Bearers of linguisitic meaning

Here, Bill has a long piece preparing the ground for  a discussion of the meaning of life question.  First he draws, and then blurs, a distinction between existential meaning and linguistic meaning.  He says,

When we ask philosophically about the meaning of life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.

So we are talking about purposes, possible answers to why? questions, rather than meanings in the linguistic sense.   But Bill's next paragraph is this:

That being said, the similarities and differences of existential and linguistic meaning are worth noting. Two quick points. One is that a human life could be construed as a vehicle of linguistic meaning. Suppose a misspent youth issues in a man’s life-long incarceration. One might say of such a man, ‘His life shows that crime does not pay.’ This is a bit of evidence for the thesis that a life can have linguistic meaning: the miscreant’s life can be reasonably taken to express the proposition that crime does not pay. There is also the phenomenon of meaningful gestures and looks. There is the look that says, ‘I don’t believe a word you are saying.’ From some students I have received the look that bespeaks, ‘I don’t believe a word you are saying, and you don’t either.’ So if looks and gestures can carry rather specific linguistic meanings, then perhaps lives can as well. This is not to say that existential meaning is a species of linguistic meaning, but that there are analogies between them worth exploring. Indeed, if one were to assimilate one to the other, it would be more plausible to assimilate linguistic meaning to existential meaning.

That last assertion is intriguing and I'd like to see Bill develop the idea, though I doubt it will be easy.  I can agree that our miscreant's life shows that crime doesn't pay.  We could say that his life exemplifies the proposition crime doesn't pay.  But it hardly linguistically means that proposition.  That would be like saying that my wearing a pair of socks and shoes means that two plus two equals four.  This really does look to me like the kind of category mistake that Bill denies in the preceding paragraph.  But maybe I'm a crabbed old positivist.  And could a life mean, in Bill's extended sense, a falsehood?  Suppose our man misspends his youth but gets away with it.  Does his life mean that crime does pay?  Is this life an untruth?

Bill is on much firmer ground in his next paragraph:

The second point is that there is an analogy between the way in which context is essential for both linguistic and existential meaning. Words and sentences have their meanings only in wider linguistic contexts. An individual life, too, has what meaning it has only in a wider social and perhaps even cosmic context. This will be explored further below when a distinction is made between anthropic and cosmic existential meaning.

Existential meaning and linguistic meaning are alike in having dependency on a larger context.   More on this later perhaps.

Sunday 14th April 2013

Bill has been posting recently about the meaning of life: here, here, and less recently, here. I don't usually comment on non-technical subjects, but it's been a difficult day and the last piece purports to contain an argument the logic of which I can't see.  In We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning Bill argues that a subjectivist view of life's meaningfulness collapses into eliminativism.  He says

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning. And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning. This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly. These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me. It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless. [my underlining]

I have two objections.  Firstly, I can't see how it follows or is implied that an act of meaning-bestowal is meaningless.  For surely the meaning of an act of meaning-bestowal is the bestowal of the meaning bestowed?  That is the aim, purpose, goal, or meaning if you will, of the act, if there are such things.  That is perhaps a narrow logical point.  My second objection is wider.

The picture Bill paints is one in which the meaning of one's life is created by an all-or-nothing decision prior to which one's life had no meaning.  Perhaps this can occur---Saint Paul on the road to Damascus maybe, though persecution of Christians seems to have supplied his life's prior meaning---but surely for most of us  what meaning we and others ascribe to our lives emerges gradually and non-volitionally.   The significance others place on our lives arises through our evolving relationships with them and behaviour towards them.  Likewise, the significance we place on our own lives arises through our emerging relationship with ourselves.  I cannot give my life meaning by an act of will, just as I cannot decide to believe something I have been told, though Bill would probably disagree with the latter. The best we can do is to choose a course of action and see what happens.  As with belief, meaningfulness may or may not be forthcoming.

Meaty thoughts

Bill has another post arguing against a materialist philosophy of mind. He says,

So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be.  The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have  cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states.  One cannot speak intelligibly  of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.

The second and third sentences appear to be in support of the thesis expressed in the first.  One cannot speak intelligibly of the voltage drop across the executing Firefox process by which I'm writing this post on my computer, but this does not prevent  this process from being, at a physical level of description,  an intricate dance of currents and voltages inside the complex arrangement of conductor, semi-conductor, and insulator that is the computer's processor and memory.  Nor does it prevent there being other ways of describing the Firefox process's dynamics that do not refer to its physical substrate of atoms and electrons.  Why can't mental talk be a specialised language for reporting our limited experience of what's going on inside our own heads?

Bill also says this,

If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible.

Suppose we were able to observe the neurons in an owl's brain as it tracked a vole's movements across the ground; or those in an ape's brain as it reached out to pluck a fruit from a nearby branch.  And suppose we could identify a group of neurons whose activation was causally dependent on the activation of neurons afferent from foveal retinal cells on which lay the image of the vole/fruit. And suppose the activation of these neurons caused the activation of neurons efferent on muscles of the wings/arm in such a way that the image of the vole/fruit lay centred on the fovea and the flight of the owl/movement of the hand brought it towards the object of the creature's attention.  Would we not want to say that the activation of those neurons was 'object-directed', that it possessed 'intrinsic intentionality' towards the object, or 'intrinsic representational power'?   Or would this count merely as derived intentionality/meaning/representational power? Or maybe no intentionality, etc, at all?

Times as Maximal Propositions

Bill begins a recent piece,

1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present. Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past is no longer; the wholly future is not yet; the present alone is. The second trio is one version of presentism. I grant that presentism is appealing, though it would be a mistake to take it to be common sense or immediate fallout from common sense. The platitudes are Moorean; deny them on pain of being an idiot. Not so with the heavy-duty metaphysical theses about time and existence advanced by the presentist. We can reasonably ask what they mean and whether they are true.

2. Now even presentists will admit that the past was not a mere nothing. Last Sunday's hike had some sort of reality that cries out for accommodation. After all it is now true that I hiked eight hours on Sunday. Even if there are no truth-makers, there still must have been something that the true past-tensed sentence is about. Here I distinguish between two principles, Truth-Maker and Veritas Sequitur Esse.

3. We should also keep in mind that past times and events did not have the status of the merely possible. When Sunday's hike was over it did not change its modal status from actual to merely possible. It remained an actual event, albeit a past actual event. Soren Kierkegaard WAS engaged to Regine Olsen, but he was never married to her. Intuitively, the engagement belonged to the sphere of the actual whereas the marriage belonged to the sphere of the merely possible, not that it is possible now. Neither event was a mere nothing. Furthermore, the engagement had, intuitively, 'more reality' than the marriage. What was was more real than what might have been. Historians attempt to determine what the actual facts were. They are constrained by the reality of [the evidence of] the past, whence it follows that past had some sort of reality. Historians are neither fiction writers nor students of mere possibilia.

4. I take it to be a Moorean datum that past events and times were not nothing and also were not merely possible. Hence a theory of time that cannot accommodate these data is worthless. How can the presentist accommodate them? He has to do it in a manner consistent with his claim that past and future items do not exist at all, that only temporally present items exist. 

Well, not quite.  If you compare the above with Bill's original you will see that I have taken the liberty of changing Bill's present tense usages into past tense and underlined them.   Is the presentist required to do anything at all? 

Feser's drum

In the course of a post reviewing a review by Mohan Matthen of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, Ed Feser reprises one of his regular themes:

This is a theme in Nagel’s work that goes back to his famous 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, and as I have emphasized in earlier posts in this series, it is crucial to understanding what he says in the new book. Human beings are like the hallway in my example, and the human mind is like the rug. The “mathematically precise quantitative description” of the natural world provided by modern science has been as successful as it has been only because those aspects of the natural world that don’t fit that method -- irreducibly qualitative features like color, sound, etc. as they appear to us (as contrasted with scientific redefinitions of color, sound, etc. in terms of such quantifiable features as surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like); and final causes, teleology, or purposes -- were swept under the rug of the mind, re-characterized as purely “subjective,” as mere projections that only seem to be features of the external world but are really only aspects of our perceptual representation of it. 

