On Substitutivity

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On Substitutivity

The idea of substituting one expression for another has played a key role in logical and semantic studies. In particular, the idea of substituting terms with the same reference has featured prominently: can this always be done without changing the truth-value of the sentence in which the terms occur? Is such substitution ever truth-value disruptive? The consensus has been that it can be, for example when substituting into belief contexts. Thus, the convention has arisen of calling some contexts “referentially transparent” and some “referentially opaque”. The distinction has been thought to be binary, not divisible into finer distinctions. I think this is a mistake; it misses important differences. There are at least four kinds of case to consider, each with distinctive properties and varying explanations. Specifically, there are three types of opacity, which deserve different names; at least two of them exhibit their own kind of transparency—they are not fully opaque. Let’s accept, for the moment, that there are no other kinds of transparency wider than the usual kind; we can then ask whether there are degrees or grades of opacity, i.e., departures from full transparency.

First, consider modal, causal, and explanatory contexts: just how opaque are these? Suppose I say “The king of England is necessarily a king”, giving the modal operator wide scope: that is clearly true, analytically so. But it is not true if we substitute “Charles Windsor” for “the king of England”—hence the context is not referentially transparent. Can we substitute any other expression for the description and obtain a truth? Yes, if we restrict the substituted terms to those that make reference to kinghood: “the male monarch”, “the male head of the church of England”, “the male hereditary ruler of an independent state”, etc. The germane consideration is that the property of being a king necessarily implies being a king (or a monarch more generally); it doesn’t matter whether anyone knows or believes this to be so—it is not dependent on how kings are thought of or mentally represented. It is a modal fact that obtains independently of how anyone thinks (compare “the successor of 2 is a number”). So, this context is less transparent than other contexts (such as negation) but more transparent than belief contexts. In honor of this fact, I will say that it is a translucent context—somewhat transparent, not completely opaque. The same holds for causal contexts: they are not fully transparent, but they are not as opaque as belief contexts either. For example, it can be true to say “The batsman is unconscious because the cricket ball hit him in the head”, but not true to say “The batsman is unconscious because the red ball hit him in the head”. The reason is that a cricket ball is always of a certain hardness and weight but a red ball isn’t—even if the cricket ball is in fact red. Being a cricket ball is causally relevant but being a red ball isn’t. This is even clearer if the context is explicitly explanatory: the explanation of the batsman’s unconsciousness is his being hit by a ball of a certain density and weight not the fact that the ball was red. We can substitute any description for the original description if it preserves reference to the causally relevant properties of the missile (“the heavy hard sphere travelling at 60 mph”), even if no one has any beliefs about these descriptions. The context is somewhat transparent, but not as transparent as a negation context—yet it falls short of the opacity of a belief context. It is transparent with respect to causally relevant explanatory properties, though not with respect to objects as such.

Belief contexts, as already implied, are opaquer than modal, causal, and explanatory contexts, because they bring in mental representation—ways of conceiving things, modes of presentation, concepts, perspectives. But they are not fully opaque, because they do allow some latitude for substitution—they don’t resist all substitutions. Thus, we may substitute synonymous terms within their scope: they are transparent with respect to sense. We could describe them as “semi-opaque” (or “semi-transparent”). Their substitutivity properties fall between full transparency and translucency, on the one hand, and a yet stricter kind of opacity, on the other. This third kind of opacity belongs to quotational contexts: they won’t even allow substitution of synonyms—you can only substitute terms that refer to the same terms (words, bits of language). These contexts may be called “hyper-opaque”, though simply calling them “opaque” would not be semantically amiss given that that word connotes an absolute condition. We have already concluded that belief contexts are not maximally opaque given their openness to synonyms—hence “semi-opaque”. So, we now have a four-way distinction: transparent, translucent, semi-opaque, and opaque (or hyper-opaque). It is a not a binary business, an all-or-nothing affair. Contexts are transparent with respect to this or that class of possible substitutions, opaque to one degree or another, not rigidly either one of the other. This is because words have a range of entities associated with them: references (objects in the world), aspects of objects (mind-independent properties), senses of words (ways of representing the world), and the words themselves (marks, sounds, states of the brain). The old extensional-intensional dichotomy is too simple.

