Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Being as the Apotheosis of the Copula: Frege's Dialogue with Pünjer on Existence

Written 11 July 2011.

Some time before 1884, Gottlob Frege had a discussion about existence with the Protestant theologian Bernard Pünjer (1850-1885). A record of the dialogue was found in Frege's Nachlass, and an English translation is available in Gottlob Frege: Posthumous Writings, eds. Hans Hermes et al., University of Chicago Press, 1979. Herewith, some critical commentary on part of the dialogue.

1. We have often discussed  'thin' or deflationary approaches to Being or existence. On a thin approach, existence is not a metaphysical or ontological topic, but a merely logical one. Consider the general   existential, 'Cats exist.' For Frege, the content of such a general existential does not lie in 'exist' but "in the form of the particular judgment." (63) Frege uses the good old 19th century term 'judgment' (Urteil) but the point could also be put, with minor adjustments, in terms of  indicative sentences, statements, and propositions. Particular judgments are the I- and O-judgments of the Square of Opposition: those of the form Some S is P and Some S is not P.

Frege's contention, then, is that the content of affirmative general existentials lies in the logical form: Some S is P. But how do we put 'Cats exist' into this form? We need a concept superordinate to the   concept cat, say, the concept mammal. We can then write, 'Some mammals are cats.' If we acquiesce in the natural anti-Meinongian presupposition that there are no nonexistent items, then 'Cats exist' is true if and only if  'Some mammals are cats' is true.

This translation illustrates what Frege means when he says that the content of affirmative general existentials does not lie in 'exist'  but in the [logical] form of the particular judgment. The logical form is Some S is P, which is just a bit of syntax, whence we are to conclude that 'exists' is bare of semantic content, whether sense or reference, and merely functions as a stylistic variant of 'Some ___ is    ---.'

Those who take a deflationary tack, therefore, are the thin theorists. We who resist deflation can then be called thick theorists.

By showing that 'exist(s)' and cognates are eliminable, Frege thinks he has eliminated those hoary metaphysical subjects Being or existence which fascinate Thomists, Heideggerians, and such other 'thicks' as your humble correspondent.

2. But does Frege's schedule of elimination really work? We saw how 'Cats exist' can be rendered as 'Some mammals are cats.' But what about 'Mammals exist'? This in turn needs elimination. Assuming that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents, this can be translated salva veritate as 'Some animals are mammals.' And so on up the tree of Porphyry, or, if you deem that to be barking up the  wrong tree, then supply some other scheme of classification. 'Animals exist' becomes 'Some living things are animals.' 'Living things exist'  becomes 'Some bodies are living things.' 'Bodies exist' gets translated as 'Some substances are bodies.'

Clearly, we either now or very soon must call a halt to the ascent by resting in "a concept superordinate to all concepts." (p. 63) Superordinate to all concepts except itself, of course. And what concept might that be? Such a concept must have maximal extension and so will have minimal intension. It will be devoid of all content,  abstracting as it does from all differences. Frege suggests 'something identical with itself' as the maximally superordinate concept. 'There are men' and 'Men exist' thus get rendered as 'Something identical  with itself is a man.' (63)

3. In ordinary language, the role of maximally superordinate concept, a "concept without content," (63) is played by an hypostatization of the copula. In 'The sea is blue' the content of the predicate lies in   'blue': 'is' is contentless. But from the copulative 'is'  we form a quasi-concept -- 'being' -- without content since its  extension is unlimited. This makes it possible to say: men = men  that have being; 'There are men' is the same as 'Some men are' or 'Something that has being is a man.' Thus here the real content of  what is predicated does not lie in 'has being' but in the form of  the particular judgment. Faced with an impasse, language has simply created the word 'being' in order to enable the form of the particular judgment to be employed. When philosophers speak of  'absolute being,' that is really an apotheosis of the copula. (64) 

This is an excellent statement of the thin or deflationary or eliminativist line: there is in reality no such 'thing' or 'property' as Being or existence. Being (as a metaphysical topic) is a result of an illicit reification or hypostatization of the copula, an apotheosis (deification) of the copula.

4. Now why can't I accept this? We saw that to eliminate existence in all cases and make it disappear into the logical form Some S is P we must ascend a classificatory tree at the apex of which is a concept or "quasi-concept" unlimited in extension and empty in intension. This is the concept a being, an existent, something self-identical. Using this concept we can translate salva veritate every sentence of the form Fs exist into a sentence of the form Some being is an F. The availability of such translations seems to strip 'exist(s)' and cognates of all semantic content.

