Maverick Philosopher

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

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental realism. 

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

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where  the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too.  What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the a priori categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.  Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos.  Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game.  As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity.  The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to  chaos. And that is plainly absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity.  For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung)  humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.'   For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.)  For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals.  It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites.  It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object.   Consciousness is subject-less.  So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects.  It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.  The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable. 

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I)  with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

Subject --------------------> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely the noema of that very noesis.  Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

------------------------------->objects.

For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on.  Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind.  The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects.  (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing,  is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone or something.  It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.'  Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear.  This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's mind merely apparent.  (Via private communication.) It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism.  It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution. 

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoché  has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoché and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoché.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1.  Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2.  Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3.  Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness. 

4.  Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to.  For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things.  Butchvarov's  theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633)  There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and  Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way."  (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego.  Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness.  And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later.  

Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?

1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are optimal for veridical perception.  I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties.  Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree, let alone deny its existence, the tree is not given as existing.  It is given as green, as blooming, etc., but not as existing. I see the green of the tree, but I don't see the existence of the tree.  If existence is a property of the tree, it is not an observable property thereof.  Whatever existence is, it is not phenomenologically accessible or empirically detectable. And yet the tree exists. We might be tempted to reason as follows:

a) The tree is not exhausted by its quiddity: it is not a mere what, but an existing what.
b) The existing/existence does not appear: only quidditative properties appear.

Therefore

c) The existing/existence of the tree is hidden.

2) Should we conclude that the existing of things is mysterious or hidden, an occult depth dimension beyond our phenomenological ken? P. Butchvarov and others would answer in the negative. And presumably anyone phenomenologically inclined would have to agree. Now there is a class of views according to which the existence of a concrete particular such as a tree is a sort of coherence of the facets, aspects, guises, noemata, intentional objects -- pick your term -- that are presented to us directly and in their turn present the thing itself.  Following Butchvarov I will use 'object' and distinguish objects from entities. The tree itself is an entity; the various facets, aspects, guises, noemata, are objects.

For example, I am seated on my porch looking at the tree.  I cannot see the whole of it, and I don't see all of the properties of the portions I do see. Seated, I enjoy a visual perception the accusative of which is (incomplete) object O1.  When I stand up, still looking at the tree, I am presented with a slightly different (incomplete) object, O2.  Advancing toward the tree, a series of objects come into view one after another.  (This makes it sound as if  the series is discrete when it is actually continuous.) Arriving at the tree, I put my hands around the trunk. The resulting object is richer than the others by the addition of tactile data, but still incomplete and therefore not identical to the completely determinate entity. But these objects all cohere and 'consubstantiate' (Castaneda) and are of one and the same entity. In their mutual cohesion, they manifest one and the same entity. They present the same infinitely-propertied entity in a manner suitable to a finite mind.

Butchvarov speaks of the material (not formal) identity of the objects.  On such a scheme the existence of an entity is naturally assayed as the indefinite identifiability of its objects.  Existence is indefinite identifiability. By whom? By the subject in question. We could call this a transcendentally-subjective theory of existence, although that is not what Butch calls it.  We find something very similar in Husserl and Hector-Neri Castaneda. In Husserl, existence is 'constituted in consciousness.' Sein reduces to Seinsinn.

On a scheme like this, existence would not be hidden but would itself be accessible, not as a separate monadic property, but as the ongoing relational coherence of objects, noemata, guises, aspects or whatever you want to call them. It would seem that the phenomenologically inclined, those who agree with Heidegger that ontology is possible only as phenomenology, would have to subscribe to some such theory of existence. 

3) On the above approach one could 'bracket' the existence in itself of the tree entity and still have available existence as indefinite identifiability.  But does this 'bracketing' (Husserl's Einklammerung) merely put existence in itself out of play or does it cancel it?I suspect it is the latter.

Let's be clear about the two senses of 'exists.' 

In the phenomenological sense, existence is the mutual cohesion of Butchvarov's objects, Castaneda's guises, Husserl's noemata.  Existence is thus accessible from the first-person point of view. It is in the open and not hidden. The question, How do I know that the tree exists? has a ready answer. I know that the tree exists from the manifest coherence of its objects, their indefinite identifiability in Butchvarov's sense.  

In the second sense, existence is such that what exists exists independently of (finite) consciousness and its synthetic activities. In this second  'realist' sense of 'exists,' things could exist even in the absence of conscious beings. Existence in this second sense is that which makes existents exist outside of their causes and outside the mind and outside of language. In the former 'idealist' sense of 'exist,' nothing could exist in the absence of consciousness. 

4) One conclusion:  if you deny that existence is hidden, then it looks like you will have to embrace some type of idealism, with its attendant problems.

5) How might existence be hidden? Suppose that everything  apart from God is kept in existence by ongoing divine creative activity. If so, each thing apart from God is an effect of the divine cause.  Its being the effect of a hidden Causa Prima is itself hidden.  My tree's being maintained in existence outside of its (secondary) causes and outside the mind  is not manifest to us. Perceiving the tree, I cannot 'read off' its createdness.  Its createdness is its existence and both are hidden.

6) My final conclusion is that no classical theist can adopt a phenomenological theory of existence.

Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

Is 'Justified Belief' a Solecism?

Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 33:

As used in epistemology, "justified" is a technical term, of obscure meaning and uncertain reference, indeed often explicitly introduced as a primitive.  In everyday talk, it is a deontic term, usually a synonym of 'just' or 'right,' and thus 'justified belief' is a solecism.  For it is actions that are justified or unjustified, and beliefs are not actions.

The argument is this, assuming that moral justification is in question:

a. Actions alone are morally either justified or unjustified.
b. No belief is an action.
Therefore
c. No belief is morally either justified or unjustified.
Therefore
d. 'Morally justified belief' is a solecism.

(b) is not evident.    Aren't some beliefs actions or at least analogous to actions?  I will argue that some beliefs are actions because they come under the direct control of the will.  As coming under the direct control of the will, they are morally evaluable.

1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory?  Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?

2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control.  If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.

3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:

Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control.
Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.

Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.

4.  I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.

a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything.  One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and  no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.

b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.

c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.

Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)

This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.

So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases -- those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples -- the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.

If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.

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Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory?  Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?

2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control.  If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.

3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:

Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control.
Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.

Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.

4.  I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.

a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything.  One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and  no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.

b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.

c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.

Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)

This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.

So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases -- those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples -- the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.

If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.

Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self

This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633) 

Wittgenstein

As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world.  "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631)  The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book."  The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.

But why not?  Because it doesn't exist, or because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience?  It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."  So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.

From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist.  If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.

As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field.  If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.

The analogy is clear to me.  Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world.  Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)  

Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case."  There is nothing outside it.  And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world.  Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self  and that it is the limit of world.  He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.

What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego.  The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher.  He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them.  According to P. M. S. Hacker,

Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant.  It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)

Spot on.

Butchvarov

Now to Butchvarov.  He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235)  A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)

Here is where I disagree.    While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists,  Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject.  Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self.  For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world.  Its non-appearance is no argument against it.

That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it.  He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world.  It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.  

What I am maintaining, then, in apparent  contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self." 

A Dilemma?

There is a  serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)

Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit?  Can a limit be conscious of anything?  Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic?  How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground?     "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641)  This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation."  Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.  The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world.  The only world for me as subject is the world as object.  As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231)  This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR.  (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through.  Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through.  I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.) 

Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field.  How can my world be mine without this transcendental I?  And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?

Are we headed for a dilemma?  It seems we are.  

1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not.  Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology.  But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.)  While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.

2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism.  It is a vacuous thesis.  For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.

3. If (b), and  antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it.  But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies.  It must be a part of the world.  But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism.  For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)

Therefore

4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent.  It is vacuous if a tautology.  For then it cannot exclude realism.  It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.

What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231)  It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism.  Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all).  But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term.  He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part  

One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing -- but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin  and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism. 

Questions for Professor Butchvarov

1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?

2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?

3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers?  (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)

4.  Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?

5.  Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely? 

6.  Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness.  Will you grant me that the distinction -- the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will -- between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?

7.  If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?

8.  If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?

9.  If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?

To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?

Related articles

A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

The Metaphysical Subject :<i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> 5.63

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

The Proctology of a Pessimist

Kant, Supererogation, and Imperfect Duties

The Metaphysical Subject :Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.63

 

I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field.  I can of course see my eyes via a mirror.  But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes.  The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.

That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes.  They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc.  The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex -- the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing?  In the pupil?  In the retina?  In the optic nerve?  Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain?  In the visual cortex?Where exactly?  Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system?  But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye.  And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items?  But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time?  And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything?  If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point:  the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able.  It is not an object of actual or possible experience.  It is not in the world.  It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye or a relation in which the eye stands or an activity of the eye.  The same goes for the whole visual system.  And yet there is seeing.  There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.  

Who or what does the seeing?  What is the subject of visual consciousness?  Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye?  No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something.  No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."*   We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."  

But then who or what is this I?  It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field.  Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness.  It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.

So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein.  There is a subject, but it is not in the world.  So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world.  'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being.  (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)

But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world.  This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world.  "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1)  It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world.  So all the self can be is the limit of the world.

We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts.  The world is a totality of things or facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively.  So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension).  So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world  as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.  

This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63)

I take it that Tractatus 5.63  is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world.  But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve.  That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.

The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of  the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think.  For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.

This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.

_____________________

*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'"  Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally. 

Related articles

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Just Say 'No' to 'No Self'

Patricia Churchland versus Colin McGinn on Mysterianism

John Searle Interviewed

Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality

Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

Butchvarov on Semirealism about Facts

Facts are the logical objects corresponding to whole declarative sentences, or rather to some of them. When it comes to facts, 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, 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: 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), 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 transcendental or onto-theological, or what have you.

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 concept horse' 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'?

Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality

One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1)  Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong!  Actually, 'posit'  is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:

But saying this  has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else:  it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat.  This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist -- a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix.  Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology.  What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!

Ain't philosophy grand?  One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given. 

What is also striking about the above  passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations.  There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat.   Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.  And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X.  There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.

The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs  realization in some medium.  It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff.  Why can't consciousness of a cat  be nothing more than consciousness of a cat?  Why can't consciousness be exhausted  by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses.  I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it.  That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does.  No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation.  But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.  Consciousness as being-conscioused.  Get it?  If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness.  Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.

Related articles

Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too.  What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity.  For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung)  humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.'   For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.   For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical egos somehow associated with human beings.  It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites.  It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object.   Consciousness is subject-less.  So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects.  It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.  

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I)  with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

Subject --------------------> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely trhe noema of that very noesis.  Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

------------------------------->objects.

For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, other than every object, not in the world, and thus not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects.  (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' inasmuch as it is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone.  It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.'  Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear.  This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's merely apparent.  It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism.  It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoche.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing.  He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1.  Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2.  Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3.  Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness. 

4.  Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to.  For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things.  Butchvarov's  theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633)  There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and  Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way."  (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego.  Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness.  And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later.  It is Saturday night and time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and cue up some oldies. 

Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

I put the following questions to Professor Butchvarov: 

1. Are you troubled by the following apparent contradiction to which you are apparently committed, namely, that consciousness is both nothing and something? This (apparent) contradiction comes out clearly in your 1994 Midwest Studies in Philosophy paper "Direct Realism Without Materialism," p. 10.