Once we have made these distinctions in the case of singular terms, we can extend the apparatus to whole sentences. Some contexts (“and”, “not”) are truth-functional; some are fact-functional (“necessarily”, “because”, “explains”); some are sense-functional (“believes” and other propositional attitude verbs); and some are inscription-functional (direct speech, quotation). Being truth-functional has no special status on this way of looking at things; it is just an extreme type of truth-value dependence, i.e., any sub-sentence with the same truth-value can be substituted for the original without changing the truth-value of the whole. Some contexts permit a broader range of substitutions salva veritate than others: that is all. It isn’t some kind of special property of truth-values, as opposed to facts or senses, that renders them more respectable or pellucid. Nor are truth-functional contexts in any way superior because of their substitutional liberality: for all contexts have their own distinctive substitutional profile. It is true that the words “transparent” and “opaque” have different connotations, evaluatively speaking: transparency is “good”, opacity is “bad”—especially when it comes to discourse (not so much for clothes). But that is just an accident of terminology; it’s all the same merit-wise. We should be substitutivity egalitarians.

I have left till last a more startlingly unorthodox suggestion (the reader needed some softening up first). What about extending the concept of transparency beyond its normal bounds? To this end, I shall introduce the notion of extended extension: a given term extendedly refers not just to its normal referent but to a wider range of referents, e.g., any twin of the normal referent. This will allow a wide range of substitutions to retain truth-value, since most of what is true of an individual will also be true of its twin. In a universe consisting of Leibnizian pairs (indiscernible but numerally distinct individuals) everything true of one twin will be true of the other, so we can substitute one twin’s name for the other and not disrupt truth-value. The names will be transparent with respect to duplicates. This seems like a definable idea and it substantially expands the range of possible substitutions. Transparent contexts will be doubly transparent in this universe—hyper-transparent. We could also employ the distinction between objects and the matter that composes them, as in the statue and the piece of bronze that composes it. Again, nearly everything true of one will be true of the other, so substitution will be well-nigh universal. Thus, the simple dichotomy between transparent and opaque contexts yields to a more generous understanding of the semantic phenomena. This opens up new possibilities concerning formal models and interpretations, i.e., assignments of elements from a chosen domain. I rather warm to the idea of fourfold functions from domains onto the formalized language: objects, aspects, senses, and words themselves. Full substitutivity will hold with respect to each subdomain.[1]

[1] Informed readers will discern elements of Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Quine, and others in this paper. In general, I am promoting greater inclusiveness in formal semantics. Many types of entity are relevant to semantic functioning. Jungle, not desert, landscapes.

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Annoying Morality

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Annoying Morality

Given its importance, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about morality. I don’t mean its alleged subjectivity or relativity, which is more puerile than profound, still less the existence of metaethical controversy; I mean its fragmentary and unsystematic character. It appears as a list of injunctions with no unifying principle underlying them. This is a well-known complaint, so I don’t need to expatiate on it: the miscellaneous list of deontological rules, the consequentialist additions and amendments, the need for separate principles of justice. There are 10 commandments, but why 10 and not 14 or 2 or 23? The usual list concerning lying, stealing, killing, promise-breaking, committing adultery, betraying friends, ingratitude, contract-breaking, et cetera, seems woefully heterogeneous, and refuses to submit to unification or even simplification, despite some valiant efforts. Even utilitarianism consists of two non-equivalent principles, concerning harm and benefit, where one (the no-harm principle) doesn‘t entail the other (the maximize well-being principle). Considerations of justice complicate the picture still further, not being reducible to anything more primitive. There are many things we must not do, and likewise for what we must do. Some say it all comes down to one rule—treating people (and animals?) as ends in themselves, not violating the social contract, maximizing utility, obeying God, conforming to societal norms—but none of these stands up to scrutiny. Moral pluralism seems to be the inescapable predicament—a lamentable lack of system, order, and organization (where is the moral analogue of Peano’s axioms?). What is worse, this lack of unity breeds moral conflicts, dilemmas, and quandaries: one department of morality suggests one thing, another suggests another, with no resolving principle in sight. The poor moral agent is left struggling with a heap of different commands, cognitively overburdened, unable to think straight, confused and bewildered. It’s all so complicated, so messy, so all-over-the-place![1]