Ed's fingers can type this stuff out while he's asleep, which perhaps explains why he fails to notice that it doesn't make sense.  Look at what the underlined sentence says:

Quantitative science has been successful only because it hasn't tried to explain qualitative phenomena.

This is like telling a retailer of shoes that his success is due to his not selling hats.  Perhaps if he had tried selling hats he would have failed.  Maybe he had the sense to see that the money was in shoes.  But his failure to sell hats doesn't detract from his success with shoes.

Ed speaks as if the seventeenth century's separation of primary and secondary qualities was purely one of convenience.  Secondary qualities are 'in the objects' but quantitative methods cannot reach them.  The problem with this is that there is now even more evidence that secondary qualities are not in the objects, but are in our heads.  They are inaccessible to scientific method not so much because it is quantitative but because it is experimental, and relies on careful control of the variables that may affect experimental outcomes.   Ed really should face up to this.  To take one example.  If sounds really are in the objects how are we to explain how such sounds can seemingly be stored as texture on a plastic disc and subsequently recovered long after the original object has ceased to exist?  An analysis of perspective drawing and life-like painting, or for that matter, mere consideration of the effects of mirrors, had they been of any interest to renaissance philosophy, would have provoked analogous questions in visual perception.

Scientific instruments have revealed more about the world than was common knowledge in classical Greece or medieval Europe, and this new knowledge has thrown up puzzles.  How, for example, do we reconcile our everyday experience of solid objects with the results of  the  Geiger–Marsden experiment?  These questions pose just as great problems for Ed's preferred manifest-image Aristotelianism as secondary qualities pose for scientific materialism.  Ed should own up to this, but he is an apologist not a seeker.

Actualism and Presentism

There is an interesting parallel between our difficulties in formulating presentism and those in formulating actualism, as Bill explains here.  If we understand actualism to be the claim that

A.  Only the actual exists,

then Bill says

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

I agree that there is such a temptation. But I don't agree that the problem lies in our understanding of 'exists'.  I take that as a rock-solid given.  Rather, we must investigate what we mean by 'the actual',  'the possible', 'the past', and so on.

There is a temptation to take the possible as the extension of the concept possible; likewise, the past as the extension of the concept past.  We say Caesar is a past Roman,  Balls is a possible prime minister, and so on, as if past and possible functioned as concept words.  But I think this is a mistake.  For the extension of possible prime minister  is  a superset of the extension of prime minister whereas the extension of female prime minister  is a subset.   Likewise, the extension of past Roman exceeds the extension of Roman, though I might be accused of question begging in claiming this.  However, I note that the extension of past Roman just goes on increasing with time, whereas that of female Roman may increase and decrease, as it did following the fall of Rome.  So there is a case for regarding possible etc as other than concept terms.  If this is right, how are we to understand them?

What follows is speculative.  I claim that past and possible and their ilk act as 'adverbs of assertion'.  They qualify whole sentences, as in

Pastly, Caesar crosses the Rubicon,
Possibly, Ed Balls is prime minister,
Fictionally, Holmes is a detective.

Though we ordinarily distribute the adverbial operators into the sentences, as in

Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
Ed Balls is a possible prime minister,
Holmes is a fictional detective,

their logical structure is  that of an operator applied to a sentence.  The presence of the operator modifies what we take as the truth value of the sentence.  Pastly asserts that there was a time when the sentence was true though it may not be true now.  Possibly warns us to take the sentence with a pinch of salt.  It's truth value is indeterminate. Everything told us by an untrustworthy source we might preface with possibly.  Fictionally reminds us that the sentence comes from or paraphrases an element of a story.  It has no truth value. It is not an attempt to say anything about the world.

The question now is what we are to make of proper names introduced by sentences under such operators.

Pastly, there is a Roman called Caesar,
Possibly, there is an MP called Balls,
Fictionally, there is a detective called Holmes.

The first primes us that the name 'Caesar' in forthcoming sentences will refer to this no longer extant Roman.  The second that 'Balls' will refer to a putative MP, with the caveat that there may be no such person.  What follows concerning said 'Balls' may be utter flim-flam, but it may turn out true.  The last primes us not to worry about the truth of sentences asserting properties or actions of 'Holmes'.   Note the element of semantic ascent:  this is information about sentences about Caesar, not information about Caesar.   And since a sentence about Caesar contains the name 'Caesar' it seems reasonable to suppose that this information is associated with the name itself.  So we appear to have names introduced under the pastly operator, the possibly operator, the fictionally operator, and so on.  I would hazard a guess that a well-educated Westerner is familiar with as many, if not more, pastly and fictionally names as presently names.  Possibly names tend to be much fewer in number since we require them to be verified and become actually names, else we tend to forget them.  One exception springs to mind: Jack the Ripper.   

My guess is that it is because the actually and presently names are subsets of all the names in our possession, and because we are tempted to think that actual and present are concept terms that pick out subsets of the available existents that we are inclined to think that presentism and actualism must be substantive metaphysical claims.  But they are not.  They really are the trivial claim that

the present = the actual = the existent

and

the past = the merely possible = the fictional =  ∅.

 

Moore and Rutherford

Following the Maverick's Presentism discussion (see here for latest and follow Bill's 'related articles' in that post for earlier) has been like living on a Möbius band: you go round a circle and fetch up where you started but the world is now upside down.

We have taken as reference Ned Markosian's A Defense of Presentism.  Here is his opening paragraph.

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist. According to Presentism, if we were to make an accurate list of all the things that exist – i.e., a list of all the things that our most unrestricted quantifiers range over – there would be not a single non-present object on the list. Thus, you and I and the Taj Mahal would be on the list, but neither Socrates nor any future grandchildren of mine would be included. And it’s not just Socrates and my future grandchildren, either – the same goes for any other putative object that lacks the property of being present. All such objects are unreal, according to Presentism. According to Non-presentism, on the other hand, non-present objects like Socrates and my future grandchildren exist right now, even though they are not currently present. We may not be able to see them at the moment, on this view, and they may not be in the same space-time vicinity that we find ourselves in right now, but they should nevertheless be on the list of all existing things.

Although he hands over a hostage in his talk of 'unrestricted quantifiers' it's clear enough what Markosian means by Presentism and Non-presentism and the contrast between the two, especially if we restrict ourselves to concreta.  The census form asks us to give the names of the people who live in our house. Not the names of those who used to live here (difficult), nor of those who will live here (impossible). If 'exist' functions as a bona fide tensed verb then we know by analogy with the census instruction what Markosian is asking us to do. So much is obvious, commonsense, Moorean. So why is the non-presentist unhappy that the presentist has not included Socrates on his list? (This shows there is a disagreement before either party has tried to define his position in some mutually agreeable language) The answer, according to Markosian, is that NP has theoretical reasons for including Socrates. One, apparently, is that if Socrates didn't exist then propositions about him couldn't exist either, and this, according to NP, rules out our saying true things about Socrates, which we Mooreanly do. So NP has argued himself into a tricky corner. His way out is not to abandon his theory but to elaborate it further with the notion of 'tenseless verb'. To cap this he convinces himself that the whole discussion must be couched within his own theoretical terms and insists that the P must play on the NP's ground. The P will at this point refuse the invitation and concentrate on exposing the problems with the NP's theory.

Consider this analogy to the present discussion. Rutherford tells us that the Mooreanly solid hand before our eyes is mostly empty space. How is this seeming impasse resolved? R explains that matter will be seen as solid (continuous) when viewed under visible light but discrete when viewed under much shorter wavelength radiation. This allows us to retain the meaning of our commonsense term 'solid' for our ordinary dealings with macroscopic objects in daylight. Likewise, if we are to take the NP seriously, then he has to explain how we are to live with his new tenseless verbs, eg, '(exist)', whilst keeping our old ones, eg, 'exist'. My own view is that NP faces formidable problems. Here's one: It seems that 'I (am) alive' and 'I (am) dead' are both true. So the law of non-contradiction seems not to apply to sentences using (is), and I, for one, will sorely miss it.