2. You say above that your metaphysical picture is compatible with physicalism. How so? Consciousness for you is real, albeit impersonal. Your "direct realist conception of consciousness" (Midwest Studies, p. 9) suggests that there is something physicalism cannot allow, namely, consciousness. After all, your conception of consciousness, while externalist, is not eliminativist: you are surely not maintaining that consciousness just is (identically) its objects.

3. Consciousness in your sense has no subject or subjects. But must it not have a 'site,' i.e., must it not be tied to animal organisms in nature? And what is the nature of this 'tie'? Or does consciousness 'float free' of all organisms and objects generally?

Butchvarov's Replies with My Rejoinders

1. “Consciousness is both nothing and something” is Sartre’s view, which I endorse. It’s no more self-contradictory than Meinong’s “there are objects concerning which it is the case that there are no such objects” or Wittgenstein’s that a sensation “is not a something, but not a nothing either.” They are attempts to convey a radically new thought. Even in everyday life we often hear sentences like “He is and he is not,” “I like it but also I do not.”

BV:  We will agree that Meinong's paradoxical formulation involves no formal contradiction.  He chose to express himself in that way for literary effect.  What he is saying, of course, is that some objects do not exist.  To be precise, he is saying that some objects neither exist, subsist, nor enjoy any mode of Being whatsoever.  Pace van Inwagen and many others who toe the Quinean line,  there is no formal contradiction involved in maintaining that some objects do not exist. The apparent contradiction in Meinong's formulation is shown to be merely apparent by distinguishing two senses of 'there are,' one existentially noncomittal, the other existentially loaded.

What I don't understand, however, is what the Meinong example has to do with Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness.  It is no contradiction to say of the golden mountain that it is something and nothing: we can read this as saying that it is some item but nothing that exists, or subsists for that matter.  It is a contradiction, however, to say of consciousness that it is something and nothing -- unless one can make a distinction, parallel to the distinction made in the Meinongian case -- one that shows that the contradiction is merely apparent. What would that distinction be?

In the everyday cases that Butch cites, it is clear that they can be read as non-contradictory.  But again, what does  this haveto do with Sartre?  Agreed, Sartre is aiming to convey a radically new thought.  But the question is whether it is a contradictory thought. (Side point: a case could be made that the thought is already in Heidegger.)

Consciousness is not nothing, but neither is it a thing. “[Consciousness] ‘exhausts’ itself in its objects, [Sartre] wrote, precisely because it is nothing but the revelation of them: ‘consciousness is outside; there is no ‘within’ of consciousness.’ It has no inhabitants. Whether perceptual or conceptual, consciousness is not a ‘thing.’ One may even go so far as saying that it is nothing. To use a word Heidegger had applied, consciousness is only the ‘lightening’ of its objects, like the coming of dawn, which lightens, reveals, the rocks, bushes, and hills that had been invisible in the darkness of the night, but is not itself an object of sight” (page 204). See also 2 below.

BV:  I agree with this as a description of Sartre's theory.  But it leaves us with the problem. Consciousness, although other than every object and every entity, is not a mere nothing, a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts to borrow a phrase from Heidegger.  Why not?  Well, it is is the 'light' in which objects appear and without which they would not appear. Although this 'light' does not itself appear as an object of sight as Butch well explains, it is not a mere nothing: it is in some sense or other 'real.'  Note also that while Butch is surely right to describe Sartrean consciousness as exhausting itself in its objects, this 'exhaustion thesis' is not an eliminativist claim to the effect that consciousness just is its objects such that there is no distinction at all between consciousness and objects.  There is this distinction and so its terms must be 'real': consciousness on the one hand and its objects on the other.

2. Physicalism denies the existence of mind and consciousness as they are usually understood, and so do I. It asserts that there are only physical things. Consciousness is not nothing, but neither is it a “thing” (see 1). On page 235 I explain: “[C]onsciousness has no intrinsic nature and no “inhabitants,” not even an ego.... there is just the world. Hence, there is some plausibility of the physicalist picture of the world as matter. But, unlike it, ours does not exclude consciousness – it merely does not include it, much as a group portrait of a family usually does not include the photographer” (235).

BV: Butchvarov is telling us here that his picture neither excludes nor includes consciousness.  I am afraid I find this as contradictory as the claim that consciousness is both nothing and not nothing.

3. As I just said, my picture of the world “does not exclude consciousness – it merely does not include it.” I deny that consciousness is a thing in the world, that “the photographer is included in the photo.” This is why I say nothing about its site or ties to animal organisms in nature.

Of course, I do not deny that sometimes I have a headache, that sometimes I am hungry, that usually I remember what I read yesterday, that I need eyeglasses to see better, that what other people say often makes sense to me, etc. In these everyday or scientific contexts we may speak of consciousness as tied to animal organisms, though the word is seldom used. They may involve nonphysical, “mental,” events, but these events would hardly be bits of consciousness rather than just objects of consciousness. Biology, psychology, and linguistics may tell us what they involve. I doubt that philosophers have special knowledge of such essentially empirical matters. But it is exactly in these contexts that to
hold, as only philosophers might, that consciousness shapes or makes the world would be especially absurd.

One of my aims has been to question philosophical claims, especially in ethics and epistemology but also in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, to knowledge of what can only be empirical
matters.

A full answer to this excellent question, however, would require a whole book -- or several books!

BV:  I would insist that it is  legitimate  to ask about the relation of consciousness as Butchvarov conceives it and what goes on in us when we think, perceive, imagine, remember, feel, and so on. Granted, consciousness is not a thing in the world, and so it cannot be identified with or reduced to any events that transpire in human animals or their  brains when they perceive, imagine, remember, and so on.  I also grant that empirical matters should be left to empirical scientists.  But that does not change the fact that consciousness in Butchvarov's Sartrean sense is involved when a man sees a tree or imagines a tree or remembers a tree.  Suppose a man sees a tree.  This cannot be accounted for without referring to consciousness in whose non-physical 'light' the tree appears.  Butchvarov will of course grant this.  He will surely not maintain that the 'lightening' that he mentions above can be accounted for by the empirical sciences of vision.  Consciousness is a transcendental condition of the revelation of objects; as such, it is not something that can itself be investigated objectively by empirical means.

Given all this, is it not legitimate to ask how consciousness, as Butchvarov conceives it, is related to animal organisms, or at least those who we describe in ordinary language as conscious?  Butchvarov maintains that consciousness is subject-less.  But it doesn't follow that we can ignore the question of how consciousness is 'tied to' animal organisms.  

One possible answer is that consciousness is not tied to animal organisms at all: it floats free.  Not a very satisfactory answer!  Where did it come from?  Another answer is that it is an emergent.  Doesn't Sartre speak of the "upsurge" of the For-Itself?  

In any case, I don;t see that this question can be evaded in the way that Butchvarov evades it by reiterating the point that consciousness is not a thing in the world.  I grant that! 

Related articles

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

In his highly  original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015)  Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics.  These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward a long review article I have been commissioned to write for a European journal.

Anthropocentrism in Metaphysics

In metaphysics, anthropocentrism assumes the form of antirealism. Antirealism is the view that the world, insofar as it is knowable, depends on us and our cognitive capacities. (6) Bishop Berkeley aside, metaphysical antirealism has its source and model in Kant's transcendental idealism. Contemporary antirealism is “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189) On Butchvarov's view there can be no return to a pre-Critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. (225) But surely the world cannot depend on us if 'us' refers to human animals. Butchvarov's task, then, is to develop a version of metaphysical antirealism that is free of anthropocentrism. A central question is whether the characteristic antirealist thesis that the world depends on us and our cognitive capacities can be upheld without 'us' being understood in an anthropocentric way. To answer this question is to resolve the Paradox of Antirealism (PA), a paradox that I would maintain is endemic to every form of transcendental philosophy from Kant, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Butchvarov:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

Some will reject the paradox by rejecting its first limb.  But that would be to reject antirealism.  It would be to dissolve the problem rather than solve it.  Let's see if Butchvarov can solve the paradox while upholding antirealism.  But what version of antirealism does Butchvarov espouse?

Butchvarov's Metaphysical Antirealism

Metaphysical antirealism is so-called to distinguish it from antirealism in ethics and in epistemology. It is the view that “The world insofar as it is knowable by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties.” (111) I would have liked to have seen a more careful unpacking of this thesis, but I take the point to be, or at least to imply, the substantive (non-tautological) proposition that the world is not intrinsically knowable as an Aristotelian realist would maintain but knowable only in virtue of certain contributions on our part.  If this is not the point, then it is difficult to see how contemporary antirealism could be “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189)

Metaphysical antirealism divides into cosmological antirealism and ontological antirealism. A cosmological antirealist denies the reality of the world, but needn't deny the reality of the things in the world. Note that 'world' has multiple meanings and that now we are distinguishing between the world as a sort of totality of what is and the world as the members of the totality.

Butchvarov takes his cue from proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein stipulates that by 'world' he means the totality of facts (die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen), not of things (nicht der Dinge). Now if the world is the totality of facts, then one who denies the reality of facts denies the reality of the world, and is thereby a cosmological antirealist. (113) Such an antirealist need not be an ontological antirealist, i.e., one who denies the reality of things. Since Butchvarov does not question the reality of things (169), he is not an ontological metaphysical antirealist. He is a cosmological antirealist who advocates a form of logical antirealism according to which (i) “there are no logical objects even though logic is present in all thought” (114), and (ii) the “cognized world” depends on the logical expressions of our language rather than on our “mental faculties” as in Kant. (189)

At a first approximation, when Butchvarov says that there are no logical objects what he means is that the logical connectives, the quantifiers, the copula 'is,' and whole declarative sentences do not designate or refer to anything. In old-fashioned terminology, they are syncategorematic or synsemantic expressions. Consider the sentence, 'Tom is tall and Mary is short.' As I understand Butchvarov, he is maintaining that the sentence itself, both occurrences of 'is,' and the single occurrence of 'and' are all logical expressions while the proper names 'Tom' and 'Mary,' and the predicates 'tall' and 'short' are non-logical expressions. There are no logical objects corresponding to logical expressions. (This bald assertion needs be qualified in a separate post on semirealism. Butchvarov takes a semirealist line on facts, the logical objects corresponding to some sentences.) That there are no logical objects is perhaps obvious in the case of the propositional connectives. Few will say that 'and,' 'or,' and 'not' designate objects. The meaning of these words has nothing to do with reference. But while there are no logical objects, there can be no “cognized world” without language, or rather human languages. With this we are brought back to the Paradox of Antirealism. Even though the things in the world do not depend on human animals, the world itself does so depend inasmuch as there would be no world at all without language.

Consider the generic sentence, 'Men are taller than women.' For Butchvarov, many generic sentences are true, but there is nothing in the world that makes them true: they have no corresponding logical objects. And yet without truths like these, and other sorts of truths as well, there would be no world. In this sense, the world, but not the things in it, depends on language-users. Butchvarov's position is roughly similar to Kant's. Kant held that one can be both a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist. Butchvarov is like a transcendental idealist in that he holds that the world depends on language and thus on us; but he is like an empirical realist in that he holds that the things in the world do not depend on us. Like Kant, however, he faces a version of the Paradox of Antirealism: surely it is as absurd to maintain that the world depends on the existence of human animals as to maintain that the things in the world depend on human animals.