Prudence is different. Here things are pretty straightforward: there isn’t a lot to learn, to remember, to take into consideration. It’s mainly a matter of consequences: don’t harm yourself in the future; act so as to make your future self happy. You don’t need to worry about not treating yourself justly, not lying to yourself, not stealing from yourself, not betraying yourself, not committing adultery with yourself, and so on. Just don’t ignore your future self’s welfare—who could forget that? You may not always act prudently, but at least you know clearly and simply what you should do. But morality is not like that—not by a long chalk. Prudence is part of morality, to be sure, but morality contains a whole lot more, and it is thorny stuff—taxing, sometimes confounding. How can we teach all this to children? How do we navigate it in the heat of the moment? How can we keep our conscience clear with all this junk to think about? Some religions preach love as the unifying formula, but that is hopelessly limited, unrealistic, and prone to lapses from strict ethical correctness. It is appealing in its simplicity and sentimentality, but it fails to measure up to the complexities of the moral life. The fact is that morality is intolerably many-sided, splintered, and polymorphous. It seems cobbled together. This has consequences. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if morality had a sleek and simple nature—where one rule encompassed everything moral? Then everyone would be clear about what they ought to do—what morality requires of them. Wouldn’t this reduce moral laxity and moral skepticism? Because, frankly, the complexity is annoying, irritating, maddening—it makes you want to scream sometimes. It’s just so hard. It’s a pain to have to think about, a drag on the spirit. Even the smartest people get tripped up by it. You always feel that you might have missed something, and you frequently have. Why did God have to make it so bloody complicated, given that he wanted us to obey it? And it fuels the moral nihilists among us, who would be happy to get rid of morality entirely—who needs the hassle? Human life would be a great deal easier if morality were more straightforward.

Why do we even speak as if morality were a single unitary thing? Doesn’t this encourage simple-minded moral monism? Why not admit that so-called morality consists of heterogeneous subdepartments—moral maxims, future consequences, justice and injustice? At least let’s acknowledge that it isn’t a clean-limbed monolith but a museum of monuments of varying ages and pedigrees—a type of zoo. Also, teach it in schools like any other difficult subject of study; don’t expect everyone to get the hang of it by trial and error with no explicit instruction. It’s too academically demanding for that. Bit of history, bit of anthropology, some literature, lots of philosophy, examinations, the works. There could be an A-level in it. As things stand, morality is a haphazard collection of disparate ideas bundled together into a kind of disorganized heap. The ordinary mortal needs help finding his or her way through it.[2]

[1] W.D. Ross’s moral system (if that is the word) is agreeably realistic in its avowed pluralism, but it is complicated and far from algorithmic (“prima facie duties”). It represents the actual nature of moral thought, not some philosopher’s idealization. But it is intellectually far from readily graspable; and it doesn’t translate smoothly into right action. Still, I think it is the best moral philosophy we have. See The Right and the Good (1930).

[2] In my experience people’s moral expertise differs dramatically, and their level of moral complacency. Mostly people are just too simple-minded, too morally lazy. Professors are no exception. Moral thoughtfulness is a rare commodity. It takes work, patience, and dedication.

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“Inner” and “Outer”

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“Inner” and “Outer”

It is with some reluctance that I undertake a discussion of an obscure and elusive topic: what philosophers mean by “inner” and “outer”, if anything. There is a cluster of putative distinctions surrounding the mental: internal and external, private and public, subjective and objective, mental and physical, spiritual and corporeal, inner and outer. I shall only be discussing the last of these; I mean to cast no aspersions on the others. These are distinct distinctions, as the words used indicate, some more viable than others. I am concerned with the alleged distinction between the property of being inner and the property of being outer, construed as both ontological and phenomenological (so distinct from the property of intersubjective knowability or observability). What does it mean to say that the mind is something inner while the material world is something outer? It clearly doesn’t mean the same as the distinction between being internal and external in the spatial sense: that distinction applies to facts about the body—what is spatially within it and spatially outside of it. The heart and brain are within it (“internal”) while clothes and houses are outside it (“external”). But the heart and brain are not “inner”—they are “outer”. Only the mind is inner, not the internal organs of the body.