Quasi-verbs

Discussion of Ed Ockham's argument here, here, and most recently here in the philosophy of language has segued into a debate about presentism and anti-presentism.  Oddly enough, I think this is still really a language issue, though not the issue Ed started with.  Here's why.  

In a comment Bill V explains about 'untensed' verbs:

Ed writes>>Therefore 'There is no such thing as y any more' is equivalent to 'there is no such thing as y and there was such a thing as y'. This (logically) implies 'there is no such thing as y'.<<

This is right, but only if each occurrence of 'is' is read as present-tensed. But it is a non sequitur if the last occurrence of 'is' is untensed.

Example. 'There is no such philosopher as Quine any more' is logically equivalent to 'There was such a philosopher as Quine & there is now no such philosopher as Quine. But it does not follow that Quine does not exist, i.e., that there is (untensed) no such philosopher as Quine. That would follow only if Presentism is true and only temporally present concreta exist.

And more explanation appears further down the thread.  

Now I have trouble with this.  I grant that talk of abstractions, especially  mathematics, use the present tense forms of 'to be' and 'to exist', viz, 'is' and 'exists', and this could be said to be a 'tenseless' usage.  There is no call for tense in the unchanging world of numbers and patterns.  But Bill wants to talk about the changing concrete world in an untensed way.  Well, OK, but be on the lookout for pitfalls.  

Let me use 'is* 'and 'exists*' to denote untensed usages of 'is' and 'exists'.  My claim is that 'is*' and 'exists*' may look like verbs, and to an extent function as verbs, but they are not verbs.  They are in fact shorthand, replacement schemes, or for computer geeks, macros.   When Bill asserts

Quine is* a philosopher

what he appears to mean is

Quine is a philosopher or Quine was a philosopher

Roughly, any sentence of the form '...is*...' is to be expanded to the disjunction  '...is... or ...was...'  We can now see why 'is*' has no past tense form---it's already in there!  Only roughly, because there is a nasty interaction with negation we need to take care of.

Let's rewrite Bill's example.  We need to take care with the negations.  He says

 'There is no such philosopher as Quine any more' is logically equivalent to 'There was such a philosopher as Quine & there is now no such philosopher as Quine. But it does not follow that not (Quine exists*), i.e., that not (there is* such philosopher as Quine). 

Peforming the macro expansions of the 'exist*' and 'is*' we get

'There is no such philosopher as Quine any more' is logically equivalent to 'There was such a philosopher as Quine & there is now no such philosopher as Quine. But it does not follow that not (Quine exists or Quine existed) , i.e., that not (there is such a philosopher as Quine or there was such a philosopher as Quine)

And expanding the parentheses we get

But it does not follow that Quine does not exist and Quine did not exist, i.e., that there is no such philosopher as Quine and there was no such a philosopher as Quine.

Indeed it does not follow.

The notion of quasi-verbs as macros goes a long way to explain the presentism/anti-presentism controversy.  Those of the presentist persuasion, such as myself, eschew these so-called 'tenseless' constructions, whereas anti-presentists cling to them.  Here's an example from Bill's latest.

If x does not exist, then no predicate is true of x.

Only an anti-presentist would claim this because he sees 'exists' as tenseless here.  The presentist sees 'does exist' as tensed and regards the assertion as clearly false.  Caesar does not exist yet Caesar was a Roman.   What the anti-presentist asserts is

If x does not exist*, then no predicate is true of x.

That is

If not (x exists*), then no predicate is true of x.

which expands to

If not (x exists or x existed), then no predicate is true of x.

Or, in other words,

If x doesn't exist and didn't exist, then no predicate is true of x.

And who would disagree with that?

So (metaphilosophical message coming) the dispute is not about the nature of reality at all. We all agree on that.  It lies in the language used to express it.

Next up: Relations between non-existent (but not non-existent*) objects.
 

Caesar exists no more

Over at the Maverick's, in the course of discussing an argument of Ed Ockham's, Bill makes some strange claims.  First, he says that

There is no such thing as Caesar any more

is a Moorean truth, that is, beyond the reach of reasonable controversy.  For me, and for Ed Ockham, this implies that there was such a thing as Caesar but that there isn't now.  No, says Bill, to reach this conclusion we need the metaphysical assumption of Presentism.  This can be stated as

Necessarily, only temporally present concrete objects exist.

This seems to me a logical truth related to how the adverbial phrase 'temporally present' interacts with the present tensed verb 'exist'.  But No again, Bill seems to say, 

we can reject presentism in favour of the plausible view that both past and present concreta exist, i.e., are within the range of our unrestricted quantifiers.

Under this view it appears that

...there is such a thing as Caesar, it is just that he is past.

Strictly speaking, this is a contradiction:  the second clause takes away what is granted by the first.   What are we to make of this?  I think a clue lies within Bill's phrase

are within the range of our unrestricted quantifiers.

The thought here might be that from

Caesar was a Roman (*)

we can infer, by existential generalisation,

∃x. x was a Roman, (**)

and translating this back into ordinary English we arrive at

There exists x such that x was a Roman. (***)

Echoing Ed Ockham here, I think this shows the perils of an uncritical formalisation.  The last assertion seems to have the imprimatur of formal logic behind it, yet it cannot follow from * for it claims that there is (present tense) someone who was a Roman, and the world's human population might have vanished by now.

The 'there exists' or 'there is' translation of ∃ is idiomatic of the mathematical language for which predicate calculus was developed.  But mathematical talk is untensed, taking place in an utterly static world.  If we want to apply the predicate calculus to the tensed statements of ordinary language in a changing world we need to be a little careful.  In this comment thread Ed Ockham suggests that we should translate (**) as

for some x, x was a Roman,

or indeed just

something was a Roman.

This works perfectly well for the eternal present of mathematics, and I suspect, for ordinary, tensed, language. So I throw down another challenge:  Can anyone offer an example where this interpretation leads to trouble?

Finally, a slogan:  Anti-presentism isn't a substantive metaphysical thesis.  It's a campaign to persuade us to use the word 'exists' in a different way.

Feser contra scientism—again

Ed Feser sees a post by Alva Noë on Thomas Nagel's recent book Mind and Cosmos as an opportunity for another diatribe against scientism.   By 'scientism' he seems to mean certain metonymic usages common in popular science writing whereby brains or other bits of the neural system are said to 'decide' or that genes are 'selfish'.  'Scientism' makes its first appearance about three quarters of the way through the article.  Ed quotes Noë

Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science…

The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn’t “give rise” to driving; driving isn’t something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car’s ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect. To be conscious is to have a world. The fact is, you and I don’t have what it takes to make a world on our own. We find the world, we don’t make it in our brains.

The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.

Ed then goes on to say

What Noë is here decrying is, essentially, what I have described elsewhere as scientism’s tendency to reify abstractions and to treat parts of substances as if they were substances in their own right, and his examples are more or less the same as the ones I gave there.  From the rich, concrete world of material objects presented to us in experience, which is characterized by colors, sounds, odors, [1] flavors, warmth, coolness, meanings and purposes, causal powers and liabilities, physics abstracts out its mathematical structure. [2] That is extremely useful for certain purposes and certainly captures aspects of what is really out there in the world.  But scientism treats this abstraction as if it were the concrete reality itself, and the entirety of that reality.  From concrete human beings, neuroscience abstracts out the nervous system [3] and makes of it the focus of study.  This too is useful for certain purposes, and is unproblematic as long as it is kept in mind that neural structures and processes can properly be understood only by reference to the whole organism of which they are a part. [4] Scientism, however, fallaciously tends to treat such structures and processes as if they were substances in their own right [5], and attributes to them activities -- “interpreting,” “perceiving,” “deciding,” etc. -- that can intelligibly be attributed only to the human being as a whole and not to any part, not even a neurological part.  (I’ve discussed various “neurofallacies” at greater length here and here.)

Scientism claims to be “reality based” but that is precisely what it is not.  It recognizes only aspects of reality, and in particular only those susceptible of study via its favored methods.   When those methods fail to capture some aspect of reality -- God, consciousness, intentionality, free will, selfhood, moral value, and so on -- scientism tends to blame reality rather than its methods, and to insist that the reality either be redefined so as to make it compatible with its methods, or eliminated entirely.