Butchvarov's Solution to the Antirealism Paradox

The solution involves a re-thinking of the role of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' as they function in philosophical as opposed to ordinary contexts. (See article referenced below.)  The idea is that 'I' and 'we' as they figure in the realism-antirealism debate do not refer to anything in the world, and so they do not refer to human beings; these grammatically personal pronouns refer impersonally to a view or "cognition" of the world, one that is not owned by any person or group of persons.  This view of the world, however, just is the world.  Therefore, the world does not depend logically or causally on the view of the world or on us: "the world and our cognition of it . . . are identical." (191)  To grasp the thought here, you must realize that "cognition" is subjectless: it is not anyone's cognition.

Now let's dig into the details.

Butchvarov's theory can be divided into negative and positive theses.  On the negative side, he claims that (i)  "there is no such entity as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego." (191)  Nor (ii) is there any such thing as consciousness as a property or activity of the metaphysical self, or as a relation (or quasi-relation) that connects such selves to their objects. (191) (ii) is a logical consequence of (i).  For if there is no self, then it cannot have properties, stand in relations, or exercise activities.  It also follows from (i) that (iii)  there is no  act-object distinction.  Butchvarov would claim phenomenological support for the first and third claims:  no self appears and no mental acts appear.  Phenomenologically, he is right.  But this doesn't decide the matter since there is also a 'dialectical' assumption at work, something like a Principle of Acquaintance:

Only that with which we are or can become acquainted, only that which can be directly experienced or singled out as an object, can be credited as real and as a possible subject of true and false predications. 

This Principle of Acquaintance (my formulation) is a bridge principle that connects phenomenology to ontology, and makes of phenomenology more than a study of 'mere appearances.'  It would therefore be fair to classify Butchvarov as a phenomenological ontologist along with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.  As opposed to what?  As opposed to what could be called a metaphysical ontologist who essays to peer behind the phenomenal scene into a realm of 'positive noumena' to use a Kantian phrase, where God and the soul count as positive noumena. Butch of course will have no truck with positive noumena, nor even with Kant's negative noumenon, the unknowable Ding an sich.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Butchvarov neither affirms nor denies the negative noumenon.

One sort of move that the Butchvarovian approach rules out is a transcendental inference from what is given to transcendental conditions of the given's givenness that cannot themselves be brought to givenness.  Someone might say this:

Granted, the subject of experience does not itself appear as just one more object of experience.  But this failure to appear is precisely what one ought to expect: for as a necessary condition of any object's appearing it cannot itself appear as an object.  The fact that it does not and cannot appear is no argument against its existence.  For it is precisely a transcendental condition of objectivity.  Just as there must be an 'accusative of manifestation,' something that appears, there must also be a 'dative of manifestation,' an item to which an appearing object appears, but which does not itself appear.

To which Butchvarov might respond that this begs the question by its rejection of the Principle of Acquaintance. The principle disallows any posits that cannot be brought to givenness.  No ego appears, and so there is no dative of manifestation.  And since there is no ego, appearing is non-relational: it is a monadic feature of that which appears.  Objects appear, but not to anything.

But of course this does not end the discussion since one can ask what validates the Principle of Acquaintance.  Why should we accept it given that it cannot be brought to givenness?  Hume claimed that all meaningful ideas derive from sensory impressions.  But what about that (propositional) idea? Is it meaningful?  Then which sensory impressions does it derive from? It appears that  here we end in a stand-off.

Butchvarov's Sartrean position is opposed to the triadic Cartesian schema that Husserl presupposes:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.

For Butchvarov, there is no ego and there are no cogitationes; there are only the cogitata and their appearing.  He speaks of objects and their "lightening" and "revealing." (205)  He mentions Sartre by name but alludes to Heidegger as well for whom the world is not the totality of things or the totality of facts but the illuminated space wherein things appear. 

For Butchvarov, then, the structure of consciousness is not triadic but dyadic: there is just consciousness and its objects.  But it is impersonal: it is not anyone's consciousness.  It is the sheer revelation of things, but not to anyone.  Consciousness is exhausted in its revelation of objects: it has no inner nature.  This is a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness.  Butchvarov is a Sartrean externalist about consciousness.

If this externalist view is correct then one can understand why Butchvarov thinks he has solved the Paradox of Antirealism.   If consciousness is no-thing, then it is no thing upon which anything else can depend either logically or causally.   The paradox arises if the things in the world are made dependent for their existence, nature, or intelligibility on any transient parts of the world such as human animals.  The paradox vanishes if consciousness is no thing or things.

Toward a Critique

But wait a minute!  What has now become of the first limb of the paradox?  The first limb reads: 

On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) 

Surely consciousness as no-thing, as a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects, as Mooreanly diaphanous, emanating from nowhere, without a nature of its own, not anchored in a Substantial Mind or in a society of substantial minds, or in animal organisms in nature, ever evacuating itself for the sake of the revelation of objects  -- surely consciousness as having these properties cannot do any shaping or forming.  It cannot engage in any activity.  For it is not a substance.  It is only in its revelation of what is other than it.  All distinctions and all content fall on the side of the object: none come from consciousness itself.  On a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness/mind, it can't do anything such as impose categorial forms on the relatively chaotic sensory manifold.

Kant is the main man here as Butch well appreciates.  Kant's thinking operates under the aegis of a form-matter scheme.  Space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, and the categories are the a priori forms of the understanding.  These forms are imposed on the matter of sensation.  The vehicle of this imposition is the transcendental unity of apperception.  All of this is our doing, our transcendental doing, whatever exactly this means (which is part of the problem).  Our making of the world is a transcendental making: it is not an immanent process within the world such as a literal making of something out of pre-given materials -- which would presuppose the world as the where-in of all such mundane makings and formings.  Nor is this transcendental making a transcendent making by a transcendent deity.

Now who is it, exactly, who does the forming of the sensory manifold?  Who imposes the categorial forms on the matter of sensation?  It cannot be human animals or their brains.  It cannot be anything in the world.  Nor can it be anything out of the world either.  And what, exactly, is this activity of forming?  It cannot be an empirical process in the world.  Not can it be a transcendent process such as divine creation.  What then?

These problems are part and parcel of the Paradox of Antirealism.  The paradox cannot get off the ground without the notions of forming, shaping, imposing, etc. whereas Butchvarov's solution to the paradox in terms of an impersonal, subjectless, non-substantial consciousness without a nature does away with all forming, shaping and imposing.  Mind so conceived cannot impose forms since all forms, all distinctions, all content determinations are of the side of the object.  How can Mind be spontaneous (a favorite Kantian word) and active if Mind is not a primary substance, an agent?

My suspicion, then, tentatively proffered, is that Butchvarov does not solve the Paradox of Antirealism; he dissolves it by in effect rejecting the first limb. It is clear to me how he removes anthropocentrism from metaphysics; what is not clear to me is hgow what is left over can still be called antirealism.

There is also the question of whether the philosophical uses of 'I' and 'we' that are essential to the formulation of the realism-antirealism debate are really impersonal uses.  To that issue I will return in a later entry.

Related articles

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

Panayot Butchvarov in his latest book claims that the first-person singular pronoun as it functions in such typical philosophical contexts as the Cartesian cogito is "a dangling pronoun, a pronoun without an antecedent noun."  (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 40)  In this entry I will try to understand and evaluate Butchvarov's fascinating claim.  But first we must sort out some obscurity in Butchvarov's presentation of what I take to be a genuine problem, the problem of what, if anything, one refers to with 'I' when one says or thinks, 'I think therefore I am.'

If a dangling pronoun is one without an antecedent, then a non-dangling pronoun would be one with an antecedent.  But while some pronouns have antecedents, it is not clear that indexical uses of pronouns have antecedents.  This is relevant because the use of  ego or 'I' in the Cartesian cogito is an indexical use.  So what is the problem with this indexical use that lacks an antecedent?  Consider first a sentence featuring a pronoun that has an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent.  The antecedent is referentially prior to to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  Another part of what makes it an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is a purely indexical (D. Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no indexical expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

This seems right.  So if a dangling pronoun is one without a noun antecedent as Butchvarov maintains, then 'he' and 'I' in our last examples are dangling pronouns.  But this is not a problem.  What Butchvarov is getting at, however, is a problem.  So I suggest that what he really means by a dangling pronoun is not one without a noun antecedent, but a pronoun which cannot be replaced salva veritate in any sentence in which it occurs with a noun.

For example, in most ordinary contexts my  uses of 'I' refer to BV, a publicly identifiable person, and only to this person.  In these contexts  'I' can be replaced by 'BV'  salva veritate.  Although 'I live in Arizona' (when uttered by BV) and 'BV lives in Arizona' differ in sense, so that the replacement cannot be made salva significatione, the two sentences have the same truth-value, and presumably also the same truth-maker, BV's living in Arizona.

To put the point more generally, in most ordinary contexts tokens of 'I' are replaceable salva veritate in the sentences in which they occur with tokens of proper names or definite descriptions or demonstrative phrases.  Thus the following sentences have the same truth-value and are presumably made true by the same concrete fact or state of affairs:

I am a native Californian [uttered by BV]
BV is a native Californian
The best chess-playing philosopher in the Superstition Foothills is a native Californian
That man [with a pointing toward BV] is a native Californian.

Let us say that such ordinary uses of 'I' are  anchored (my term).  For in each case the 'I'-token is anchored or can be anchored in a non-indexical term such as a proper name or a definite description that refers to the same item that the 'I'-token refers to.  But we shouldn't confuse anchors and antecedents.  Every antecedent of a pronoun anchors that pronoun, but not every anchor of a pronoun is an antecedent of it.  Thus 'BV' anchors the 'I' in 'I am hungry' assertively uttered by BV; but 'BV' is not the antecedent of the 'I' in the sentence in question.  The 'I'-token in the sentence in question has, and needs, no antecedent.

In typical philosophical contexts, however, 'I' appears to be what Butchvarov confusingly calls a dangling pronoun, “a pronoun without an antecedent noun.” (40) If I say, “I was born in California,” I refer to the man BV, a transient chunk of the physical world, a bit of its fauna. The pronoun in this context is replaceable salva veritate by the proper name, 'BV.'  But when I thoughtfully say or write “I think therefore I am,” or “I doubt therefore I am” in the context of a search for something indubitable, something whose existence cannot be doubted, I cannot be taken to be referring to the man BV.  For the existence of this man can be doubted along with the existence of every other physical thing.  

Butchvarov is on to something, but he expresses himself in a confusing and confused way.  His point is not that the 'I' in 'I think therefore I am' lacks an antecedent, for this is also true in unproblematic sentences such as 'I am hungry.'  The point is that the ego of the cogito , the 'I' of the 'I think therefore I am' is not anchored, i.e., not replaceable salva veritate with  a proper name or definite description or demonstrative phrase in the way that the 'I' in 'I am hungry' when assertively uttered by BV can be replaced by a token of 'BV.'

The problem that Butchvarov is on to is that in the cogito situation we seem to have  a use of the word 'I' -- a genuine  indexical use, not a quasi-indexical use or a quantificational use -- that does not pick out the speaker or any physical thing.   What then does it pick out?