What does the dictionary have to say about “inner”? The OED (Shorter) gives: “situated (more) within or inside; (more or further) inward; internal”. This is intended to capture such uses as “inner sanctum”, “inner recesses”, “innertube”, “inner regions”, “innermost”, “inner circle”, “inner workings”—not the nature of the mind as an “inner” reality. We also are given “close to the center” by the OED (Concise), also intended in the spatial sense—central as opposed to peripheral. This distinction makes perfect sense, but it is not the distinction as intended by psychologists and philosophers of mind. The mind is not being conceived as closer to some center than the body or the material world outside the body (literally, spatially). Nor do philosophers want to allow for gradations of innerness, as in “more inner”—the mind is not “more inner” than the body. And what exactly is it inside of—the body, the self? No, the idea is that the mind is inner intrinsically, as a matter of its very nature, as material objects are intrinsically extended, or numbers are intrinsically abstract—it isn’t more or less inner relative to some containing entity. If so, shouldn’t the property be phenomenologically detectable—part of everyday consciousness? But do I experience my mind as inner? Does it strike me as something inner? It is hard to know what this might mean, but in so far as it means anything the answer would appear to be no. It strikes me neither as inner nor as outer; it just strikes me as there. For relative to what would it be inner? What center is it closer to? In what sense of “closer”? Granted, material objects strike me as outer relative to my body—both are objects situated in space—but what does it mean to say they each strike me as outer relative to my mind? It isn’t an object in space that other objects could stand in spatial relations to. By the same token, my mind doesn’t strike me as inner relative to objects of perception, because it stands in no spatial relation to those objects (phenomenologically). It doesn’t feel somehow inner. My heart feels inner in relation to my arms or the chair I am sitting in, but my mind doesn’t feel inner in these ways—I don’t perceive it that way, or otherwise so apprehend it. Thus, this alleged innerness is not a phenomenological datum, not a part of one’s normal self-awareness. How then could its ascription be ontologically true—how could the mind be ontologically inner and yet not phenomenologically inner? How could it be inner without my knowing it? Why would we even talk this way if there was no phenomenological basis to the distinction? The natural conclusion, then, is that there is no such property as innerness (and none of outerness either, except in the innocuous “outside my body” sense).

Why do we talk this way if it has no basis in fact? Well, there is a use of “inner” and “inside” that does apply to the mind, as when I say that my beliefs and desires are inside my mind (not outside it)—that they are inner constituents of my mind. In this sense my mental states are “internal” to my mind not “external” to it. And surely, I do experience my mental states as inner parts of my mind, constituents of it, elements within it. Is thatwhat we mean by calling the mind inner? There are two points about this. The first is that there is no entailment from “beliefs are inner parts of the mind” to “the mind is inner”. That is a simple non sequitur: parts can be inner to the thing they are parts of without the whole thing itself being inner to anything, or nothing. Second, the same locution applies to material objects and their parts: the parts of an engine are internal to it (“inner” relative to the engine), but neither they nor the engine are themselves inner—unless parts of something larger. So, there is no basis here for grounding the concept of the inner, construed as a property of the mind considered in itself. This is just another way of talking about the part-whole relation and has no bearing on the supposed inner nature of the mind. The mind is neither inner nor outer; it simply is. The distinction between what is internal to the person and external to the person, where this coincides with the boundaries of the body, is perfectly intelligible and real; but the philosophical inner-outer distinction looks like a myth, a conceptual snarl-up. It is also true that we have a private-public distinction in good standing, but this epistemological distinction is not identical to the inner-outer distinction—neither entails the other. I don’t even experience my mind as analogous to the inner chambers of a building, because there is no contrast analogous to the spatial relation between periphery and center. I do have what I am pleased to call an “inner life”, but this means nothing more than that I have a mental life in addition to an organic physical life. The word “inner” just means “mental” or “psychological” or “spiritual”; it does not connote anything beyond these terms. Interestingly, the OED gives as its second definition of “inner”, “designating the mind or soul; mental; spiritual”, thus regarding the word as simply synonymous with those terms—in which case “the mind is inner” means “the mind is the mind”. It is obvious that philosophers intend more than a tautology when characterizing the mind as “inner”, but it is unclear whether there is anything more they can mean. It looks as if language has been playing tricks on them, mixing up one “language game” with another (architecture and psychology). Yet it is a trick that has proved remarkably tenacious. It is hard to think of the mind as not inner (in some nontrivial sense of the term).[1]