The Aristotelian, by contrast, insists upon recognizing the world as it really is, and adjusting method to reality rather than reality to method.  Hence while the methods appropriate to physics -- the construction of mathematical models that capture those aspects of material nature susceptible of strict prediction and control -- are certainly suitable for the study of some phenomena, they are not suitable for biology, psychology, ethics, metaphysics, or what have you.

As we’ve seen, in his most recent post, Noë writes:

The issue at stake is internal to science.  We have not yet integrated an account of ourselves into our understanding of nature.  And so our conception of nature itself is, or threatens to be, incomplete.

But the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had an account that integrated us into nature.  It is scientism, which abstracts out of nature everything that smacks of the human [6], that has created the problem of reintegrating us into it.  The solution is not a further application of its methods, which simply compounds the problem, but a realization that those methods are not the only ones available to us, and never were.  The work of Nagel, Noë, and Co. is evidence that that realization is increasingly to be found outside the circle of self-consciously Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophers. 

I'll adopt my usual method of a close critical reading of what Ed has written.  The underlined sentences, to my mind, stand out.

(1) Ed starts almost with an own-goal.  Concrete reality presents itself to us in experience.  Is it the reality or the experience that is characterised by colours, sounds, etc?

(2) What on Earth can Ed mean by the mathematical structure of the world? (or was it the experience?)  The mathematical structure.  Just the one?  Mathematics can be applied to a vast range of phenomena from the interactions of elementary particles to the dynamics of space-time itself, with engineering, ecology, and economics somewhere in the middle.  Nobody mistakes these abstract mathematical models for the concrete reality.  Perhaps what Ed is trying to say is that physics hypothesises that the material world is assembled from vast numbers of particles drawn from a small family of easily characterised types interacting through a small number of similarly characterised fields of force.  But no-one would ever claim that there is nothing more of interest to be said about the world, except perhaps shortly after the Big Bang.  

(3) I have trouble with Ed's use of abstracts out.  Neuroscientists sometimes dissect out (bits of) a nervous system but they regard this as a concrete entity that can be experimented with.  They may subsequently theorise that a nervous system can be treated as a network linking sensing elements (in sensory organs) to actuating elements (in muscles, say). If a significant amount of the behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans  with its 302 neurons can be explained by reference to this model then it would appear that we have a good understanding of the worm's nervous system.  That's scientific method. But no-one would mistake the model for the nerve cells themselves.

(4) What is meant by properly here? If it means completely, in the sense that no questions remain unanswered, then everyone would have to agree with Ed.  It's in the nature of abstractions that some aspects get left out.  But if it means legitimately then I disagree.   Valuable understanding can be had through abstractions and approximations.  Arguably all intellectual understanding is through abstractions.  If we can treat the vascular system in this way, why not the nervous system?

(5) Maybe Ed is using substance in a technical sense here.  In distinction with accident clearly a kidney is a substance, so why not a system of nerves?  The complaint that activities are ascribed to parts that can properly be ascribed only to wholes is a complaint against a metonymic usage that careful authors avoid.  Yet it's a chess-playing computer's program rather than its power supply that more properly decides on its next move, though both have a hand in the decision. Or perhaps this should not be called a decision at all? 

(6) Here Ed uses abstracts out in the opposite sense to his earlier usages.  Here he means discards as opposed to retains.

It's really disappointing that Ed Feser continues to bang away at the straw man of scientism whilst ignoring the problem that Nagel and others have put before us:  How are we to reconcile the Sellarsian manifest and scientific images?    True, Aristotelianism gives us an account of the human integrated with nature.  It does so by projecting the human onto nature.  The apparatus of matter and form, potentiality and actuality, teleology and cause invented to tame the unruly and complicated human world has nothing to offer us in our understanding of the strikingly simple world of the elementary particles.  It's no use saying, as Ed often does, that the scientific image results from some metaphysical error committed in the seventeenth century and if we would only repent this mistake all would be well.   For J. J. Thompson experimenting with cathode rays in the late 1890s, electrons were as real as billiard balls but profoundly simpler.  We are stuck with the scientific image and have to move forward with it.  Neither image can assimilate the other.  Hence we must unify them or continue to live with the duality.

The Thames valley

Bill and Lucas Novak have been discussing constituent ontology.  I wonder if the following analogy is relevant. The geology of South East England consists of clay overlying chalk overlying greensand. The layers have been raised up into two lines of hills and the clay thus exposed has been eroded away.


It makes sense to say that the chalkiness of the Chiltern Hills and the chalkiness of the North Downs are distinct property-instances. But it also makes sense to say that there is one underlying chalkiness appearing in two substances. It would seem that the world admits a duality of self-consistent descriptions and we can choose to use either. But we shouldn't mix them up.

Substance and reality

Bill has an interesting post here on the notions of reification and hypostatization in the course of which he says a couple of things which attracted my attention.

Firstly, he says

Or consider the internal relation being the same colour as. If two balls are (the same shade of) red, then they stand in this relation to each other. But this relation is an "ontological free lunch" not "an addition to being" to borrow some phraseology from David Armstrong. Internal relations have no ontological status. They reduce to their monadic foundations. The putatively relational fact Rab reduces to the conjunction of two monadic facts: Fa & Fb. To bring it about that two balls are the same colour as each other it suffices that I paint them both red (or blue, etc.) I needn't do anything else. If this is right, then to treat internal relations as real is to commit the fallacy of reification. Presumably someone who reifies internal relations will not be tempted to hypostatize them.

There seems something odd about this.  Let's suppose Armstrong is right.  Then the internal relation being the same colour as is not real and it's a fallacy to think it is.  Does this mean that the balls are not the same colour?  In what sense is the relation not real?  Is it imaginary?  Do relations fall into the exclusive categories of the real and the unreal?  I have to confess that I'm struggling to understand this.  Here's an argument in favour of the reality of being the same colour as:  it makes an existential commitment.   To say that a is the same colour as b is to say that there exists a colour C such that Ca & Cb.

Secondly, he says

To hypostatize is is to treat as a substance what is not a substance. So the relation I just mentioned would be hypostatized were one to consider it as an entity capable of existing even if it didn't relate anything. Liberals who blame society for crime are often guilty of the fallacy of hypostatization. Society, though real, is not a substance, let alone an agent to which blame can be imputed.

It struck me that the relation of crime to society is closely analogous to that of accident to substance.  One might say that (a) crime is an accident on society.   But if society is not a substance what 'ontological status' are we to grant to society and crime? 

On properties

In the brief discussion here Bill makes the point that one can assert (a)  black(x)-->coloured(x) without asserting black(x), or coloured(x) or indeed the existence of x.  This suggests to me that black(x)-->coloured(x) is not so much an extensional statement about some or all xs, but rather an intensional statement about the properties of blackness and colouredness, viz, that blackness subsumes (or includes) colouredness.    First order logic doesn't contemplate relations between properties, unfortunately.  However,  we can express them by projecting them down into relations over objects, as in (a) above.  Here the name x is a kind of 'dummy variable'.  But this seems inadequate.  Surely blackness subsumes colouredness even when there are no objects at all?

If we are to be realists about properties then I think we must contemplate such relations between properties.  But I don't want to interpret properties as sets of objects, as I think happens in second order logic.  I want properties to be a distinct category of entity.  That blackness subsumes colouredness would then follow from the nature of those two properties, independently of any objects instantiating them.  Can this be made to work?  Frege says no, I think.

I am starting to think of properties in terms of  ways in which (bits of) the world might be.  Such ways seem quite real to me, in the same sense of ways in which hands of cards might be dealt.  Some motivation for this idea can be found here.  It's interesting that modality makes an appearance right at the start of this.   

Here are a couple of principles I'd like to keep to the forefront.

First, there is no uniform sense in which a property inheres in an object.  One has only to consider colour, roughness, shape, smell, to see that these are quite distinct categories.   In each of these categories, inherence requires a distinct explanation.  This goes some way to accounting for the superficiality of constituent ontologies, for example, which as far as I can see say nothing about inherence.

