tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post1085673237590916865..comments2023-10-08T15:51:17.426+00:00Comments on Beyond Necessity: Do fictional characters exist?Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-90194557759329357182011-04-06T13:33:08.925+00:002011-04-06T13:33:08.925+00:00Can we take a closer look, then, at the Ockhamist ...Can we take a closer look, then, at the Ockhamist theory of proper names? One implication appears to be that, for understanding and deciding the truth of a set of sentences, eg, the Dido and Aeneas story, we can do without the notion of reference altogether. The story can be thought of as a pattern or template or specification with blank spaces or empty slots. The pattern is to be offered up to the world and if we can find objects that fit the slots then the story is true. Names serve merely to label the slots and convey what relations between the slot occupiers are to hold. There is a strong whiff of circularity here which will need to be addressed. Basically, the pattern matching has to be done non-linguistically. But the upshot appears to be that the finding of the objects that satisfy the story is what makes them the referents of the names, under the usual understanding of 'reference'. So we had things backwards all along. This makes some sense to me but it doesn't seem to gel with your 'proper names are descriptive, signifying 'haecceity''. Could you expand on that?David Brightlyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06757969974801621186noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-69483215476199632602011-04-05T16:17:33.509+00:002011-04-05T16:17:33.509+00:00>>Either we take the NFL route accepting tha...>>Either we take the NFL route accepting that some names simply do not refer, <br /><br />This is essentially Sainsbury's position.<br /><br />>>or we take the abstract object route. On one route we depart from classical predicate calculus. On the other we stay classical but get weird objects. Or is there a third possibility?<br /><br />Yes: my route, which is that proper names are descriptive, signifying 'haecceity'. I've already indicated how this would be possible in the posts about Aeneas. A proper name simply signifies whatever you were talking about before - whatever that is.Edward Ockhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-5978147138455889372011-04-05T16:13:07.167+00:002011-04-05T16:13:07.167+00:00>>The answer would appear to be that it seem...>>The answer would appear to be that it seems to enable us to regiment 'S does not exist' as '~exists(s)'. But from this we immediately deduce the rather paradoxical '∃x.~exists(x)'. <br /><br />Yes quite. There is no obvious translation from the commonplace 'Holmes does not exist' into the predicate calculus. But PVI's whole argument, and basis of his position, is that there always is such an easy translation.Edward Ockhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-58748256744005955512011-04-05T16:10:08.018+00:002011-04-05T16:10:08.018+00:00>>A last point: why would PVI or anyone intr...>>A last point: why would PVI or anyone introduce an existence predicate into classical predicate calculus?<br /><br />That was my embellishment. PVI believes that 'there is' means the same as 'there exists', so I introduced 'exist()'. There's no prohibition against this. (At least I don't think so).Edward Ockhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-52785131513155796722011-04-05T12:12:39.473+00:002011-04-05T12:12:39.473+00:00It certainly looks as if PVI's position is inc...It certainly looks as if PVI's position is inconsistent. Though he makes the exemplifies/encodes (has/holds) distinction between two modes of predication, he seems not to draw the distinction between concrete and abstract, which allows us to say that Sherlock exists but is not concrete. <br /><br />1. Zalta writes 'Fs' to denote 's exemplifies F', eg, 'Sherlock is fictional' and 'sD' to denote 's encodes D', eg, 'Sherlock is a detective' understood as 'Sherlock encodes the property of being a detective'. 'sD' and '~Ds' are not inconsistent propositions. <br /><br />2. to derive 'concrete(s)' (which is inconsistent with 'abstract(s)') we would have to start from '∀x. Fictional(x)-->concrete(x)'. But this last would be denied.<br /><br />A last point: why would PVI or anyone introduce an existence predicate into <i>classical</i> predicate calculus? If it means the same as '∃' it's surely redundant, being true everywhere, so that '∀x. Fx-->exists(x)' is true for any predicate term F. The answer would appear to be that it seems to enable us to regiment 'S does not exist' as '~exists(s)'. But from this we immediately deduce the rather paradoxical '∃x.~exists(x)'. This way surely madness lies. Either we take the NFL route accepting that some names simply do not refer, or we take the abstract object route. On one route we depart from classical predicate calculus. On the other we stay classical but get weird objects. Or is there a third possibility?David Brightlyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06757969974801621186noreply@blogger.com