[1] One might think that since the mind is not conceived as in space (whether or not it really is) it is impossible for it to be outer, so it is “inner” by default.  But this is obviously wrong, because not being in space does not entail being inner in any sense (if anything, being inner implies some sort of spatiality); numbers are not in space but not intuitively inner in any way. It is really tremendously obscure what this talk of the inner amounts to. The plain fact is that I experience my mind as neutral with respect to the inner-outer axis; it is simply present. It is not experienced as within anything—the body, the soul, the cosmos. That is why idealism is thought possible.

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Is Language in the Head?

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Is Language in the Head?

It has been said that meaning is not in the head, but is language in the head? A naïve response to this odd question might be: “Well, no, because language is speech and speech is in the mouth and throat”. Technically, the mouth is in the head, of course, but the question is really asking whether language is in the brain. The speech organs are not in the brain, so speech is not in the brain, i.e., the sounds that come out of a person’s mouth. A person would not be speaking English, say, if the sounds they made were not the sounds characteristic of English, but of Chinese, even if their brain were in the same state as that of an English speaker (suppose the articulatory organs have been artificially hooked up to a Chinese voice generator). However, if the brain were identical, it would be sending motor commands to the speech organs identical to those sent by an ordinary English speaker, so to that extent the language would be English. And the language employed in silent soliloquy would clearly be English. The speech organs merely externalize internal linguistic operations; they are not what the language fundamentally is.[1] The syntax of the language would also be in the head (brain), even if the articulatory organs were unable to externalize this syntax. Perhaps we are under some sort of perceptual illusion as to the location of language, brought on by the fact that we hear the sounds of language and see the speaker moving his or her lips; but really, language is located in the brain machinery behind these outer manifestations. After all, a person might be a master of English even if the speech organs don’t function at all (and he or she cannot perform the acts of a sign language). Language exists in the brain (e.g., Broca’s area) not in the motor systems by which it is externalized in communication. Speech acts are not the essence of language (unless we mean internal speech acts). A brain in a vat could have mastery of a language, possibly under the illusion of performing speech acts with mouth or hands. Language is like thought in this respect: thought too has modes of externalization (speech and other bodily actions), but these are not the essence of thought. Thought is in the brain, if anywhere, not in the body that expresses thought (and may fail to in cases of paralysis). Only dogmatic behaviorism could deny these virtual truisms. By all means say that speech is the embodiment of language, its vehicle in acts of communication, its overt manifestation, but don’t say that language is speech, i.e., the sounds and marks (let’s not forget writing) produced by the body. Obviously, a machine that merely replicates the sounds of English doesn’t know English. Language is in the human head not in the atmosphere (where soundwaves reside). Nor is it in the hand motions of speakers of Sign. Language is in the head as electricity is in atoms—not in the effects of electricity that we observe. Howlanguage exists in the brain is still a subject of study, and presents many mysteries, but that it does is scarcely deniable. We should therefore be internalists about language. Linguistics and philosophy of language are really discussing an internal property of the human animal not the bodily events that provide the external medium of linguistic expression (the externalization of language mastery). It is acceptable to talk as if speech is the subject of interest, given that it is publicly available and acts as a vehicle of language, but we should not make the mistake of identifying language with speech. And remember that inner speech is itself just another manifestation of language not its indispensable essence. Performance isn’t competence, here and elsewhere.