Second, a realist theory of properties conceived in terms of possible arrangements will presuppose atomism.

Third, the discussion here on reductio ad absurdam shows that a pair of properties may be non-co-instantiable, though this may not be obvious on superficial inspection.   This should be explicable in terms of the structure of properties.

On reductio ad absurdum

Bill asks for an example of proof (of non-existence) by RAA that illustrates my contention that a subject-predicate assertion makes no existential claim.   Two arguments spring immediately to mind:  the mathematical proof that there can be no rational square root of two, and the astronomical argument that there can be no planet Vulcan.  These seem to me to have such similar structure that we  can treat them together.

Suppose, (H) there is a rational square root of two.  Then there is a pair of integers, p and q, that satisfy the following conditions: (a) p and q have no common factor apart from 1, and (b) p²=2q².  Condition (a) is the usual demand that a rational number p/q be expressed as a ratio of integers in lowest terms.  Condition (b) expresses the requirement that (p/q)²=2.  On the surface this looks unproblematic but a little digging reveals that (a) and (b) cannot both be satisfied.  From (b) it follows that p is even, since only the squares of even numbers are even, and (b) tells us that p² is even.  So p=2r, say, and (b) can be written as 4r²=2q², or (b') q²=2r².  But from (b') we infer that q is even, by the same argument that showed us p was even.  Hence both p and q are even.  That is, they have a common factor of 2, contradicting condition (a).  So from hypothesis H falsehood follows.  Ergo H itself is false and there is no rational square root of two.

Suppose, (H) there is a planet Vulcan.  Then (a) Vulcan is large enough to account by Newtonian gravitational principles for the observed anomalies in the perihelion of Mercury, and (b) Vulcan is small enough to be unobserved from Earth.  It follows from further calculations and plausible assumptions as to the mean density of the planet that the diameter of Vulcan is greater than some distance D, to satisfy (a), and also smaller than D, to satisfy (b).  Again, from hypothesis H falsehood follows. Hence H itself is false and there is no planet Vulcan.

What interests me in these arguments is the role played by the names p, q, r, and Vulcan.  It seems that these names are introduced on the strength of an existence assertion alone, and indeed an existence assertion which turns out to be false.  This however does not detract from the meaningfulness of the names.  For me this is a knock-down argument against any direct reference theory of proper names and makes such theories untenable.  Furthermore, a statement such as p is even that occurs within the argument cannot of itself include the assertion that p exists, or that something exists that satisfies the defining predicate associated with the name p.  Rather, there is in the background, as it were, an existence assertion on which p is even depends for its meaningfulness, but p is even does not of itself make this claim.  And as I find it hard to draw semantic distinctions between sentences occurring within explicit hypotheses and sentences occurring 'on the surface', I'm inclined to deny that a sentence like Max is black is making an existence claim.  Sentences ascribing predicates to named subjects should be man enough to own up to their own dependency on earlier sentences making existential claims.  The adolescent chest-beating that 'the thing I'm about really exists, I tell you!'  convinces nobody.

More on facts

This meditation is inspired by the Maverick's  The Problems of Order and Unity and Their Difference, an investigation into the structure of facts.

Bill's thought seems to run along the following problematic lines:

1. Relational facts such as the cat is on the mat have the form aRb where R denotes a dyadic relation and a and b denote objects.
2. Facts are complexes.
3. If two complexes differ then they differ in a constituent.
4. If R is antisymmetric then aRb and bRa denote distinct facts.
5. The constituents of both aRb and bRa are just R, a, and b.
6. How then do they differ?

In Bill's words:

So what, if anything, is the ontological ground of the difference between aRb and bRa when R is either asymmetrical or nonsymmetrical? This, I take it, the problem of order, or, in the jargon of Gustav Bergmann, the problem of providing an 'assay' of order. It may be that no assay is possible. It may be that the difference is a brute difference. But that cannot be assumed at the outset.

Let me start by admitting that I find the style of 'ontological analysis' that Bill goes in for rather alien and hard to engage with.   It presents a smooth, hard, exterior that offers no obvious points of entry.  Having said that, this post has been in draft for some time now, and as I'm laid low with the flu this weekend, perhaps this is a good moment to polish it off.

Bill gets into difficulties here, I think, because although he uses 'fact' to mean 'extra-linguistic state of affairs', his analysis above fails to get outside the world of language.  It would be more appropriate as an analysis of '(dyadic relational) factual statement' than as an analysis of what some such statement asserts.  However, at (5) he discards the one aspect of statements,  the spatial or temporal ordering of the words within them, that supports the distinction between statements aRb and bRa, to which he is committed.  Trouble ensues.

Bill has said several times that facts must have 'propositional structure'.   If facts were just shadows cast on the world by statements then this must be right.  But I am sufficiently a realist to think that there is more to it than this.  On the basis of this example alone I'm tempted by the counter-assertion that 'facts must have object-like structure'.   We have to suppose that there are higher-order objects built from ordinary objects.  Thus an on object consists of two objects, one in the above role and one in the below role.  To say that that the cat is on the mat is claim the existence of an on with the cat in above role and mat in below role.

I used to be a Presentist but now that's all in the past

Bill gets 2013 off to a flying start with a revamp of a late 2010 posting on presentism.  If he carries on like this I'll have plenty to comment on, though I'm a bit concerned for my blood pressure.

I'm not sure what the thesis of presentism is.  I took it to be the common or garden notion that Bill gets close to in the following:

He [the presentist] seems to be operating with a metaphysical picture according to which there is a Dynamic Now which is the source and locus of a ceaseless annihilation and creation: some things are ever passing out of being and other things are ever coming into being. He is not saying that all that is in being is all there ever was in being or all there ever will be in being. That is the lunatic thesis of the present-moment solipsist.

The presentist can be characterized as an annihilationist-creationist in the following sense. He is annihilationist about the past, creationist about the future. He maintains that an item that becomes past does not lose merely the merely temporal property of presentness, but loses both presentness and existence. And an item that becomes present does not gain merely the merely temporal property of presentness, but gains both presentness and existence. Becoming past is a passing away, an annihilation, and becoming present is a coming into being, a creation out of nothing.

I wouldn't want to talk about the temporal property of presentness.  It's too easy to slide into nonsense like Julius Caesar possesses the temporal property of pastness.  But let's put that quibble to one side.  Bill says that to be a substantive philosophical thesis presentism must avoid the trivial.  To that end he puts words into the presentist's mouth.  Examples:

1. [James, the actor] Dean does not presently exist at all
2. Dean does not presently exist at any time, past, present, or future.
3. It is presently the case that there are past times at which Dean does not exist.

For me, in (1) the presently and the at all are  redundant, but Bill insists one or both must be there to avoid triviality.  Bill then elaborates (1) into (2).  What can I say about this?  I suppose one might say this for a joking, exasperated kind of emphasis, but it's nonsense, isn't it? What could it possibly mean to say that Dean does not presently exist at any time in the past?  It's an absurd jumble of tenses.  Compare with Dean does not presently talk at any time in the past.  Finally Bill claims that (3) follows from (2).  You've heard of GIGO?  This is NINO.  (3), though, is not too distant syntactically from something  a presentist woud say, viz,

4. It is presently the case that there have been past times at which Dean did not exist.

Explaining the quantification over time in (4) is interesting but will have to wait for another day.  In the meantime  I'm happy to run aground on the Scylla of triviality.

Are there indexical facts?

My review of Bill Vallicella's articles on constituent ontology has led me to his category facts, and in particular to  Are There Indexical Facts? Are They a Threat to Materialism?   Here Bill retells Ernst Mach's account of stepping onto an omnibus after a tiring rail journey and catching sight of another man, who looks to Mach like a 'shabby pedagogue', doing just the same.  Moments later Mach realises that he sees his own reflection in a large mirror in the bus.