At this point you can and perhaps ought to ask: How could what is grammatically the first-person singular pronoun not function as an indexical term?  Well, suppose I am explaining Brentano's theory of intentionality to a student and I say,

1. I cannot be conscious without being conscious of something.

Clearly, what I am trying to convey to the student is not some fact about myself, but a fact, if it is a fact, about any conscious being.  The proposition I am trying to get across is more clearly put as follows:

2. For any x, if x is a person, and x is conscious, then x is conscious of something.

Curiously, 'I' can be used to mean anyone.  So I say a token of (1) features a quantificational use of 'I,' not an indexical use. The reference of an indexical term depends on the context of its deployment, use, tokening.  Thus the indexical 'I' used by BV refers to BV and cannot be used by BV to refer to anyone other than BV.  But the reference of 'I' in (1) does not vary with the persons who use it.  So 'I' in (1) is not an indexical.  It functions essentially like a bound variable.

Back to our problem.    What am I referring to when I enact the Cartesian cogito? Let's consider a second classical example to get the full flavor of the problem. 

What am I referring to when I enact the Augustinian Si fallor, sum?  (The City of God, XI, 26)"If I am mistaken, I am."  In my life I have been mistaken about many things.  Is there anything about which I can be certain that I am not mistaken?  If yes, then it is not the case that everything is open to doubt.  Thinking about this,  I hit upon the old insight of the Bishop of Hippo: If I am mistaken about this or that, or deceived about this or that,  then I am, whence it follows that there is at least one thing about which I cannot be mistaken, namely, that I exist.

What does 'I' refer to in the philosophical conclusions 'I cannot doubt that I exist' and 'I cannot be mistaken about my own existence'?  I agree with Butchvarov that these uses of 'I'  -- call them philosophical uses to distinguish them from ordinary uses -- cannot refer to the speaker or to any physical thing.   If they did, the question would be begged against the skeptic and no fundamentum inconcussum would have been reached.

At this point some will say that 'I' does not refer to anything, that it is a mere expletive, a bit of linguistic filler that functions like the 'it' in 'She made it clear that she would not tolerate her husband's infidelity' or like the 'it' in 'It is snowing' as opposed to the 'it' in 'It is a snow flake.'  Accordingly, 'I am thinking . . . .'  means ''There is thinking going on . . ..'  But I don't want to discuss this view at present.  I will  assume with Butchvarov that 'I' used philosophically as in the Cartesian and Augustinian cases  does have a referent just as the 'I' of ordinary contexts has a referent.  Unlike names and descriptions, indexical uses of 'I' have seemed to most theorists  to be guaranteed against reference failure and in a two-fold sense:  My uses of 'I' cannot fail to refer to something and indeed to the right thing.  I can't be a 'bad shot' when I fire an 'I'-token: I can't hit PB, say, instead of BV.

So 'I' deployed philosophically has a referent but not a physical referent.  This seems to leave us with only two options: 'I' used philosophically refers to a metaphysical self or it refers to something that is not a self at all.   I incline toward the first view; Butchvarov affirms the second. 

Well, why not say something like what Descartes and such latter-day Cartesians as Edmund Husserl either said or implied, namely, that the primary reference of the indexical 'I' is to a thinking thing, a res cogitans, a metaphysical self, a transcendental ego? One might argue for this view as follows. (This is my argument.)

a. Every indexical use of 'I' is immune to reference failure in a two-fold sense: it cannot fail to have a referent, and it cannot fail have the right referent.  (This point has been urged by P. F. Strawson.)

b. Every philosophical use of 'I' is an indexical use. 

Therefore

c. Every philosophical use of 'I' is immune to reference failure. (a, b)

d. Every indexical use of 'I' refers to the user of the  'I'-token.  (A user need not be a speaker.)

e. No philosophical use of 'I' refers to an item whose existence can be doubted by the user of the 'I'-token.

f. Every physical thing is such that its existence can be doubted.

Therefore

g. Every philosophical use of 'I' refers to a meta-physical item such as a Cartesian thinking thing. (c-f)

Butchvarov won't accept this argument.  One point he will make  is that the metaphysical self, if there is one, is an item that could be referred to only by an indexical.  "But would anything be an entity if it could be referred to only with an indexical?" (39)  A thinker that is only an I "borders on incoherence." (39) I take the point to be that nothing could count as an entity unless it is referrable-to in third-person ways.  So BV and PB are entities because, while each can refer to himself in the first-person way by a thoughtful deployment of an 'I'-token, each can also be referred to in third-person ways.  Thus anyone, not just PB, can refer to PB using his name and such definite descriptions as 'the author of Anthropocentism in Philosophy.'  Philosophical uses of 'I,' however, cannot be replaced by names or descriptions or demonstrative phrases having the same reference.  The philosophical 'I' is a dangling pronoun. There is no name or description that can be substituted for it.

For Butchvarov, there cannot be a pure subject of thought, a pure ego, ein reines Ich, etc.  Butchvarov would also point out that talk of such involves the monstrous transformation of pronouns into nouns as we speak of pure egos and ask how many there are.   He would furthermore insist Hume-fashion that no such item as a pure I is every encountered in experience, outer or inner.  If I replied that it is the very nature of the ultimate subject of thought and experience to be unobjectifiable, he would presumably revert to his point about the incoherence of supposing that any entity could be the referent of a pure indexical only.

I concede that Butchvarov has  a reasonable case against (g), though I do not think he has refuted it.  But let us irenically suppose that (g) is false.  Then which of the premises of my argument must Butchvarov reject?  If I understand him, he would reject (d):  Every indexical use of 'I' refers to the user of the  'I'-token.  His view is  that only some do and that the philosophical uses such as we have in the Cartesian and Augustinian examples do not refer to the user of the 'I'-token.  They do not refer to persons or anything at the metaphysical core of a person such as a metaphysical ego.

To what then do they refer?  Here is where things get really interesting.

Butchvarov's proposal is that the philosophical (as opposed to the ordinary) uses of the grammatically personal pronoun 'I' are logically impersonal: they refer not to persons but to views ("cognitions" in a broad sense) that needn't be the views of any particular person.   I take him to be saying that the philosophical uses of 'I' are indexical uses that are impersonal uses, as opposed to saying that the philosophical uses are  non-indexical impersonal uses. (1) above is an example of a non-indexical impersonal use of 'I.'  As I read him, Butchvarov is not saying that the philosophical uses are like (1).

To show  how a use of 'I' could refer to a view rather to a person, Butchvarov offers us this example:

3. I can't believe you left your children in the car unattended! (197) 

One who says this is typically not referring  to himself and stating a fact about what he can or cannot believe.  He is reasonably interpreted as using the sentence "to indicate the view that leaving children unattended in a car is grossly imprudent." (197)  Thus (3) is better rendered as

4. Leaving children unattended in a car is grossly imprudent. 

Now I grant that 'I' in (3) is impersonal in that it is not plausibly read as referring to the speaker of (3), or to any person.  But I fail to see how 'I' in (3) indicates (Butchvarov's word) a view or proposition, the view or proposition expressed by (4).  If a term indicates, then it is an indicator, which is to say that it is an indexical.  But 'I' in (3) is not an indexical.  I say it is an impersonal non-indexical use of 'I.'  If 'I' in (3) were an indexical, then different speakers of (3) would be referring to different views or propositions.  But if Manny, Moe, and Jack each assertively utter (3), they express the same proposition, (4).

Butchvarov sees that the philosophical uses of 'I' cannot refer to the speaker or to any innerworldly entity, on pain of begging the question against the skeptic.  For the existence of any intramundane entity can be doubted.  But he also insists, with some plausibility, that the philosophical uses of 'I' cannot refer to any transcendental or pre-mundane or extra-mundane entity.  Now if the referent of the philosophical 'I' is neither in the world nor out of it, what is left to say but that the referent is the world itself?  Not the things in the world, but the world as the unifying totality of these things.  And that is what Butchvarov says.  "In the philosophical contexts that would render reference to the speaker or any other inhabitant of the world question-begging, 'I' indicates a worldview and thus also the world." (198)

Now a crucial step in his reasoning to this conclusion is the premise that a view or "cognition" "need not be a particular person's cognition." (197)  Not every view is optical, but consider an optical view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building.  Butchvarov claims that it would be "absurd" to ask: Whose view is it?  One sees his point: that view is not 'owned' by Donald Trump, say, or by any particular person.  But it does not follow that there can be an optical view without a viewer.  Every view is the view of some viewer or other even if no view is tied necessarily to some particular person such as Donald Trump. So the question, Whose view is it? has a reasonable answer: it is the view of anyone who occupies the point of view.  The view into the Grand Canyon from the South Rim at the start of the Bright Angel Trail is the view of anyone who occupies that position, which is not to say that the view presupposes the existence of BV or PB or any particular person.  But an actual view does presuppose the existence of some viewer or other.  And so if the actual world is a (nonoptical) view, then it too has to be someone's view.  There can be a view from nowhere since not every view is optical, but I balk at a view by no one.  If I am right, Butchvarov has failed to solve the paradox of antirealism.  But to explain this would require a separate post.

As I see it, Butchvarov's argument trades on the confusion of 'No view is tied necessarily to some definite person' (true) and 'No view requires a viewer, some viewer or other.' (false)

Butchvarov further maintains that if a  proposition is described as true, it would be absurd to ask: Whose truth is it? (197)  In one sense this is right.  That 7 + 5 =12 is not my truth or your truth.  But it doesn't follow that truths can exist without any minds at all. Classically, truth is adequation of intellect and thing, and cannot exist without intellects, whether finite or divine. Truth is Janus-faced: it faces the world and it faces the mind.  Truth is necessarily mind-involving.  I suggest that truth conceived out of all relation to any mind is an incoherent notion.

This is even clearer in the case of knowledge.  Butchvarov claims that if physics is described as a body of knowledge, it would be absurd to ask: Whose knowledge is it?  Well of course it is not Lee Smolin's knowledge or the knowledge of any particular person. But if there were no physicists there would be no physics.  In general, if there were no knowers, here would be no knowledge.  Even if truths can float free of minds, it is self-evident that knowledge cannot.  Knowledge exists only in knowers even if truth can exist apart from any knowers.

And so a worldview that is not anyone's view is a notion hard to credit.  And that a philosophical use of 'I' could indicate a worldview is even harder to understand. 

Summary

Butchvarov is trying to understand the philosophical uses of 'I' as we find them in the well-known Augustinian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian contexts.  He is trying to find a way to reconcile the following propositions:

5.  These philosophical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are referential.
6.  These uses are indexical.
7.  These uses do not refer to thinking animals or to any objects in the world.
8.  These uses  do not refer to Augustinian souls or Cartesian thinking things or Kantian noumenal selves or Husserlian transcendental egos.

Butchvarov reconciles this tetrad by adding to their number:

9. These uses are impersonal and refer to the world. (192)

In a subsequent post I will try to show that Butchvarov is entangled in essentially the same problem that Kant encounters when he tries to understand the unity of experience, the unity of the phenomenal world, in terms of the "'I think' that must be able to accompany all my representations."  (CPR B131)  The mystery is how the words 'I' and 'think' which have clear ordinary uses are appropriate to express the unity of experience when these words used philosophically cannot designate any items IN experience or OUT of experience.

Fused Participles and Ontology

Let's begin by reviewing some grammar.  'Walking' is the present participle of the infinitive 'to walk.'  Present participles are formed by adding -ing to the verb stem, in our example, walk.  Participles can be used either nominally or adjectivally.  A participle used nominally is called a gerund.  A gerund is a verbal noun that shares some of the features of a verb and some of the features of a noun. Examples:

Walking is good exercise.
Sally enjoys walking.
Tom prefers running over walking.
Rennie loves to talk about running.

