creating grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble by us.

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

Is a Dead Man Mortal?

An Inconsistent Tetrad

a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.

If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.

The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.

Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?

First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?

Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?

The Concept of 'Standoff' in Philosophy

The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:

1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time. 

2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.

Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true.  Each entails the negation of the other.  And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.

If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other,  then I say that A and B are in a standoff.

On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.

So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical. 

This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto,  but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question.  I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues.  There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material. 

A second example. 

3. God by his very nature as divine  is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.

4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.

By 'concrete' I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true.  And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being.  (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility -- if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility -- is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us.  (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects.  It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity.  It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being.  If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.  

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be.  Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum.  Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).

Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads.  The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.

The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical

I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy.  But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs.  These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible  need to be secure in their beliefs.  They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency.  Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.

As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic.  A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.

And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it.  To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.

As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly,  the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having. 

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If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator? A Good Koan?

Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

Herewith, the eighth installment  in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the  juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death."  This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.

Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.

If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything.  But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him.  A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.

Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.

The Existence Requirement

One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs?  The Existence Requirement, then, is this:

ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)

It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views.  But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.

The Aporetics of Being Dead

I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:

1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.

2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.

3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.

The limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.

How do we solve this bad boy?  Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?

The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar

. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)

Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way. 

I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence? 

The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term.  If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.

The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.

We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person.  This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many.  On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity.  Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.

Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116)  The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)

Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus. 

What say you, Vlastimil?

________________

*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico.  While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad. 

Related articles

David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous <i>New Criterion</i> Attack

Benatar, Death, and Deprivation

Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II

The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian 'Don't Care'

The Puzzle of Dion and Theon

This puzzle, similar to Peter Geach's Tibbles the Cat in content, is unlike it in vintage. Its origin is attributed by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C. - 45 A. D.) to Chrysippus the Stoic (c. 280 B.C. - c. 206 B. C.) What follows is my take on the puzzle. I draw heavily upon Michael B. Burke, "Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle," The Journal of Philosophy, 1994, pp. 129-139.

Yesterday, Dion was a whole man, but today he had his left foot successfully amputated. Yesterday, 'Theon' was introduced as a name for that proper part of Dion that consisted of the whole of Dion except his left foot. (To keep the formulation of the puzzle simple, let us assume that dualism is false and that Dion is just a living human organism.) It is clear that yesterday Dion and Theon were numerically distinct individuals, the reason being that yesterday Theon was a proper part of Dion.  (By definition of 'proper part,' if x is a proper part of y, then x is not identical to y.  And if x and y are not identical, then x and y are distinct.  Two items can be distinct without being wholly distinct.)  Now the question is which of the following is true today, after the amputation:

 

 

 

A. Both Dion and Theon exist.
B. Neither Dion nor Theon exist.
C. Dion exists but Theon does not.
D. Theon exists but Dion does not.

The problem is to justify one of these answers. If none of the answers can be rationally justified, then we have a tetralemma which might be taken to suggest that there is something deeply problematic about our ordinary talk and thought about material particulars and their persistence. Given my conception of philosophy as at once both aporetic and revisionist, this would be a welcome result if I could support it. 

Ad (A). Because Dion and Theon both existed yesterday, you might think they both exist today.  There is, however,  a reason to think that it cannot be true that both Dion and Theon exist today after the amputation. The reason is that it is impossible both that (i) Dion and Theon be numerically distinct and that (ii) Dion and Theon occupy exactly the same place and be composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way, as is the case today after the amputation.

Could we say that Dion and Theon both survived the operation but are now one and the same? This is impossible given the Indiscernibility of Identicals. For today, after the operation, something is true of Dion which is not true of Theon, namely, that he, Dion, once had two feet. So Dion and Theon cannot be or have become identical.

Ad (B). This option is so counterintuitive that no one has maintained it.

Ad (C). It seem obvious that Dion survives the amputation. But what about Theon? Can we say that Theon ceases to exist after the amputation? Michael Burke (p. 134 ff.) thinks we can. He gives something like the following argument:

1. The concept of a person is maximal: the proper parts of persons are not themselves persons.
Therefore
2. Theon before the amputation was not a person.
3. Persons are essentially persons, and hence nonpersons are essentially nonpersons.
Therefore
4. Theon before the amputation was essentially a nonperson.
Therefore
5. Theon could not have survived a change that would have made it, if it survived, a person.
6. The amputation of Dion's left foot is a change that would have made Theon, if it survived, a person.
Therefore
7. Theon did not survive the amputation of Dion's left foot, and so does not exist after the amputation.

Ad (D). If one adopts mereological essentialism, then one can say that Theon survives but Dion does not. Mereological essentialism is the doctrine that wholes have their parts essentially. Accordingly, for any whole W and part x of W, if x is a part of W, then necessarily x is a part of W. This implies that no whole can survive the gain or loss of a part. If so, then Dion ceases to exist when he loses his left foot. But Theon continues to exist. Unfortunately, mereological essentialism applied to ordinary continuants such as cats and cabbages and cars is highly counterintuitive. My car does not cease to exist when the antenna is snapped off.

None of the solutions is satisfying as far as I can see. One might conclude that reason in us is weak and dialectical in Kant's sense.

Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

 This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation.

Recapitulation

Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item that is not immanent to consciousness, whether human or divine,  but exists on its own. And by 'consciousness' in this discussion I mean intentional (object-directed) consciousness. 

(I deny that every instance of consciousness is a consciousness of something: there are, I claim in agreement with Searle, non-intentional conscious states, states not directed upon an object.   See Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States and the  good ComBox discussion to which Harry Binswanger and David Gordon contribute. Objectivist Binswanger disagrees with Searle and me. And even if every consciousness is a consciousness of something, it does not follow that every consciousness is a conscious of something that exists.)

So God creates independent reals. What he creates exists on its own, independently, an sich. At the same time, however, what he creates he sustains moment-by-moment. At every moment of its existence the creature depends on the Creator for the whole of its Being, for its existence, its nature, as well as for such  transcendental determinations as its intelligibility and goodness.  Ens et verum convertuntur is grounded in God's being the ultimate source of all truth,and ens et bonum convertuntur is grounded in God's being The Good itself and thus the ultimate source of all goodness in creatures.

Creatures, then, depend for their whole Being on the Creator according to the classical conception of divine creation that involves both an original bringing-into-existence (creatio originans) and an ongoing conservation of what has been brought into existence (creatio continuans). And yet creatures exist on their own, independently. As I emphasized in the earlier post, finite persons are the prime examples of this independence. And yet how is such independence possible given divine conservation? It appears to issue in a contradiction: the creature exists both independently and dependently.

Does it follow that a creator God does not exist? (It would take a separate post to show that a God worth his salt cannot be conceived along deistic lines.)

Rand to the Rescue?

Thinking about this I recalled Ayn Rand and her notorious axiom, "Existence exists." On a charitable reading it is not the tautology that whatever exists, exists, but expresses an extreme metaphysical realism: whatever exists exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  But then it follows that God cannot exist, and our problem dissolves. Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

Is there any good reason not to accept the above argument?  

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