Here is what Bill says about this:

When Mach got on the bus he saw himself, but not as himself. His first thought was one expressible by 'The man who just boarded is a shabby pedagogue.' 'The man who just boarded' referred to Mach. Only later did Mach realize that he was referring to himself, a thought that he might have expressed by saying, 'I am a shabby pedagogue.'

Clearly, the thought expressed by 'The man who just boarded is shabby' is distinct from the thought expressed by 'I am shabby.' After all, Mach had the first thought but not the second. So they can't be the same thought. And this despite the fact that the very same property is ascribed to the very same person by both sentences. The difference emerges quite clearly if we alter the example slightly. Suppose Mach sees that the man who has just got on the bus has his fly open. He thinks to himself: The man who has just boarded has his fly open, a thought that leads to no action on Mach's part. But from the thought, I have my fly open, behavioral consequences ensue: Mach buttons his fly. Since the two thoughts have different behavioral consequences, they cannot be the same thought, despite the fact that they attribute the very same property to the very same person.

But if they attribute the same property to the same person, what exactly is the difference between the two thoughts?

He goes on to develop an argument roughly as follows:

There is a category of  first-person (indexical) thoughts that is distinct from third-person (non-indexical) thoughts.  These indexical thoughts are underpinned by indexical facts such the fact of DB's being me.  These facts are irreducibly real but not physically real.  Hence materialism, which claims that reality is exhausted by non-indexical physical facts, must be false.

I say roughly above  as  I find Bill's argument rather unclear;  readers will see that I have merely transcribed Bill's final paragraph.  But I would like to make the following comment.

Bill uses Mach's story to drive a wedge between indexical and non-indexical thoughts.   I am a shabby pedagogue is a distinct thought from The man who has just got on the bus is a shabby pedagogue.  Yet, Bill says, I and the man who has just got on the bus refer to the same individual and attribute the same property to that individual.  How then can they be distinct thoughts unless they are underpinned by distinct indexical and non-indexical facts? We have a number of ways open to us to reject this.  I think the simplest and most convincing is to deny that  I and the man who has just got on the bus refer to the same individual.  It's clear from Mach's account that he initially believed that two men got on the bus, himself at one end and another man at the other end.  If Mach spoke his thoughts out loud he would say something like this:  There are two men getting on the bus.  Myself, Ernst Mach, at one end and a second man at the other end.  The second man looks a shabby pedagogue.  This is a perfectly consistent story that could have been told by a third person (forgetting the myself) and that could have been true.  In it, the second man clearly does not refer to Ernst Mach.  If it were to do so the story-teller would be telling us that Mach was in two well-separated places at the one time.  But this is not a piece of magic realism fiction.  It's just a common or garden perceptual mistake with which we are all familiar.  Now one could argue that Mach really is seeing himself and therefore the other man must refer to Mach.  But this would suppose a causal connection between object and speech that was not mediated by belief and left no room for error, and it's clear that Mach believes there to be two men involved.  This belief is supported by Mach's prevailing belief that he is not a shabby pedagogue, whereas the other man is.  Sadly, this belief turns out to be false also.

In conclusion, this line of thought undermines the premise of Bill's anti-materialist argument that there is a distinct category of irreducibly indexical facts.   Bill's piece seems to have another argument for indexical facts which I'm not clear about yet.  So for the time being I will stop here.  More in another post perhaps.

Against Vallicellan facts

BV has been posting recently on constituent ontology so I have been reviewing his collection of postings on that topic.  One that caught my attention is Are Facts Perceivable? An Aporetic Pentad.  By fact Bill does not mean a true sentence or proposition, which would be my preferred usage.  Rather he means the situation or state-of-the-world that makes a proposition true.  In other words, its 'truth-maker'.  But this idea is problematic because the following pentad is inconsistent though each limb seems true.

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).   

where Rab denotes a relational truth between two objects a and b such as the table is against the wall or the cat is on the mat.  Bill discusses several ways out.  He regards (1) and (5) as all but unassailable and considers rejecting (2), (3), and (4) in turn,  though he finds objections to each of these moves.  He concludes

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

I'm not so sure.  It seems to me that Bill's non-standard definition of 'fact', like that of Russell's barber, is simply inconsistent.  Just as there can be no Russellian barber, so there can be no Vallicellan facts.  Why is Bill's usage non-standard?  Well, if someone demands "Give me the facts!" we usually take him to be expecting sentences about some salient matter, not bits of the world.  Indeed, Bill himself falls back to this common usage when he says in defence of (2)

But if there are no facts about observable things, then it is reasonable to hold that there are no facts at all. [my italics]

Surely it is sentences and other intentional items that are about things.  Bill's facts appear to contain or consist of things.  Now, if we want a category of entities that are both visible and consist of things, then we need look no further than visible things themselves, which I take to be objects.  Why not consider the assertion that the cat is on the mat to be an existence claim for a compound object consisting of the cat and the mat in a certain spatial relation?  After all, the existence of the cat itself is equivalent to the existence of various cat parts in specified spatial relations with one another, and if so then the boundary between objects and facts is rather arbitrary.  And if we can draw this boundary anywhere it would suggest that there cannot be a separate category of facts, assuming we accept already the category of objects. 

Bill argues in this piece (and elsewhere) that truth-makers must have a proposition-like structure for which Vallicellan facts are the natural candidates.  But does this follow?  Here is a possible counter-example:  suppose there are three line segments in the plane and that each of the six end-points is coincident with exactly one of the other end-points.  This appears to be a Vallicellan fact concerning line segments.  Yet we find it easier to say there is a triangle, ie, we assert the existence of an object.  Our understanding of the concept triangle includes an understanding of the requirement for pairwise coincident line segment end-points.

Common natures

Bill Vallicella has been discussing the Thomistic notion of a common nature in a number of recent posts:   Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication",  Lukáš Novák on Common Natures,  and, most recently, More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures.   Some years ago, prompted by a Catholic friend of long standing, I read Anthony Kenny's  Aquinas on Mind, and more recently, Ed Feser's Aquinas.  Both these authors give good introductions to Thomistic metaphysics.  But I struggle with both books largely because I can't engage with the basic metaphysics.  It's a little like the struggle one has with a mathematical theory when one hasn't fully absorbed some foundational theorem.  At least with the maths one can repeatedly go over the early material, work through examples, and eventually the light dawns.  Sadly, for me, the words the Thomists use have individual meanings but the sentences they comprise do not.  For example, we are told that the common nature felinity has  the mode of being esse naturale in the cat in front of me and also the mode of being esse intentionale in my mind as I contemplate the cat.   This leads us straight into an abstruse debate as to the 'ontological status' of felinity: is it universal or particular, one or many, or perhaps none of these characterisations?   But what does it mean to say that one and the same thing  has two 'modes of existence' open to it?  I use 'thing' loosely in the same sense that BV uses 'item'; it does not imply 'entity', though surely something that has a mode of being open to it counts as an entity?   Is  'being' seen here as an action subject to adverbial qualification?  Are we offered simple examples by which we might get clear as to the meaning of 'mode of being'?  I fear not.  I'm left with the feeling that 'mode of being' is term invented to give a quick and easy theory of mind.  How do I know the thing before me is a cat?  Simple, answers the Thomist, felinity exists in esse naturale in the cat and the self-same felinity also exists in esse intentionale in my mind.  Ergo, I see the thing as a cat, QED.  Leaving aside the question as to whether the co-presence of felinity in the cat and in my mind is sufficient for me to recognise the cat (how would mistakes be explained, for example, or the time taken to arrive at a decision on a borderline case) this seems to sweep all the difficulties under the 'modes of being' heading.  How are we to understand this?