As the examples show, gerunds can occur both in subject and in object position.

Participles can also be used adjectivally as in the following examples:

The boy waving the flag is Jack's brother.
Sally is walking.
The man walking is my neighbor.
The man standing is my neighbor Bob; the man sitting is his son Billy Bob.
The Muslim terrorist cut the throat of the praying journalist.

 

Fused Participles

Now what about the dreaded fused participles against which H. W. Fowler fulminates?  In the following example-pairs the second item features a fused participle:

She likes my singing.
She likes me singing.

John's whistling awoke her.
John whistling awoke her.

Sally hates Tom's cursing.
Sally hates Tom cursing.

If you have a good ear for English, you will intuitively reject the second item in these pairs.  They really should grate against your linguistic sensibility even if you don't know what it means to say that gerunds take the possessive.  That is, a word immediately preceding a gerund must be in the possessive case.  A fused participle, then, is a participle used as a noun preceded by a modifier, whether a noun or a pronoun, that is not in the possessive.

Fused participles, most of them anyway, are examples of bad grammar.  But why exactly?  Is it just a matter of non-standard, 'uneducated,' usage?  'I ain't hungry' is bad English but it is not illogical.  Fused participles are not just bad usage, but logically bad inasmuch as they elide a distinction, confusing what is different.

This emerges when we note that the members of each of the above pairs are not interchangeable salva significatione.  It could be that she likes my singing, but she doesn't like me.  And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else. 

In the second example, it could be that the first sentence is false but the second true.  It could be that John, who was whistling, awoke her, but it was not his whistling that awoke her, but his thrashing around in bed.

The third example is like the first.  It could be that Sally hates the sin, not the sinner.  She hates Tom's cursing but she loves Tom, who is cursing.

Is every use of a fused particular avoidable?  This sentence sports a fused participle:

The probability of that happening is near zero.

The fused participle is avoided by rewriting the sentence as

The probability of that event's happening is near zero.

But is the original sentence ungrammatical without the rewriting?  Technically, yes.  One should write

The probability of that's happening is near zero

although that is perhaps not as idiomatic as the original.  In any case,  one would have to be quite the grammar nazi to spill  red ink over this one.

According to Panayot Butchvarov, "Fused participles are bad logic, not just bad usage." ("Facts" in Cumpa, ed., Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Ontos Verlag, 2010, p. 87.)  In Skepticism in Ethics, Butch claims that a fused participle such as 'John flipping the switch' is as "grammatically corrupt" as 'I flipping the switch.' (Indiana UP, 1989, p. 14.)

I think Butch goes too far here.  Consider the sentence I wrote above:

And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else.

I don't agree that this sentence is grammatically corrupt.  It strikes me as grammatically acceptable, fused participle and all.  It expresses a clear thought, one that is different from the thought expressed by

And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like my singing or my doing anything else.

The first is true, the second false.  If she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me when I am singing, shaving, showering, or doing the third of the three 's's.

So we ought not say that every use of a fused participle is grammatically corrupt.  We ought to say that fused participles are to be avoided because they elide the distinctions illustrated by the above three contrasts.  The trouble with 'I hate my daughter flunking the exam' is not that it is ungrammatical but that it fails to express the thought that the speaker (in the vast majority of contexts) has in mind, namely, that the object of hatred is the flunking not the daughter.

Ontological Relevance?

What does this have to do with ontology?

Some of us maintain that a contingent sentence such as 'John is whistling' cannot just be true: it has need of an ontological ground of its being true.  In other words, it has need of a truth-maker.  Facts are popular candidates for the office of truth-maker.  Thus some of us want to say that the truth-maker of 'John is whistling' is the fact of John's whistling.  Butchvarov, however, rejects realism about facts.  One of his arguments is that we have no way of referring to them.  Sentence are not names, and so cannot be used to refer to facts.

But 'John's whistling' fares no better.  It stands for a whistling which is an action or doing.  It does not stand for a fact.  For this reason, some use fused participles to refer to facts.  Thus, the fact of John whistling.  Butch scotches this idea on the ground that fused participles are "bad logic" and "grammatically corrupt." 

I don't find Butchvarov's argument compelling.  As I argued above, there are sentences featuring fused participles that are perfectly grammatical and express definite thoughts.  My example, again, is 'If she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else.'  So I don't see why 'John whistling' cannot be used as a name of the fact that is the truth-maker of 'John is whistling.'

Related articles

'Each Other' versus 'One Another'

Thinking About Frodo

Butchvarov on Semi-Realism about Facts

This post takes up where Butchvarov Against Facts left off.  See the latter post for bibliographical data concerning the essay "Facts" which I presently have under my logical microscope.  And if you are a fan of Butch's work, all of my Butchvarov posts are collected in the aptly entitled Butchvarov category.

(The following is also highly relevant to the discussion currently in progress with the Londonistas, David Brightly and Edward the Ockhamist in the combox to this post.)

Butch's position is a nuanced one as one would expect.  He 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 both attractive yet problematic.  We will then turn to semi-realism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.

1. 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 slacker dude, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs.  There is nothing linguistic or mental about that.  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 of its logical form or ex vi terminorum -- we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true.  I don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.

2. 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.)

3. 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 Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: "If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . ." ("Facts," 73-74)  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."

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: 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 (84-85), one does not see the relational fact either.  Their invisibility is a strike against them.  A careful examination of this argument would make a nice separate post.  And indeed it did.

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. which is, pace Richard Gaskin, vicious.  So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact.  But what could that be?  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 transcendental or onto-theological, or what have you.

4.  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 what exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism is supposed to be.

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" (87) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper.

Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing.  Object is an example of a formal concept, while book is  an example of a material concept.  That there are books can be said.  That there are objects cannot be said.  Instead, it is shown by the use of names.   

'This is an object,' unlike 'This is white,' is a pseudo-proposition.  This is because it attempts to say what can only be shown.  'This is an object' does not say anything. "It shows the logical category to which the item belongs." (75) 

Fact, like object, is a formal concept.  It follows that 'There are facts' and 'A sentence expresses a fact' are pseudo-propositions.  They are pseudo because they attempt to say what can only be shown.   But why , exactly, does 'A sentence expresses a fact' not say or state anything?  Presumably because ". . . it presupposes what it purports to say because 'fact' is the philosophical term for what sentences express." (76)

The following  cannot be said: 'This page is white is a fact.'  It cannot be said because it is ill-formed. (88)  We can of course say, 'That this page is white is a fact.'  But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase.  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 astructure 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.

Butchvarov's discussion from p. 88 to the end of his article is extremely murky and unsatisfactory.  His semi-realism is not a clear alternative to realism and anti-realism.  Butch sees the problem with crystal clarity, but I cannot see what exactly his solution is.

He tells us that semi-realism with respect to facts  differs from anti-realism by acknowledging that there is more to the truth of true sentences than the sentences that are true.  (88) Excellent!  This is a non-negotiable 'datanic' point.  If it is true that Jack loves Jill, then there must be something in the world that makes this true, and it cannot be Jack, or Jill, or loves, or the set or sum of all three.  If these three items are what the sentence 'Jack loves Jill' are about, then the truth-maker has to be distinct from each and from the set or sum of all. (88)

But Butch also tells us that semi-realism about facts differs from realism by refusing to countenance a special category of entity, the category of fact, the members of which are the referents of declarative sentences. What bothers Butchvarov is that "facts cannot be referred to or described independently of the sentences expressing them" (88)  a consideration which renders antirealim about facts plausible and the correspondence theory of truth implausible. (88)

So what is Butch's third way?  How does he get between realism and anti-realism.  He seems to be saying that there are facts but that they cannot be said, only shown.  But of course this cannot be what he is saying if one cannot say that there are facts!

If there is something that cannot be said but only shown, and what is shown are the referents of sentences, then he is saying that there are the referents of sentences in which case he is saying that there is what he says can only be shown.

This is highly unsatisfactory and barely coherent if coherent at all.  I am tempted to say to Butch, "Look, either there are facts or there aren't. Which is it?  Bringing in Wittgenstein's saying v. showing distinction only muddies already troubled waters."

So I don't see that semi-realism about facts is a viable position.  I suggest we admit that we are stuck with a genuine aporia.

Are Facts Perceivable? An Aporetic Pentad

'The table is against the wall.'  This is a true contingent sentence.  How do I know that it is true except by seeing (or otherwise sense perceiving) that the table is against the wall?  And what is this seeing if not the seeing of a fact, where a fact is not a true proposition but the truth-maker of a true proposition?  This seeing of a fact  is not the seeing of a table (by itself), nor of a wall (by itself), nor of the pair of these two physical objects, nor of a relation (by itself).  It is the seeing of a table's standing in the relation of being against a wall.  It is the seeing of a truth-making fact.  (So it seems we must add facts to the categorial inventory.)  The relation, however, is not visible, as are the table and the wall.  So how can the fact be visible, as it apparently must be if I am to be able to see (literally, with my  eyes) that the table is against the wall? That is our problem. 

Let 'Rab' symbolize a contingent relational truth about observables such as 'The table is against the wall.'  We can then set up the problem as an aporetic pentad:

1. If one knows that Rab, then one knows this by seeing that Rab (or by otherwise sense-perceiving it).
2. To see that Rab is to see a fact.
3. To see a fact is to see all its constituents.
4. The relation R is a constituent of the fact that Rab
5. The relation R is not visible (or otherwise sense-perceivable).

The pentad is inconsistent: the conjunction of any four limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the problem, then, we must reject one of the propositions.  But which one?

(1) is well-nigh undeniable: I sometimes know that the cat is on the mat, and I know that the cat is on the mat by seeing that she is. How else would I know that the cat is on the mat?  I could know it on the basis of the testimony of a reliable witness, but then how would the witness know it?  Sooner or later there must be an appeal to direct seeing.  (5) is also undeniable: I see the cat; I see the mat; but I don't see the relation picked out by 'x is on y.'  And it doesn't matter whether whether you assay relations as relation-instances or as universals.  Either way, no relation appears to the senses.

Butchvarov denies (2), thereby converting our pentad into an argument against facts, or rather an argument against facts about observable things.  (See his "Facts" in Javier Cumpa ed., Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Ontos Verlag 2010, pp. 71-93, esp. pp. 84-85.)  But if there are no facts about observable things, then it is reasonable to hold that there are no facts at all.

So one solution to our problem is the 'No Fact Theory.'  One problem I have with Butchvarov's denial of facts is that (1) seems to entail (2).  Now Butch grants (1).  (That is a loose way of saying that Butch says things in his "Facts' article that can be reasonably interpreted to mean that if (1) were presented to him, then would grant it.)  So why doesn't he grant (2)?  In other words, if I can see (with my eyes) that the cat is on the mat, is not that excellent evidence that I am seeing a fact and not just a cat and a mat?  If you grant me that I sometimes see that such-and-such, must you not also grant me that I sometimes see facts? 