In the light of the above, we might want to revisit externalism about meaning: is it to be supposed that language is in the head but meaning is not? That sounds fishy, fantastical. First, let’s formulate the thesis more precisely. Instead of saying “in the head” we should say “in the person”: for it might justly be complained that it is a category mistake to say that meanings are in the head; rather, they are attributes of the person (same for language). Then the question is whether meaning is an internal property of the person or an external property—intrinsic or relational (compare being bipedal and being married). Second, we need to clean up the usual formulation of the twin earth thought experiment: so-called twin earth is not a twin of earth but rather a very similar (but not completely similar) variant of earth. This is because “twin” earth contains XYZ not H2O, these being distinct substances that happens to look alike. A real twin is not just a superficial copy but a deep copy—same DNA, same anatomy, a precise duplicate. But twin earth is not an exact duplicate of earth but a partial duplicate, given the difference in its liquid content. A genuine twin planet could not produce a difference of meaning for “water”. We do better to speak of a sister planet—very similar in outward appearance but not the same through and through. Nor is it necessary to the thought experiment to suppose that the planet is otherwise precisely identical to earth; all that is necessary is that “water” designates different substances on the two planets. Indeed, it is not required that we imagine two planets; two sides of this planet will do fine.

But these are minor emendations compared to the main defect in the usual formulation: the thought experiment doesn’t demonstrate that all of meaning is not in the person, only that some of it isn’t.[2] The same goes for the extension of the thesis from meaning to mind: some of the mind is not in the person as an intrinsic non-relational property, but it doesn’t follow that all is.[3] In fact, upon closer analysis we have the much more modest result that the meaning of only some expressions is (only partially) not in the person, namely those that have a demonstrative component (ordinary natural kind terms like “water”). To put it baldly, all we have is the thesis that linguistic context is not in the person—for example, the fact that one object or kind and not another is being pointed to in a given case of reference fixing (“that liquid”). And that is a truism: in this sense perception is not in the person, being determined by causal context. Nor is knowledge located solely within the person (though partially it is), simply because knowledge requires truth. Given that context helps to fix reference for indexical expressions, it of course follows that an aspect of meaning isn’t located in the person (what Kaplan calls “content”)—he or she is located in the context. The context is external to the person and it helps to determine the reference of “water”; so, neither meaning nor mind is wholly within the person. But this isn’t a remarkable metaphysical discovery but rather a platitude dressed up as a startling new insight. It is certainly a truth worth knowing, and admits of solid demonstration, but it isn’t a radical new view of meaning and mind. Yes, two persons can be in the same intrinsic condition and refer to distinct objects with the same indexical term—but that is hardly surprising, given context-dependence. And terms like “water” can be semantically tied to such demonstrative reference via the act of reference-fixing, but that too is not a startling discovery about where meaning and mind are located. For it is entirely compatible with the claim that nearly allof meaning and mind are located within the individual—are completely “individualistic”. The cash-value of “meanings aren’t in the head” is simply “indexical reference is context-dependent”—big effing deal!

Thus: language is in the head, and meaning is mainly in the head. Syntax (grammar) is in the head and so is phonetics, if we mean “voice commands from the brain to the articulatory apparatus”. The lexicon is also in the head, though words can be overtly pronounced on occasion. The meaning of most words is wholly in the head (person), though some words have an indexical component that brings in context. Persons are equipped with an elaborate internal mental apparatus that they bring to the world; but they are also placed within the world, and that provides a linguistic context that can select a particular object as reference. This is all reassuringly obvious and distills the basic truths that have emerged from discussions of internalism and externalism.[4] The rhetoric has outpaced the logic.[5]

[1] I am with Chomsky on this (the “I-language” etc.). See chapter 1 of What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016).

[2] See my Mental Content (1989) for a detailed discussion.

[3] Can we say that meaning is in the mind? I don’t see why not, even if meaning is not in the person, since the boundaries of the person correspond to the boundaries of the body (roughly). Neither mind nor meaning are (completely) in the person, though they are attributes of the person (partially relational attributes).

[4] I am thinking of Kripke, Putnam, Donnellan, Kaplan, Burge, myself, and others.

[5] To be clear, I think opponents of externalist thought experiments are mistaken, but the externalist thesis is far less momentous than has sometimes been supposed. A modest form of externalism is trivially true—but still true, which is not nothing.

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The Journal of Philosophical Philosophy

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I hereby perform the following performative: :”I hereby name this blog “The Journal of Philosophical Philosophy”. There, done. I am the editor and sole contributor (aside from such comments as I deem worthy of inclusion). That wasn’t so difficult.