Let me try to give my own interpretation of the Thomistic jargon.  I start by suggesting that a common nature such as felinity is to be understood as one of the ways (a bit of) the world could be, and, indeed, one of the ways bits of the world actually are.  Here 'way' is to be taken exactly in the sense that we say that Head, Tail, Tail is one of the ways that tossing three coins might turn out.  Or that there are eight such ways in all. Or that there are 635103559600 ways of dealing a 13-card hand from a standard deck of 52 cards.  I'm happy to give a description such as Head, Tail, Tail and assert that it is a way of ... and to make existential assertions such as there are eight ways of..., but I shall make no claims as to the 'ontological status' of such ways.  My view is that we understand this sense of way perfectly well and know what we mean when we assert their existence or count them. It's clear that ways are abstractions of a high order.  We aren't  interested in the size of the coins, what they are made of, where they land on the table, or their orientation.  Only that they have distinct faces that can be identified as Heads and Tails, and that some ordering is imposed on them, say the temporal ordering of their being tossed.  Again, I see no need to delve into the ontological status of abstractions.  It is enough that we understand the term.   I now say that 'felinity' is the name we give to one of the ways of arranging world-stuff into an object.  Just as we can say that a triple coin tossing conforms to the way called 'HTT',  so we can say that a lump of world-stuff conforms to the way called 'felinity'.  This is my translation of the Thomist's  felinity exists in esse naturale in the cat.  How do I know that the cat before me conforms to the way of felinity, the state that the Thomist expresses as felinity exists in esse intentionale in my mind?  One approach to this is to claim that ways have structure.  For example, a six-coin tossing can be seen as a three-coin toss followed by a second three-coin toss, so any way of tossing six coins is a pair of  ways of tossing three coins. (Mathematicians call this a Cartesian product).   Likewise, the way 'felinity' may be seen as a combination of lesser ways such as four-legged-ness, tailedness, sharp tooth and clawedness, and so on.  To recognise felinity I must recognise its component ways.  To recognise the component ways I must recognise their component ways, and so on recursively.  To avoid an infinitely deep recursion I must claim that certain elementary ways are recognisable without further recursion.   So an analysis of felinity into a tree-structure of lesser ways must be present in my mind and these lesser ways must be recognised in the object before me.  This, I claim, is what the Thomist must mean by a common nature existing in esse intentionale in my mind. 

Necessary existents

In a recent post Bill Vallicella mentions a paper Necessary Existents by Timothy Williamson, which I have taken a look  at.   Williamson discusses the following argument.

(1) Necessarily, if I do not exist then the proposition that I do not exist is true.
(2) Necessarily, if the proposition that I do not exist is true then the proposition that I do not exist exists. 
(3) Necessarily, if the proposition that I do not exist exists then I exist.
(4) Necessarily, if I do not exist then I exist. 
(5) Necessarily, I exist.

Williamson's penultimate paragraph runs thus:

There are few knockdown arguments in philosophy, and the foregoing argument for necessary existence is not one of them. Someone determined to reject its conclusion at all costs can surely reject one of its premises, perhaps by abjuring the very idea of a proposition. The argument is directed to those with more open minds, who are willing to rethink the status of its superficially implausible conclusion in the light of the argument itself and of the proposed metaphysics. The cost of rejecting a premise may be higher than the cost of accepting the conclusion.

But surely we can knock the argument down with a simple counter-example.  Let the possible worlds be rows of six balls randomly chosen from a bag containing three white balls and three black balls.  Let 'I' denote a run of three adjacent black balls.  Then there are possible worlds like WBWBWB in which I doesn't exist and hence I cannot be a necessary being. In fact, I exists in just four of the twenty possible worlds.

What is wrong with this?

Are singular existential denials indicative?

Why do we make statements like Vulcan doesn't exist or Pegasus never existed or there's no such person as Santa Claus?

One usage is in proofs of non-existence by reductio ad absurdum where such statements form the concluding line.  Such proofs start with an hypothesis that an object satisfying a certain condition exists, ∃x.Px, in first order logic. For convenience in the subsequent argument we give this object a name, N, say.  We then proceed to deduce a falsehood.  This often takes the form of first deducing p and then deducing ~p.  This is a classic contradiction.  We infer from this that the original hypothesis is false.  That is, that no object satisfies the condition.  And we usually express this by asserting N does not exist, using the name we attached to our hypothetical object.   Note that we are not obliged to use this form of words.  The formal conclusion of the argument is ~∃x.Px.  We do not need to say N does not exist at all.  It is merely a convenient informal shorthand.

Now, my contention is that all use of singular negative existentials is really shorthand for a general existential denial.  Sometime in the past the name was introduced to us as a label for some object satisfying a condition.  This is a case of existential instantiation. If  ∃x.Px is true then introduce a new logical constant, c, say, and by instantiation we have Pc.  Informally, c is a name for the object that witnesses the truth of ∃x.Px.  Of course, c may only be used within the scope of the hypothetical ∃x.Px, and this is made very clear in the 'proof box' method of presenting an argument.  In effect, until we arrive at the contradiction that denies us ∃x.Px, the proof box remains open.  This is how we live our lives.  We are in the midst of hundreds, maybe thousands of proof boxes opened with general existential hypotheses.  There was an ancient Greek thinker who wrote several texts highly influential on medieval and subsequent European philosophy.  Call him Aristotle.  Aristotle was an ancient Greek thinker who wrote several texts highly influential on medieval and subsequent European philosophy.  If it ever turns out that there was no such man we simply say Aristotle never existed.  Close proof box.

Why do I question whether these denials are indicative?  Well, a consequence of closing the proof box that allows us to infer  ~∃x.Px is that we must discard all the formulae deduced inside the box.  Some of these may be re-deducible outside the box, but certainly all those involving the constant c have to go.  c no longer has a referent.  So we have to throw away everything we thought we knew about this object.  Aristotle never existed  is actually an imperative rather than an indicative.

So I throw out a challenge:  find a use of a negative singular existential that does not fit this pattern.

There is no dead horse

Today, Bill has come up with what seems to me a confused and mistaken piece on the inadequacies of the Quinean thin theory.

First, he says, rightly, that the thin theory (or the principal version thereof) translates Something exists as

1. ∃x (x = x). 

He observes that this contains no non-logical terms and then goes on to ask

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

This seems to me a confusion.  What does he mean by 'pure logical syntax' or 'merely syntactical symbols'?  I would have thought a good reply would be to say that, since MPL does not regard exists as a predicate, it expresses exists through a special symbol, viz, '∃', and hence '∃' is more than 'merely syntactic', though again I don't appreciate quite what Bill means by this phrase.  My point is that existence is expressed within the core language of MPL and does not require a predicate symbol added on to the core.

Second, he introduces the universal quantification

2. ∀x (x=x),

saying that, on the thin theory, this translates Everything exists. He says that (2) is a logical truth (I agree) but then claims that (1) follows from (2) and uses this as a leg in an aporetic triad.  But there is no aporia because (1) does not follow from (2).  ∃xPx only follows from ∀xPx under the precondition that the domain is non-empty, ie, Something exists is true.

Thereafter things get more confused.  He says Everything exists cannot be translated as (2) because (2) is a necessary truth and hence its negation is necessarily false.  Yet its negation corresponds to  Something does not exist and this, according to Bill, is not necessarily false.  Now we have been here before.  To me this says There is something that does not exist.  Since I can't conceive of a world in which this could be true I regard it as necessarily false.  But Bill disagrees, I think.

Finally Bill argues that Nothing exists cannot be translated as Everything is not self-identical.  For Nothing exists is contingent whereas its translation, ∀x~(x=x), is necessarily false, he claims.  But this last claim is wrong.  ∀x~(x=x) is false when the domain is non-empty, ie, when something exists, and vacuously true when the domain is empty, ie, when nothing exists.  To see the latter, note that when the domain is empty there is no x available which could make ~(x=x) false.  Hence ∀x~(x=x) is contingent too.

The plane of logical syntax

In hist latest post on Quinean renditions of existential statements, Bill Vallicella argues that the so-called 'existential quantifier' of predicate calculus should be seen as a 'particular quantifier' acting against a background assumption of some set of existents.  Thus, '∃x.Cat(x)'  has to be understood as Of the things that there are, one of them is a cat.  The of the things that there are makes this assumption explicit.  Hence '∃' of itself, or rather the formula '∃x.Px', of itself, does not express existence, or at any rate, not the absolute notion of existence that Bill requires.  I think this is probably right, but it doesn't give Bill the result that he wants, because an 'ordinary language' understanding of existentials suffers from exactly the same problem. He says

If existence is to come into the picture, we have to get off the plane of mere logical syntax: there has to be some reference to the real world.