And if there are no facts,then how do we explain the truth of contingently true sentences such as 'The cat is on the mat'? There is more to the truth of this sentence than the sentence that is true.  The sentence is not just true; it is true because of something external to it.  And what could that be?  It can't be the cat by itself, or the mat by itself, or the pair of the two.  For the pair would exist if the sentence were false.  'The cat is not on the mat' is about the cat and the mat and requires their existence just as much as 'The cat is on the mat.'  The truth-maker, then, must have a proposition-like structure, and the natural candidate is the fact of the cat''s being on the mat.  This is a powerful argument for the admission of facts into the categorial inventory.

Another theory arises by denying (3).  But this denial is not plausible.  If I see the cat and the mat, why can't I see the relation -- assuming that I am seeing a fact and that a fact is composed of its constituents, one of them being a relation?  As Butch asks, rhetorically, "If you supposed that the relational fact is visible, but the relation is not, is the relation hidden?  Or too small to see?"  (85)

A third theory comes of denying (4).  One might think to deny that R is a constituent of the fact of a's standing in R to b.  But surely this theory is a nonstarter. If there are relational facts, then relations must be constituents of some facts. 

Our problem seems to be insoluble.  Each limb makes a very strong claim on our acceptance.  But they cannot all be true.  

Butchvarov Against Facts

In his essay, "Facts," (Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Javier Cumpa, ed., Ontos Verlag, 2010, p. 83) Panayot Butchvarov generously cites me as a defender of realism and a proponent of facts.  He credits me with doing something William P. Alston does not do in his theory of facts, namely, specifying their mode of reality:

However, William Vallicella, also a defender of realism, does.  He argues that true propositions require "truth-making facts." And he astutely points out that facts could be truth-making only if they are "proposition-like," "structured in a proposition-like way" -- only f a fact has a structure that can mirror the the structure of a proposition." (A Paradigm Theory of Existence, 13, 166-7,192-3)  Vallicella's view is firmly in the spirit of Wittgenstein's account in the Tractatus of the notions of fact and correspondence to fact, but his formulation of it may invite deflationist attacks like Strawson's.

Butchvarov, however, is firmly against adding the category of facts to our ontological inventory. This post will consider one of his arguments.  Butchvarov tells us (p. 86) that

The metaphysical notion of fact is grounded in our use of declarative sentences, and the supposition that there are facts in the world depends at least in part on the assumption that sentences must correspond to something in the world, that somehow they must be names.  But this assumption seems absurd.  Sentences are not even nouns, much less names.  They cannot serve as grammatical subjects or objects of verbs, which is the mark of nouns. [. . .] Notoriously, "p is true," if taken literally, is gibberish.  "Snow is white is true" is just ill-formed. "'Snow is white' is true" is not, but its subject-term is not a sentence -- it is the name of a sentence. 

Here is what I take to be Butchvarov's argument in the above passage and surrounding text:

1. If there are facts, then some declarative sentences are names.
2. Every name can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.
3. No declarative sentence can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.
Therefore
4. No declarative sentence is a name. (2, 3)
Therefore
5. There are no facts. (1, 4)

The friend of facts ought to concede (1).  If there are truth-making facts, then some declarative sentences refer to them, or have them as worldly correspondents.  The realist holds that if a contingent sentence such as  'Al is fat' is true, then that is not just a matter of language, but a matter of how the extralinguistic world is arranged.  The sentence is true because of Al's being fat.  Note that Al by himself cannot be the truth-maker of the sentence, nor can fatness by itself, nor can the set, sum, or ordered pair of the two do the job.  If {Al, fatness} is the truth-maker of 'Al is fat,' then it is also the truth-maker of 'Al is not fat' -- which is absurd. 

As for (2), it is unproblematic.  So if the argument is to be neutralized -- I prefer to speak of 'neutralizing' rather than 'refuting' arguments -- we must give reasons for not accepting (3).  So consider this argument for the negation of (3).

6. 'Snow is white' is true.
7. No name is true or false.
Therefore
8. 'Snow is white' is not a name.
9. Anything either true or false is a declarative sentence.
Therefore
10. 'Snow is white' is a declarative sentence.
Therefore
11. 'Snow is white'  serves as the grammatical subject of the verb 'is a declarative sentence.'
Therefore
12. Some declarative sentences can serve as the grammatical subjects of a verb.
Therefore
~3. It is not the case that no declarative sentence can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.

The argument just given seems to neutralize Butchvarov's argument.

The Paradox of the Horse and 'the Paradox of Snow'

Butchvarov's view is deeply paradoxical.  He holds that 'Snow is white ' in (6) is not a sentence but the name of a sentence.  The paradox is similar to the paradox of the horse in Frege.  Frege notoriously held that the concept horse is not a concept.  Butchvarov is maintaining  that the sentence 'Snow is white' is not a sentence. 

What is Frege's reasoning?  He operates with an absolute distinction between names and predicates (concept words).  Corresponding to this linguistic distinction there is the equally absolute ontological distinction between  objects and concepts.  Objects are nameable while concepts are not.  So if you try to name a concept you willy-nilly transform it into an object.  Since 'the concept horse' is a name, its referent is an object.  Hence the concept horse is not a concept but an object.

Similarly with Butchvarov.  To refer to a sentence, I must use a name for it.  To form the name of a sentence, I enclose it in quotation marks.  Thus the sentence 'snow is white' is not a sentence, but a name for a sentence.  

Butchvarov finds it "absurd" that a sentence should name a fact.  His reason is that a sentence is not a name.  But it strikes me as even more absurd to say that the sentence 'Snow is white' is not a sentence, but  a name.   

My tentative conclusion is that while realism about facts is dubious, so is anti-realism about them.  But there is also what Butchvarov calls "semi-realism" which I ought to discuss in a separate post.

Indeterminate Yet Existent? The Aporetics of Prime Matter and Pure Consciousness

Scott Roberts e-mails in reference to my post Hylomorphic Ontological Analysis and the Puzzle of Prime Matter: 

I have also been perplexed at hylomorphism's dependence on something called [prime]  'matter', for the same reason as you give. But I think there is a way out, though perhaps not one a hylomorphist will like. You say "Something bare of determinateness is unthinkable and hence nonexistent." But I can think of three words that refer to something one might consider real yet bare of determinateness, namely mass (or energy), consciousness (considered apart from all intentional objects of consciousness), and God (of classical theism). In each case you have something that can be thought of as giving form actuality. But that leads to an inversion of hylomorphism, namely, that now it is form that is potential, and what was formally [formerly?] thought of as matter is now Pure Act.  For example, a mathematical object which is not being thought of is a potential form that consciousness gives actuality as a thought. [. . .]

The reader is right to point out that there is something dubious about my claim that "Something bare of determinateness is unthinkable and hence nonexistent." Of the three counterexamples he gives, the clearest and best is "consciousness considered apart from all intentional objects of consciousness."  Consciousness so considered is not nothing, and yet it is indeterminate since all determinations fall on the side of the objects.  Consciousness is no-thing, a Sartrean theme which is also developed by Butchvarov. 

The reader has made me see that there is a certain structural analogy between prime matter and consciousness conceived of as pure of-ness bare of all determinacy.  For one thing, both, considered in themselves, are indeterminate or formless, and necessarily so.  If consciousness were determinate, it would be an object of consciousness and not the consciousness without which there are no (intentional) objects.  And if prime matter were determinate, it would be formed matter and thus not prime matter.  Second, neither can exist apart from its other.  There is no consciousness without objects, and there is no prime matter that exists on its own in the manner of a substance.  So, while consciousness is other than every object, it cannot exist except as the consciousness of objects (objective genitive).  And while prime matter is other than every form, and in itself formless, it requires formation to be something definite and substantial.

A third point of analogy is that both consciousness and prime matter give rise to a structurally similar puzzle.   Consider a mind-independent hylomorph A whose matter (H) is prime matter and whose form (F) is composed of lowest forms.  Which is ontologically prior, A, or its ontological parts H and F?  If the parts are prior in the manner of pre-existing ontological building blocks -- think (by analogy) of the way the stones in a stone wall are prior to the wall -- then H could not be a 'principle' in the scholastic sense but would have to something capable of independent existence.  And that is unacceptable: surely prime matter cannot exist on its own.  If, on the other hand, A is prior to its parts, then the parts would exist only for us, or in our consideration, as aspects which we bring to A.  But that won't do either because A ex hypothesi exists extramentally and so cannot in its ontological constitution require any contribution from us.

The consciousness puzzle is similar. Is consciousness (conceived as pure diaphanous of-ness of objects in the manner of Sartre, Butchvarov, and perhaps Moore) something really existent in itself or is it rather an abstract concept that we excogitate?  In other words, when we think of consciousness transcendentally as the sheer revelation of objects, are we thinking of a really existent condition of their revelation, or is consciousness so conceived merely a concept that we bring to the data?  If consciousness really exists, then we substantialize it (reify it, hypostatize it) in a manner analogous to the way we substantialize prime matter when we think of its as something capable of independent existence.  And that is puzzling.  How can something exist that is not an object of actual or possible awareness?  If, on the other hand, consciousness is not something that exists on its own but is a concept that we excogitate, then how do we account for the real fact that things are apparent to us, that things are intentional objects for us?  Besides, if consciousness were a mere concept, then consciousness as a reality would be presupposed: concepts are logically subsequent to consciousness.

So the two puzzles are structurally similar. 

Let us see if we can abstract the common pattern.  You have a term X and a distinct term Y.  The terms are introduced to make sense of a phenomenon Z.  Z is the analysandum whose analysis into X and Y is supposed to generate understanding.   X cannot exist without Y, hence it cannot exist on its own.  The same goes for Y.  The terms cannot exist without each other on pain of (i) hypostatization of each, and (ii) consequent sundering of the unity of Z.  (The diremption of Z into X and Y gives rise to the ancient problem of the unity of a complex which no one has ever solved.)  That the terms cannot exist without each other suggests that the unitary phenomenon Z is split into X and Y only by our thoughts such that the factoring into X and Y is our contribution.  On the other hand, however, the terms or factors must be capable of some sort of existence independent of our conceptual activities if the explanation that invokes them is an explanation of a real mind-independent phenomenon.

Here is a sharper form of the common aporia.  Both prime matter and pure consciousness are real.  But they are also both unreal.  Nothing, however,  can be both real and unreal on pain of violating Non-Contradiction.  How remove the contradiction without giving rise to a problem that is just as bad?

I don't say that the aporiai are insoluble, but I suspect that any solution proffered with give rise to problems of its own . . . .

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence. 

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Realism and Idealism

An excerpt from an e-mail by Chris C., with responses in blue.

. . . I read your post on Butchvarov's latest paper, and you made clear your argument about the problem with the crucial step in the "idealist" position; then you closed with the assertion that realism has its own set of problems.  Granted that that's obviously true, I was wondering if you had a piece, whether a paper or a blog post, that elucidated your positions on 1) Why, although you think ultimately he is wrong, you also think Butch's position is a serious alternative to realism; and 2) Why, despite its problems, you believe realism addresses those problems adequately.