The problem with this was appreciated by Aristotle long ago when he argued that Being is not a summum genus, a highest genus, or a genus generallisimum, a most general genus. (See Metaphysics 998b22 and   Posterior Analytics 92b14). Being, as that which makes beings be, does not abstract from the differences among beings. But a concept  superordinate to every quidditative concept, which is what the concept a being and the concept something self-identical are, does abstract from the differences among beings. To put it another way, Being, as that which constitutes beings as beings, is not superordinate to every  quidditative concept since it belongs to a different order entirely, the non-quidditative order of existence. The Being of a being is its thatness, not its whatness.

The mistake that Frege makes is to think that Being is a highest quidditative determination, a highest what-determination. The concept a being, ens, is such a concept, but this concept is not Being, esse.

In sum: Frege's elimination of existential judgments by translation into copulative judgments works only if Being (esse, das Sein) is a maximally abstract quidditative concept, the concept a being (ens, das  Seiende). But this is precisely what Being is not. Ergo, etc.

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic Revisited

A long-time reader writes,

I was going through some of your posts from earlier this month (Belief, Designation, and Substitution, January 10, 2017) and was interested in seeing your comment that "[l]inguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality."

 

. . . I have to say that your above sentence was the first time I've heard anyone articulate what you have articulated in such a direct manner.  It's something that certainly makes the most sense to me in terms of thinking about some of the broad discussion points in the field, but I'm surprised, actually, that no one I've come across has articulated this, and I'm curious whether that lacuna has to do with the analytic tradition's anti-metaphysical tendencies (of a more robust type of metaphysics, in any event): if one moves the object of analysis from questions about how language refers to how the mind refers, perhaps it gets one into hoary metaphysical waters that people back in the day would rather have left alone.  Is this actually the case or am I missing something or is the whole thing simply too obvious for most people to bother mentioning?

 

It is actually an old debate within analytic philosophy. I would refer you to the 1957 Roderick Chisholm-Wilfrid Sellars correspondence although the debate antedates their discussion.  Your note warrants the re-posting of an old entry from eight years ago. This is a redacted and expanded version.

 

Note to the Astute Opponent: Can you come up with a powerful counterargument to the primacy of the intentional?  I'd like to test whether there is perhaps an aporia here.  

 

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is.  Very simply, (mental) intentionality  is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states.  (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment. Dispositionality would count as physical intentionality.) 

Suppose a neighbor asks me about Maxwell Schwarz, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks.    The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery.  The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else.  Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max?  How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible? How does it work? How does the mental act of thinking 'grab onto' a thing whose existence does not depend on my or anyone's thinking?

Why should there be a problem about this?  Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life.  But a cat is not.  First of all, no cat is an event. Second, no cat is a content of consciousness. 'Content' suggests containment. The content of a bottle is what's inside it. A cat an object of consciousness but not a content of consciousness.  Cats ain't in the head or in the mind.  Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my skull, or spatially inside my non-spatial mind, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind:  it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking,  if me and my mind cease to exist.  He needs for his existence my thinking of him as little as my thinking needs to be about him.  We are external to each other. Cats are physical things out in the physical world.  And yet my thinking  of Max  'reaches'  beyond my mind and targets -- not some cat or other, but a particular cat.  How is this possible?  What must our ontology include for it to be possible?

To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him.  (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness.  But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain.  So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object.  But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?

How is it that the act of thinking and its content 'in the mind' hooks onto the thing 'in the world' and in such a way that true judgments can be made about the thing, judgments that articulate the nature and existence of the thing as it is in itself apart from any (finite) thinking directed upon it?

Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.  This thesis consists of the following subtheses:

A. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic,  or intentional character.  There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red.  After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German.  It doesn't mean anything to  a speaker of German qua speaker of German.  In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning.  Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on screen, etc. have  no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature.  It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean.  And that brings minds into the picture, the minds of those who subscribe to and uphold the linguistic conventions.

B.  So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic:  whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional.  Mind is the source of all intelligibility.  Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible. Thinking reference underpins linguistic reference.

C. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind.  Laird Addis puts it like this:

Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language.  Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states.  The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)

These considerations strike me as decisive. Or are there counter-considerations that 'cancel them out'?

Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is.  Very simply, (mental) intentionality  is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states.  (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment. Dispositionality would count as physical intentionality.) 

Suppose a neighbor asks me about Maxwell Schwarz, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks.    The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery.  The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else.  Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max?  How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible? How does it work? How does the mental act of thinking 'grab onto' a thing whose existence does not depend on my or anyone's thinking?

Why should there be a problem about this?  Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life.  But a cat is not.  First of all, no cat is an event. Second, no cat is a content of consciousness. 'Content' suggests containment. The content of a bottle is what's inside it. A cat an object of consciousness but not a content of consciousness.  Cats ain't in the head or in the mind.  Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my skull, or spatially inside my non-spatial mind, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind:  it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking,  if me and my mind cease to exist.  He needs for his existence my thinking of him as little as my thinking needs to be about him.  We are external to each other. Cats are physical things out in the physical world.  And yet my thinking  of Max  'reaches'  beyond my mind and targets -- not some cat or other, but a particular cat.  How is this possible?  What must our ontology include for it to be possible?

To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him.  (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness.  But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain.  So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object.  But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?

How is it that the act of thinking and its content 'in the mind' hooks onto the thing 'in the world' and in such a way that true judgments can be made about the thing, judgments that articulate the nature and existence of the thing as it is in itself apart from any (finite) thinking directed upon it?

Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.  This thesis consists of the following subtheses:

A. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic,  or intentional character.  There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red.  After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German.  It doesn't mean anything to  a speaker of German qua speaker of German.  In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning.  Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on screen, etc. have  no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature.  It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean.  And that brings minds into the picture, the minds of those who subscribe to and uphold the linguistic conventions.

B.  So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic:  whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional.  Mind is the source of all intelligibility.  Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible. Thinking reference underpins linguistic reference.

C. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind.  Laird Addis puts it like this:

Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language.  Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states.  The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)

These considerations strike me as decisive. Or are there counter-considerations that 'cancel them out'?

Univocity, Equivocity, and the MOB Doctrine

Here is another argument that may be banging around in the back of the heads of those who are hostile to the doctrine that there are modes of being, the MOB doctrine to give it a name:

1. If there are modes of existence, then 'exist(s)' is not univocal.
2. If 'exist(s)' is not univocal, then it is equivocal.
3. If 'exists(s)' is equivocal, then existents are partitioned into separate and unrelatable domains.
4. It is not the case that existents are partitioned into separate and unrelatable domains.
Ergo
5. There are no modes of existence.

I believe that this argument can be fairly imputed to Quentin Gibson. (See The Existence Principle, Kluwer 1998, p. 26 et passim) Of course, the above is my reconstruction; he is nowhere near as clear as I am being. 

The argument is seductive but unsound.  (2) is false: if a term is not univocal it does not follow that it is equivocal in the sense of 'equivocal' needed to make (3) true.   I believe I have already demonstrated this.  'Exists(s)' is not univocal as between

6. Jewish philosophers exist
and
7. Kripke exists.

But it doesn't follow from this lack of univocity that we have sheer equivocity of the river bank /financial bank sort.  (6) makes an instantiation claim while (7) doesn't.  'Exist' in (6) is a second-level predicate while in (7) 'exists' is a first-level predicate.  So the predicate is used to say different things of different things.  In (6) being-instantiated, but not singular existence,  is being predicated of the concept Jewish philosopher.  In (7) singular existence, but not being-instantiated, is being predicated of Kripke.

And yet there is a systematic connection between the two sentences and the two senses of 'exist(s).'  If a first-level concept 'exists,' i.e., is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual that exists.  And if an individual exists, then there is some concept it instantiates.

Call this equivocity if you like, but it is not the sort of equivocity that has the unacceptable consequence that is recorded in the consequent of (3).  It doesn't lead to a partitioning of existents into separate and unrelatable domains.

Or take the substance/accident case.  Substances exist and accidents exist.  If so, they exist in different ways.  Or so say I.  Accidents exist-in substances while substances do not.  Does 'exist(s)' have two different senses as applied to substances and accidents?  Yes, but they are connected senses.  So it doesn't follow from this lack of univocity that substances and accidents belong in separate and unrelatable domains.  Quite the contrary!  It is precisely because they exist in different ways that we can render intelligible how they are related.

We are drifting in the direction of the old analogia entis.  I can feel it.