But this, I claim, is impossible, in both QuineSpeak and ordinary language.  The reason for this is that sentences must have meanings that are independent of the worlds in which they are said, though of course their truth values will vary across worlds.  This is why Some existing thing is a cat adds nothing to Something is a cat.  A fictional character cannot 'break out' of his fictional world and refer directly to the actual world merely by uttering the word existing.  If Frodo says Some existing thing is a hobbit he's talking about Middle Earth and he means this to be true.

We are stuck on the plane of mere logical syntax and we must settle for a relative understanding of exists.

Afterthought, Wednesday 22 August.

If I have got him right Bill is saying that the Quinean rendition requires the assumption there are some things in order for of the things that there are, one of them is a cat to make sense.  Well, suppose we allow ourselves to refer to the things with the caveat that there may be no such things at all.  Then one of the things is a cat allows us to infer there is at least one thing and hence there are some things. So the particular quantifier does after all carry a there are assertion.  Bill says

So to be perfectly clear, one must write:

Some existing thing is a cat. 

And now the explanatory circularity of the Quinean account is obvious.

But we have been here before in this discussion.  Bill is accused of introducing existing spuriously in order to create the appearance of circularity.  I simply cannot see any difference in meaning between Some thing is a cat and Some existing thing is a cat.

I met a Beverley Sister

Bill asks why I think the 'a' in my cubic polynomial example of the previous post is a proper name.  Perhaps by analogy with the following dialogue.

A: I met one of the Beverley Sisters last night.
B: Really! Which one?
A: I forget. Let's call her 'Bev'.
B: OK.
A: Bev said she was born in 1927.
B: Ah. Bev must have been Teddie or Babs.

The logical constant 'a' seems to play the same role as 'Bev' in the dialogue as argument to predicate functions/subject of predicates.  And though we never find out exactly which Sister man A met, it's clear that 'Bev' is essentially singular.   A met only one woman that night.

Univocity of 'exists'

Bill argues here that we cannot have univocity of 'exists' over singular and general existential statements without the monstrosity of haecceities.  I'm not convinced.

Consider the cubic polynomial p(x)=x**3-7x+6 over the real numbers.  p(3)=12 and p(-4)=-30 so by the intermediate value theorem p has a real root: ∃x.p(x)=0.  Denote this root by 'a'.  Now 'a exists' is surely true.  But this, despite the proper name 'a', has to be understood as a general existential claim---the concept 'real root of p' is instantiated---since this is all we know about a.  So we have univocity of 'exists'.  Yet we don't pay the price of a haecceity property that uniquely captures a-ness.  There can be no such haecceity because a could be any of -3, 1, or 2.

Bill persists in seeing things in terms of theories of existence.  I have increasingly come to see it as a question of how proper names are introduced into discourse, and how they subsequently work.  I'm much influenced here, of course, by Ed Ockham's story-relative theory of reference.  See here, and especially here.

Horses exist

Today BV asks whether 'exists' could be a non-distributive predicate, as apparently advocated by Peter van Inwagen.   Horses exist might be analogous to Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.  But we think not. There seems to be nothing about existing that requires that it be done collectively:  A horse exists seems perfectly meaningful.

A minor point.  Bill introduces  are becoming extinct as a distributive predicate.  I'm not sure.  Does it make sense to say Some bald eagles are becoming extinct,  that is, becoming extinct is what some definite group of concrete bald eagles might do?  That's not quite the right sense of extinct.  Bald eagle here I think refers to the species bald eagle.  As in The bald eagle is becoming extinct.  So becoming extinct may be a predicate that applies to concepts.  This would lend support to the Fregean idea that exists is a predicate that applies to concepts too.

What about Horses are four-legged? Bill says this is distributive.  Again, not so sure.  Horses here doesn't seem to refer to any specific group of horses that four-legged could distribute over.  Without an article or a quantifier or a demonstrative,  horse seems to refer to the species.  We should read this as The concept horse is subordinate to the concept four-legged.

We should distinguish between the intensional Horses are four-legged and the extensional (and contingent) All horses are four-legged.  The former says that the concept four-legged is part of the content of the concept horse, so that any horse, past, present, or future, must have four legs.  The latter, at least in its predicate logic rendering, says that every horse happens to be four-legged.  Perhaps the latter is, in fact, somewhat ambiguous, and could be given the intensional interpretation.  However, I'd say that All the horses are four-legged is definitely extensional, referring to every horse in some salient context implied by the the.

Bill's conclusion in this piece is, once again, aporetic.  Having ruled out the Fregean second-level understanding of exists he finds arguments against exists as a first-level distributive predicate and as a first-level non-distributive predicate.  This seems to leave just one possibility:  that the role of exists is not predicative at all.  But we await Bill's next post eagerly.

God and Abraham

Bill argues here that the sentences used to express his notion of 'modes of being', in particular, the notion of existing dependently on another being, as ordinary things may be said to depend on God, cannot be given a Quinean regimentation.

Bill introduces the QuineSpeak predicate letter 'D' to translate the English predicate '---depends for its existence on---'.  So, if 'a' is the QuineSpeak name for Abraham, say, and 'g' for God, then the QuineSpeak wff 'Dag' translates 'Abraham depends for his existence on God'.  The QuineSpeak is no more or less than a compressed version of the English.  Bill then goes on to say

To translate the target sentences into QuineSpeak one has to treat the presumably sui generis relation of existential dependence of creatures on God as if it were an ordinary external relation.  But such ordinary relations presuppose for their obtaining the existence of their relata. 

This is where he loses me.  Why have we moved from talk of predicates into talk of relations? And what extra leverage does Bill find in relations that cannot be found in predicates?

Suppose the world consists of just God and Abraham (and they are distinct).  Then the only truth of the form 'Dxy' is 'Dag'.  All the other sentences of this form, viz,  'Daa', 'Dgg', 'Dga', are false.  Or, in relation talk, the only element in the relation D is (a,g).  And before God created Abraham there was no truth of the form 'Dxy' and the relation D was empty.  Where is the problem with this?

Some polygon is triangular

In  yesterday's post Bill Vallicella reiterates his insistence that though they are logically equivalent there is nevertheless a semantic distinction between 'Some cat is fat' and 'A fat cat exists'.   Clearly expecting the answer No he asks the rhetorical question Does 'Some unicorn is angry' require by its very sense that an angry unicorn exists?  Since for me the answer is an immediate and obvious Yes I have been racking my brains trying to understand how we can possibly differ on this.  Here is what I have come up with.

Let me change our example.  Suppose the possible worlds are sheets of paper on which are drawn polygons (or should that be polylaterals?)  So the only objects are triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, etc, of various sizes and orientations.  Consider a particular sheet.  If it's true to say (of this sheet) 'A triangular polygon exists' then it's true to say (again of this sheet) 'Some polygon is triangular'.  Conversely, if it's true (of this sheet) that some polygon is triangular then it's true (of the sheet) that a triangular polygon exists.  This shows the logical equivalence of  'A triangular polygon exists' and 'Some polygon is triangular'.  Logical equivalence is an extensional notion.  Our sentences have to agree in truth value on every possible sheet.  Indeed, the only way to assign a truth value to 'A triangular polygon exists' is by reference to a particular sheet.  In contrast, there does seem to be a reading of 'Some polygon is triangular' that makes it a conceptual truth, independent of any possible world.  We have to see it as saying that the concept Polygon is compatible with the concept Triangle.  By this I mean that there is nothing in the two concepts that rules out an object falling under both.  Or, modally, it is possible that an object be both a polygon and a triangle.  Or, in medieval spirit, 'Some Polygon is Triangle'.  So, although we might see 'Some polygon is triangular' as conceptually true it doesn't follow that in any given world that there exists a triangular polygon.  And this, I suggest, is the source of the asymmetry between our some-sentence and our exists-sentence that Bill notes here.

We can also give a non-extensional, non-quantificational reading to 'all'.  'All Triangle is Polygon' says that the concept Triangle is subordinate to the concept Polygon.