That post ended rather abruptly with the claim, "Metaphysical realism, of course, has its own set of difficulties."  I was planning to say a bit more, but decided to quit since the post was already quite long by 'blog' standards.  Brevity, after all, is the soul, not only of wit, but of blog.  I was going to add something like this:

My aim in criticizing Butchvarov and other broadly Kantian idealists/nonrealists is not  to resurrect an Aristotelian or Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge, as if those gentlemen clearly had the truth, a truth we have somehow, post Descartes, forgotten.  My aim is to throw the problems themselves into the starkest relief possible.  This is in line with my conception of philosophy as fundamentally aporetic: the problems come first, solutions second, if ever.  A philosopher cannot be true to his vocation if he is incapable of inhibiting the very strong natural tendency to want answers, solutions, definite conclusions which he can live by and which will provide 'doxastic security' and legitimation of his way of life.    You are not a philosopher if you are out for solutions at all costs.  As Leo Strauss points out near the beginning of his essay on Thucydides, and elsewhere, the unum necessarium for the philosopher, the one thing needful, is free inquiry.  Inquiry, however, uncovers problems, difficulties, questions, and some of these are reasonably viewed as insolubilia.

The philosopher, therefore, is necessarily in tension with ideologues and dogmatists who claim to be in possession of the truth.  What did Socrates claim to know?  That he didn't know.  Of course, to be in secure possession of the truth (which implies knowing that one is in secure possession of it) is a superior state to be in than in the state of forever seeking it.  Obviously, knowing is better than believing, and seeing face-to-face is better than "seeing through a glass darkly." On the other hand, to think one has the truth when one doesn't is to be in a worse state than the state of seeking it.  For example, Muhammad Atta and the boys, thinking they knew the truth, saw their way clear to murdering 3000 people.

Your first question:  How can I believe that Butch's position is untenable while also considering it a serious alternative to realism?  Because I hold open the possibility that all extant (and future) positions are untenable.  In other words, I take seriously the possibility that the central problems of philosophy are genuine (contra the logical positivists, the later Wittgenstein, and such Freudian-Wittgensteinian epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz), important  -- what could count as important if problems relating to God and the soul are not important? -- but absolutely insoluble by us. 

Your second question:  How can I believe that metaphysical realism, despite its problems, addresses those problems adequately?  Well, I don't believe it addresses them adequately.

I would say your book is pretty much a response to those questions, but what I'm looking for is your understanding of what makes Butch's position so powerful.  What I have in mind is something like what [Stanley] Rosen does in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, where in a couple of essays he makes clear that there is not going to be a way based on analysis or deduction to adjudicate between the Platonic and the Kantian claims - that is, the claims, respectively, that the "Forms" are external and mind-independent and that they are internal and mind-dependent.  The final two essays in the aforementioned book are Rosen's attempt to provide a way to tip the scales in favor of Plato, and I have to say I haven't really seen a better way to do it.

I haven't read Rosen's book, but I will soon get hold of it.  It will be interesting to see whether he has a compelling rational way of tipping the scales.

The point is that I was wondering if you thought, along those lines, that roughly speaking your form of realism and Butch's form of idealism form a similar sort of "fundamental alternative" in the way Rosen believes Platonism and Kantianism do.  And if so, I would be interested to see your take on what makes Butch's idealism (again roughly speaking) as something that cannot be truly defeated, but rather must be established as something of a less plausible vision of how things really stand.

 

Can any philosophical position be "truly defeated"?  I assume that we cherish the very highest standards of intellectual honesty and rigor and we are able to inhibit the extremely strong life-enhacing need for firm beliefs and tenets (etymologically from L. tenere, to hold, so that a tenet is literally something one holds onto for doxastic security and legitimation of one's modus vivendi.)  Now there are some sophomoric positions that can be definitively defeated, e.g., the relativist who maintains both that every truth is relative and that his thesis is nonrelatively true.  But in the history of philosophy has even one substantive position ever been "truly defeated," i.e., defeated to the satisfaction of all competent practioners?  (A competent practioner is one who possesses all the relevant moral and intellectual virtues, is apprised of all relevant empirical facts, understands logic, etc.)  I would say No.  But perhaps you have an example for me. 

 

Now why don't I think that I have defeated Butchvarov on any of the points we dispute?  Part of the reason is that he does not admit defeat.  If I cannot bring him to see that he is wrong about, say, nonexistent objects, then this gives me a very good reason to doubt that I am right and have truly refuted his position.  It seems to me that, unless one is an ideologue or a dogmatist, one must be impressed by the pervasive and long-standing fact of dissensus among the best and brightest.  Of course, I could be right and Butch wrong.  If he maintains that p and I maintain that not-p, then one of us is right and the other wrong.  But which one?  If I do not know that I am right, or know that he is wrong, then I haven't solved the problem that divides us.  It is not enough to be right, one must know that one is right and be able to diagnose convincingly how they other guy went wrong.

As for Platonism versus Kantianism, see my post on another latter-day Kantian, Milton Munitz, espceically the section on Platonic and Kantian intelligibility.  My Existence book avoids both Kantianism and Platonism by adopting an onto-theological idealism.  If the reality of the real traces back to divine mind, that is reality and realism enough, but it is also a form of idealism in that the real is not independent of mind as such.

 

As I've indicated in previous emails, I have always taken realism as a presumptive truth (in a general way) and I thus place the burden of truth [proof]  on idealism.  Kant impressed me, but he didn't convince me, and consequently I've never understood what it was exactly in realism that made people jump into the idealist camp.  That is, I've never understood that basic shift where someone takes idealism as presumptively true and thus places the burden of proof on realism.  What was so bad about realist arguments that made idealism so attractive as an alternative for these thinkers?

 

Well, this is a very large topic, but you can glean some idea of what motivated Kant to make his transcendental turn from his famous 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, part of which is here.  And then there is the metaphilosophical topic of burden of proof.  How does one justify a claim to the effect that the burden of proof lies on one or the other side of a dispute?  For you there is a (defeasible?) presumption in favor of realism, and that therefore the onus probandi lies on the nonrealist.  But what criteria do you employ in arriving at this judgment?

Butchvarov on Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism

This post is a  stab at a summary and evaluation of Panayot Butchvarov's "Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism" which is available both online and in R. M. Gale, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), pp. 282-302.  Page references are to the Blackwell source. The ComBox stands open if readers have some informed commentary to offer. ('Informed' means that you have read Butchvarov's paper, and my response, and you have something pertinent to contribute either in objection to or agreement with either Butchvarov or me.)

Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence

(UPDATE: 23 March.  Butchvarov sent me some comments via e-mail the main ones of  which I insert in the text in red.)

This post assumes familiarity with Panayot Butchvarov's "protometaphysics," as he calls it.  But I will begin by sketching the distinction between objects and entities.  Then I will present an objection that occurred to me and Larry Lee Blackman independently.  That will be followed by a response that Butchvarov could make to the objection.  Finally, I will try to show that Blackman's objection, despite his disclaimers, commits him to a doctrine of modes of existence, but that this is not the bad thing he thinks it is.  This post ties in with our earlier explorations of the modes-of-existence doctrine which is dogmatically denied by a majority of analytic philosophers.  (These earlier posts are collected in the Existence category.)  There is also an obvious tie-in with earlier posts on Intentionality.

I. Entities and Objects

Entities exist while objects may or may not exist. Some objects exist and some do not. When one imagines Santa Claus or hallucinates a pink rat, an object appears, an object that doesn’t exist. When one perceives his hand, an object appears too, one that exists. The difference between an object that exists and one that does not is explicated by Butchvarov in terms of indefinite identifiability: An object exists if and only if it is indefinitely identifiable with other objects. The domain of objects is logically prior to the domain of entities. The application of the concepts of identity and existence to the domain of objects results in a "conceptual transition" from the domain of objects to the domain of entities or existents. (BQB 39) The concepts of identity and existence sort objects into the existent and the nonexistent. Identity and existence are therefore classificatory concepts.  Of the two concepts, identity is the more basic since existence is explicable in terms of it.  The identity in question is material as opposed to formal identity, the kind affirmed in true, informative identity statements like 'The morning star is the evening star.'  But although identity and existence are genuine concepts, they are only concepts: there is nothing in the world that corresponds to them.

Butchvarov’s Meinongian commitment to nonexistent objects is a direct consequence of his Sartrean view of consciousness as exhausting itself in its objects. For on this view consciousness harbors no representations or other intermediary contents that could serve as surrogate objects when we think about what does not exist. Imagination of a mermaid is not consciousness of a mental image or other content of consciousness but precisely consciousness of a mermaid. Consciousness of a mermaid is just as outer-directed and revelatory of a material item as consciousness of a dolphin. But mermaids do not exist. Therefore, some objects do not exist. To take intentionality at phenomenological face-value, as Butchvarov does, is to accept nonexistent objects. Phenomenologically, consciousness is just the revealing of objects, only some of which are indefinitely identifiable. (THIS SECTION STATES MY VIEWS BETTER THAN I HAVE EVER DONE  MYSELF!)

II. An Objection

There is a strong temptation to suppose that if there are nonexistent objects, as Meinongians maintain, then they must have some ontological status despite their not existing.  After all, they are not nothing.   And so one might suppose that they must have the status of merely intentional objects.  By 'merely intentional object' I mean an accusative of consciousness that does not exist in reality but does exist as, and only as, an accusative of consciousness.  (We will have to ask whether one who accepts merely intentional objects must also accept modes of existence.)  (I AM UNEASY ABOUT YOUR USE OF ‘ACCUSATIVE.’ IT IS A GRAMMATICAL TERM. WHAT YOU MEAN BY IT IS ‘OBJECT,’ BUT THEN YOUR PHRASE “MERELY INTENTIONAL OBJECTS” JUST MEANS “OBJECTS THAT DO NOT EXIST BUT SOMEONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEM.) But for Butchvarov, the class of nonexistent objects does not have the same extension as that of merely intentional objects.   For he tells us that there is "no contradiction in supposing that there are objects that are not perceived, or imagined, or thought by anyone." (BQB 62, quoted in Larry Lee Blackman, "Mind as Intentionality Alone," Metaphysica, vol. 3, no. 2 December 2002,p. 45)  If there are such nonexistent objects, then of course it cannot be true that x is a nonexistent object iff x is a merely intentional object.

Furthermore, what I am calling merely intentional objects are mind-dependent: they exist as, and only as, accusatives of mind.  No mind, no merely intentional objects.  But Butchvarov's nonexistent objects are neither mind-dependent nor mind-independent, whether logically or causally.  Only what exists is either mind-dependent or mind-independent.  It follows that none of his nonexistent objects are what I am calling merely intentional objects. 

Blackman's worry, and mine too, is expressed by Blackman when he writes, "He [Butchvarov] denies that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, but in an obvious sense they are, since, in a world without minds, there would be no perceivings of golden mountains, no imaginings of centaurs, etc." (Blackman, 55)  Now Butchvarov denies on phenomenological grounds that there are individual mental subjects and mental acts as well.  So Butchvarov might respond that of course there are no imaginings of centaurs, if imaginings are mental acts.  So we need to put Blackman's objection more precisely.  The objection needn't presuppose that there are individual minds or mental acts.  The essence of the objection is that in a world without mind (consciousness)  there are no perceptual or imaginal objects.  (THIS IS AMBIGUOUS, THOUGH THE FAULT IS MINE BECAUSE I USE ‘PERCEPTUAL’ AND ‘IMAGINAL’ FOR THE NONRELATIONAL PROPERTIES IN QUESTION. BUT THEY ARE EXPLICITLY INTENDED TO EXCLUDE REFERENCE TO A CONSCIOUSNESS.) Denying as he does that there are minds and mental acts,  Butchvarov must deny that imagining, perceiving, remembering, etc. are types of mental acts or properties of mental acts.  Act-differences are displaced onto the object as monadic (nonrelational) properties of objects. Thus it is a nonrelational, and hence intrinsic, property of centaurs that they are imaginal objects.  This being understood, Blackman's objection can be put by saying that in a world without consciousness there would be no perceptual or imaginal or memorial objects, and that therefore, in a world without consciousness, there would be no such nonexistent objects.  Blackman is of course assuming that there could be a world without consciousness.  If Butchvarov were to claim that there could not be, then his theory of objects would have idealism as a consequence.