 

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Existence and Non-Existence

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Existence and Non-Existence

We have puzzled over the nature of existence and the nature of non-existence, but we don’t ask how these two categories relate to each other. Does one entail the other? Not in the sense that if something exists then it doesn’t exist, and vice versa, but in the sense that if one thing exists then other things must not exist, and vice versa. If certain things exist in a possible world, must there also be other things that don’t exist in that world? And if certain things don’t exist in a possible world, must there also be things that do exist in that world? Could there be a world of pure existence (no non-existence), and could there be a world of pure non-existence (no existence)? For example, is there a world which contains the usual existent planets but no non-existent planets like Vulcan, and is there a world which contains all the Greek gods but no existing human beings or other entities? I think these alleged possibilities ought to strike us as peculiar, conceptually problematic. There is the feeling that existence and non-existence are parasitic on each other—not identical, to be sure, but mutually dependent. Why might this be?

Two ideas suggest themselves. The first is that these are contrastive concepts: non-existence is by definition the absence of existence, and existence is by definition the absence of non-existence. Thus, the concepts lose their grip in alleged cases of one applying without the other; we would have no use for either concept if its complement concept had no application. To say that Mars exists is to say that it is not like Vulcan being-wise, and to say that Vulcan does not exist is to say that it is not like Mars being-wise. This is suggestive: we do tend to think of each category as the opposite of the other, choosing certain paradigms of each, and we are hard put to come up with anything more substantial than that. The terms have no meaning outside the “language game” of attributions of existence and non-existence (that is their actual use). Isn’t this contrast really what we are thinking when we employ the notions of existence and non-existence? If so, it will not be possible to separate the two concepts: we need instances of both in order to make sense of either. A pure existence world and a pure non-existence world put too much pressure on these concepts as they are ordinarily employed. So, existence always occurs side by side with non-existence, and non-existence always presupposes existence: necessarily, if one, then the other. In fact, we might want to say that in a world consisting of a number of existing objects there must be hugely many non-existent objects—all the objects in other possible worlds that don’t exist in that world. And non-existent objects always imply existing objects: it could not be that the universe contained all the non-existent objects we normally talk about but no existing objects. The world of fiction is surely parasitic on the world of fact.

The second idea is that fictional objects are products of the human mind, so they require the existence of such minds.[1] Unicorns need unicorn thoughts, and thoughts occur in minds, so unicorns require existing minds. To say that there are unicorns but no existing minds is therefore contradictory. So, a world containing fictional objects must contain non-fictional minds: we can deduce existing minds from non-existing unicorns. This gives us an inverted form of the ontological argument: given that God does not exist, we can infer that something else exists, viz. the mind or minds that thought the idea of God up. If I came up with the idea, then I can state, “God does not exist, therefore I do exist”. We can’t perform this kind of inference using a true existential statement as the premise. Thus, existence is implicit in non-existence: in a world containing non-existence there must be existent minds. We can’t seal the concept of non-existence off from the concept of existence: where one is instantiated so must the other be—not in the non-existent object, to be sure, but beside it.

Here is an analogy: the concepts of necessity and contingency are similarly intermingled. In our world we have both necessary and contingent truths, but could there be a world containing only necessary truths or only contingent truths? Again, the idea seems outlandish: don’t the two concepts feed off each other? We can produce examples of both that can be used to ground the contrast, but absent these we lose our grip on the concepts of necessity and contingency. A modally homogeneous world is not really an intelligible world. If everything is necessary, then nothing is; and similarly for contingency. What is necessary is what is notcontingent (and now we give examples), and what is contingent is what is not necessary (more examples). Without the contrast class we are left with the notion of mere non-modal truth (compare generous and miserly). Every possible world must consist partly of necessary truths and partly of contingent truths. Similarly, there can be no possible world consisting only of the future, or only of the past; each presupposes the other. Truth and falsehood are the same: where there is a true proposition there has to be a false one, and vice versa. Or identity and distinctness. Or good and evil. These concepts come in pairs not singly. Presence presupposes absence and absence presupposes presence—which is another way of saying that existence and non-existence necessarily go together. We shouldn’t compartmentalize these categories, as if each member of the pair had an independent identity. Existence and non-existence are really parts of the same package—semantically and metaphysically indissoluble.