The problem can be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1. Only what exists is either mind-dependent or mind-independent. (MY POINT IS THAT CAUSAL RELATIONS HOLD ONLY BETWEEN EXISTENT OBJECTS. IF THERE IS AN EXISTENT SUCH AS MIND, THEN DEPENDENCE ON IT WOULD BE SUCH A RELATION.)

2. There are objects that do not exist.
3. Both the distinction between objects and entities, and the related distinction between existent and nonexistent objects, are  mind-involving in the sense that in a world without mind these distinctions would not obtain. (THE TERM ‘MIND’ HERE IS AMBIGUOUS. IF IT MEANS ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ THEN MIND IS NOT THE SORT OF THING ON WHICH ANYTHING CAN DEPEND OR NOT DEPEND.)

The limbs of this triad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.  For example, (1) and (2) taken together entail the negation of (3).  Indeed, any two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  Since Butch is committed to both (1) and (2), he will solve the problem by denying (3).  Unfortunately, (3) is at least as plausible as (1) and (2).  Blackman, if I have understood him, will go further and say that (3) is more plausible than (1).  Accordingly, Blackman will solve the problem by denying (1). 

There is of course the possibility that the inconsistent triad is a genuine aporia, a conceptual impasse, and thus insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.  I can't prove that it is a genuine aporia, but all three limbs, though jointly inconsistent, make a strong claim on our acceptance.  It is therefore not unreasonable to hold that we have no rational ground to prefer the rejection of one limb rather than another.  Of course, there is no way to stop people from being dogmatic.  Thus some will quickly reject (2) while ignoring the phenomenological and dialectical considerations Butch adduces in support of it.

My point, then is that Butchvarov's position, which requires the acceptance of (1) and (2), and the rejection of (3), is not compelling and is rationally rejectable.   

III.  A Possible Butchvarov Response

Suppose we reject (1) as I am inclined to do.  We would then be maintaining that an item can be mind-dependent without existing in reality. ('Exist' when used without qualification just means 'exist in reality.')  An imagined centaur would then exist-in consciousness without existing in reality.  And so we would have to distinguish between two distinct modes of existence, existence simpliciter (existence in reality) and intentional existence (existence in consciousness as a mere intentional object).  A scholastic philosopher would speak of esse reale and esse intentionale.  At this point Butch would probably object by saying that talk of modes of existence involves an intolerable equivocation on 'exists.'  If one adheres strictly to the univocity of 'exists' and cognates, then one cannot sensibly speak of modes of existence (as opposed to categories of existent).  So one can imagine Butchvarov arguing:  (a) To reject (1) is to embrace a doctrine of modes of existence which entails the  thesis that 'exist(s)' is equivocal.  (b) But this equivocity thesis is unacceptable.  So (c) (1) ought to be accepted.  (d) Given the phenomenological evidence for nonexistent objects, (3) ought to be rejected.  On the equivocity of 'exist(s)' see the work by the Butchvarov student, Dennis E. Bradford, The Concept of Existence: A Study of Nonexistent Particulars (University Press of America, 1980), pp. 37 ff.

IV.  Blackman's Attempt to Avoid Equivocity

Blackman agrees with me that in a world without mind there are no nonexistent objects.  But Blackman doesn't agree with me that holding this commits him to modes of existence:  ". . . to assert that gargoyles exist as the objects of our awarenesses is not to employ the term 'exists' equivocally, as Butchvarov might allege." (Blackman, 55)  Why not?

To say that gargoyles exist as the objects of my imaginings and that penguins exist as the the objects of my (veridical) perceptions is no more to use the term 'exists' equivocally than it is to to claim that the word 'exists' is used equivocally in the locutions, 'I exist as a father' and 'I exist as a husband.'  In neither case are we supposing different 'modes' of existence. (Ibid.)

The comparison is faulty.  I grant that there is no equivocation on 'exists' as between 'I exist as a father' and 'I exist as a husband.'  The first is equivalent to 'I exist and I am a father' while the second is equivalent to 'I exist and I am a husband.'   No equivocation!  But then  'Gargoyles exist as the objects of my imaginings' is equivalent to 'Gargoyles exist and gargoyles are objects of my imaginings' and 'Penguins exist as the objects of my (veridical) perceptions' is equivalent to 'Penguins exist and penguins are the objects of my (veridical) perceptions.'  Here there is equivocation! From this one can see that the comparison is flawed.  For while it is true that penguins exist and are the objects of my (veridical) perceptions, it is false that gargoyles exist and are the objects of my imaginings when 'exists' is employed univocally.  Penguins exist but gargoyles do not.

Blackman is trying to have it both ways: he is trying avoid the doctrine of modes of existence (modes of being) while maintaining that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent.  But this is impossible.  If nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, then they must exist in some way or mode.  This is because ontological dependence/independence obtains only between items that have some mode of existence.  An item that has no being or existence whatsoever cannot be said to be independent or dependent on mind or on anything else.  This is the core insight embodied in (1).  On the other hand, if there are no modes of being or existence,  then nonexistent objects cannot be said to be mind-dependent.

Although Blackman is on very solid ground in claiming that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, he falls into incoherence because of his adherence to the analytic dogma that there cannot be modes of existence.  Further proof of the incoherence is in evidence when Blackman states that  "We might say that nonexistent objects, like the existent ones, belong to something larger called 'reality,' but the claim that nonexistent objects are in a sense 'real' is innocuous, as long as it understood that their 'reality' consists merely in their being the (strictly mental) intentions of certain awarenesses. (55-56)  It seems to me that the first independent clause in this sentence contradicts the second.  If reality is common to existent and nonexistent objects, then surely the reality of an object (whether existent or nonexistent) cannot consist in its being the strictly mental intention (i.e., intentum, intentional object) of certain awarenesses.

I claim that the widespread analytic view that there cannot be modes of existence is but a dogma.  In earlier posts collected in the Existence category I try to show that typical arguments against the doctrine fail and that there is a way between the horns of univocity and sheer equivocity of the river bank/financial bank sort (which I grant is intolerable).  If I am right about this, the insights of both Blackman and Butchvarov can be accommodated.  Blackman is right to insist that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent.  And Butchvarov is right to think that only what exists can stand in relations of dependence or independence.  But Butchvarov is wrong to think that only what exists in reality exists.  What exists in the mode of esse intentionale also exists but not in reality, only in consciousness.

Knowledge as Absolute Impossibility of Mistake

I incline towards Panayot Butchvarov's notion of knowledge as involving the absolute impossibility of mistake. In The Concept of Knowledge (Northwestern  UP, 1970), Butchvarov writes that "an epistemic judgment of the form 'I know that p' can be regarded as having the same content as one of the form 'It is absolutely impossible that I am mistaken in believing that p'." (p. 51)

One way to motivate this view is by seeing it as the solution to a certain lottery puzzle.

Suppose Socrates Jones has just secured a teaching job at Whatsamatta U. for the 2011-2012 academic year. Suppose you ask Jones, "Do you know what you will be doing next year?" He replies, "Yes I know; I'll be teaching philosophy." But Jones doesn't like teaching; he prefers the life of the independent scholar. So he plays the lottery, hoping to win big. If you ask Jones whether he knows he isn't going to win, he of course answers in the negative. He doesn't know that he will win, but he doesn't know that won't either. Jones also knows that if he wins the lottery, then he won't work next year at a job he does not  like.

On the one hand, Jones claims to know what he will be doing next year, but on the other he also claims to know that if he wins the lottery, then he won't be doing what he claims to know he will be
doing. But there is a contradiction here, which can be set forth as follows.

Let 'K' abbreviate 'knows,' 'a' the name of a person, and 'p' and 'q' propositions. We then have:

   1. Kap: Jones knows that he will be teaching philosophy next year.
   2. Ka(q -->~p): Jones knows that if he wins the lottery, then he will
   not be teaching philosophy next year.
   3. ~Ka~q: Jones does not know that he does not win the lottery.
   Therefore
   4. Ka~q: Jones knows that he does not win the lottery. (From 1 and 2)
   But
   5. (3) and (4) are contradictories.
   Therefore
   6. Either (1) or (2) or (3) is false.

Now surely (3) is true, so this leaves (1) and (2). One of these must be rejected to relieve the logical   tension. Isn't it obvious that (1) is the stinker, or that it is more of a stinker that (2)? The inference from (1) and (2) to (4) is an instance of the principle that knowledge is closed under known implication: if you know a proposition and you know that it entails some other proposition, then you know that other proposition. This seems right, doesn't it? So why not make the obvious move of rejecting (1)?

Surely Jones does not KNOW that he will be teaching philosophy next year. How could he KNOW such a thing? The poor guy doesn't even KNOW that he will be alive tomorrow let alone have his wits sufficiently about him to conduct philosophy classes. He doesn't KNOW these things since, if we are serious, knowledge implies the impossibility of mistake, and our man can easily be mistaken about what will happen in the future.

Of course, I realize that there is much more to be said on this topic.  
  

Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality

One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1994), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1)  Curiously enough, however, Butch goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong!  Actually, 'posit'  is not a word he would use since Butch claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the proverbial hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following  1961 passage from Anscombe and Geach's Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:

But saying this  has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else:  it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat.  This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist -- a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix.  Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology.  What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!

Ain't philosophy grand?  One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given. 

What is also striking about the above  passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations.  There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether painting, photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat.   Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.  And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X.  There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.

The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs  realization in some medium.  It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff.  Why can't consciousness of a cat  be nothing more than consciousness of a cat?  Why can't consciousness be exhausted in its being by its revelation of objects? 

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.  Get it?

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental- contents conception.

 

Message From Butchvarov

 Bill, great web site! The address of mine should be corrected. It's
http://myweb.uiowa.edu/butchvar/
No "www" in it.

Best,
Butch

Knowledge, Certainty, and Exaggeration

As I explained the other day, I am inclined to accept Butchvarov's view of knowledge as the impossibility of error. If I know that p, then it is not enough that I have a justified true belief that p; I must have a true belief whose justification rules out the possibility of error. Anything short of this is just not knowledge. But then what are we to say about the knowledge claims that people routinely make, claims that that don't come near satisfying this exacting requirement? We won't say that they are mere beliefs, for many of them will be rationally held beliefs. For example, an air traveler who claims to know that he will be in New York tomorrow has a rational belief that will in all probability turn out to be true; but by Butchvarov's lights, a true belief for which one has reasons does not amount to knowledge unless the reasons entail the belief's truth. Since the air traveler's reasons for believing he will be in New York tomorrow do not entail his being there tomorrow, his belief, though rational, is not a case of knowledge. How then do we explain his use of the word 'know'? Should we say that there is a weak sense of 'know' as rational true belief short of certainty?

One idea, also from Butchvarov (The Concept of Knowledge, pp. 54-61), is that the various loose claims of knowledge can be understood as cases of exaggeration. But I'll try to develop this idea in my own way.

Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Certainty

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47. [CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?] There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.