[1] I discuss this in Logical Properties (2000), chapter 2. The topic of existence is extremely confusing and I slide over potential pitfalls in this short paper, but be assured that I am well aware of the dangers. In particular, we have to be careful about the interpretation of quantifiers.

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Metaphysical Meaning

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Metaphysical Meaning

The positivists declared metaphysical sentences meaningless. This required them to be able to identify a metaphysical sentence. But how could they do that if such sentences literally have no meaning? It could not be by recognizing them as meaningless, though that is certainly an intelligible mental act, because many sentences are meaningless without being metaphysical—not all gibberish is metaphysical gibberish. Being gibberish is not sufficient for being metaphysical, though it may be necessary (according to the positivists). The answer, of course, is that metaphysical sentences are perfectly meaningful and are recognizable as metaphysical by being meaningful: we can see that they are both meaningful and not empirically verifiable. But the positivists are not permitted to say that by their own doctrine, so their position is self-refuting. It would be different if such sentences had a different kind of meaning altogether, as ethical sentences are alleged to; then the positivist could claim them to be meaningless only as construed as fact-stating (assertoric, cognitive). But that is highly implausible—they aren’t merely expressive or imperative. They are straightforward indicative sentences. So, there is really no alternative to the commonsense view that metaphysical sentences are meaningful, though not empirically verifiable (we can all agree that they are not mere tautologies). The simple truth is that the positivists could pick them out as metaphysical only by knowing what they mean, which is surely what they did; but then they can’t turn around and declare them meaningless. How could a meaningless sentence count as metaphysical in meaning?[1]

[1] You might question whether there is any point in flogging the dead mackerel of positivism, since it perished decades ago, but actually the ghost of positivism still lingers, ready to leap from the shadows. It is therefore worthwhile to point out its flaws (many scientists still believe it, if only implicitly).

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Metaphysical Cravings

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Metaphysical Cravings

The soul craves metaphysics.[1] The thinking self wants to think about metaphysical questions. Why do they attract us so? I believe it is because we know (clearly and distinctly) that we are thinking beings: we are directly aware of ourselves as thinking beings. Not necessarily infallibly aware, but aware enough that we don’t question it. So, we know our nature—it is transparent to us. But we don’t know the nature of other things, not in the same way at any rate. We don’t know the nature of matter in this way; it is therefore a subject of controversy. Is it extension or solidity or energy or perceptibility? We can’t tell just by looking at it; we can only conjecture—debate, argue. We don’t know the nature of matter as we know the nature of mind. Or consider space, time, causality, necessity, goodness, number, meaning: it is all a matter of dispute. Is space absolute or relative? Is time composed of events or independent of events? Is causality constant conjunction or a type of necessity? Is necessity linguistic or language-independent? Is goodness happiness or justice or something else? Are numbers ideas in the mind or Platonic entities? Is meaning use or inner representation? We don’t know the answers to these age-old questions, not in the way we know the nature of ourselves as thinking beings. Yet we want to have the same kind of knowledge in their case that we have about ourselves. Thus, we are pitched into the subject of metaphysics, naturally, unavoidably. If we had no such knowledge of ourselves, we might be able to leave metaphysics alone, as we leave many questions alone; but each of us is confronted by the contrast between knowledge of self and ignorance of other things. We desire the same kind of knowledge across the board, because we have it in the case of the self. And if we had such knowledge in the areas mentioned, as well as in the case of the self, then we would not need metaphysics as a subject of study—we would already know what we now crave to know. It is the epistemological asymmetry that troubles us, goads us on. Metaphysics is therefore inescapable: it is built into human psychology once we become aware of ourselves as thinking beings. That is why it is so ancient and persistent. Knowledge of ourselves as thinking beings gives us a taste of what real knowledge of reality would be like, so we earnestly seek it, whether we can achieve it or not. I know what I am and I want to know what that is: this thought is the beginning of metaphysics—of the craving for metaphysical knowledge. It is wanting knowledge of what is alien to us as reflective thinkers—distant, removed. If only we could know the rest of reality as we know our own thinking consciousness!

[1] I would bet good money that you have never read sentence like this from an analytical philosopher; and yet it is not just pretentious nonsense but perfectly accurate.

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