Appeals to phenomenology

IN his latest post on ‘pure ficta’, Arizona Bill wheels out what looks like an argument from revelation.

If Ed denies that there are merely intentional objects, then he is denying what is phenomenologically evident. I take my stand on the terra firma of phenomenological givenness. So for now, and to get on with it, I simply dismiss Ed's objection. To pursue it further would involve us a in a metaphilosophical discussion of the role of phenomenological appeals in philosophical inquiry.

Well, it probably would involve us in such a discussion, and I wouldn’t want to go there, correct. I don’t recognise the validity of any kind of appeal to revelation in strictly philosophical enquiry.

None of these men [the pre-Socratics], it is to be noted, tried to answer these questions by an appeal to any revelation, to myth, or religious knowledge of any kind; but attempted to extract the answer by using their reason; and they used it almost without reference to sensible observation and experiments. Why was this ? Clearly because they were convinced that the thing they sought lay deeper in the heart of the world than the superficial aspect of things, of which alone the senses could tell them. (Modern Thomistic Philosophy, R.P. Phillips, London 1934)

But is Bill really making such an appeal? I don’t think so. He is actually appealing to premisses which are uncontroversial, such as our ability to create fictional characters, imagine centaurs etc, and then arguing from such uncontroversial premisses to a more controversial conclusion. So it’s a matter of logic, not ‘phenomenological appeal’. The argument looks like this:

(1) You cannot write or understand a story without thinking about various fictional characters. (2) When you create a fictional character, you bring before your mind an intentional object. (3) The existence of such intentional objects is therefore phenomenologically evident.

I can buy the first premiss. The second I can understand only figuratively. What is an intentional object? The third I reject. It is bizarre to make an existence claim about things which purportedly do not exist, and such existence is far from evident. It’s a neat example of the fallacy of logical intransitivity. You start with a premiss containing a logically intransitive verb, such as ‘imagine’, ‘desire’ and so on. A logically transitive verb is one which takes a grammatical accusative but not a logical one. The accusative of the sentence ‘Jake wants to marry a mermaid’ is ‘a mermaid’, but the sentence is consistent with ‘nothing is a mermaid’. A logically transitive verb, by contrast, requires a real object. The truth of ‘Jake married a mermaid’ requires that some person is such that she was married by Jake. The fallacy consists in drawing a conclusion that contains a logically transitive verb, and which for that reason is existential. The fallacy is a specific instance of the more general existential fallacy, in which we erroneously draw an existential conclusion from non-existential premisses.

Over to you Bill.

Meinongians who aren’t Meinongians

To explain the apparent paradox of the title, there are at least two senses of the term ‘Meinongian’. In the first sense, a Meinongian affirms the reality of fictional characters (by saying for example that there is such a person as Sherlock Holmes, or Sherlock Holmes exist). In the second sense, a Meinongian denies Brentano’s thesis and thus drives a wedge between ‘thing’ and ‘existing thing’: some things are fictional characters, but those things do not exist.

Peter van Inwagen is an example of the first kind of Meinongian, but not the second. He argues* (p. 237 ff) that the correct way, and the only way, to understand the use of variables and quantifiers is to show how they can be translated into expressions of ordinary English that we already understand. He gives a few examples to show how it is clear that the formal predicate calculus is simply a regimentation of the ‘all’ and ‘there are’ of ordinary English. He concludes (p.239) “The existental quantifier therefore expresses the sense of ‘there is’ in ordinary English. (As an opponent of any form of Meinongianism, I would say that the existential quantifier is appopriately named – for the reason that, in expressing the sense of ‘there is’ in English, it thereby expresses the sense of ‘exists’ in English).” To the objection (p.242) that this account of the meaning of a sentence containing quantifiers does not tell us the conditions under which it would be true, he neatly replies that “the conditions under which a sentence would be true, are not the first thing about the meaning of a sentence. The first thing about the meaning of a sentence is what the sentence means” – which is just what his account tells us about sentences containing quantifiers, he says.

This has an important consequence for fictional discourse (meaning not the discourse you find in works of fiction, but rather what is spoken or written about works of fiction, such as found in literary criticism). Such discourse can potentially include complex quantification. Inwagen’s example is

(1) There is a fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in that novel or is a model for a character who does.

This involves apparent existential quantification and a complex quantificational structure, as well as the ability to generate all the inferences licensed by quantifier logic. For example, we can deduce

(2) If no character appears in every novel, then some character is modelled on another character.

If the quantification is real, and given Inwagen’s rejection of the second kind of Meinongianism (i.e. the kind that accepts existential quantification but not existential commitment) then we must accept the reality, indeed the real existence, of fictional characters. If the quantification is not real, we must explain (p.244) how to paraphrase the two sentences above, show whether the second sentence follows from the first, and if not, why it does not. In summary:

*The existential quantifier expresses the sense of ‘there is’ and ‘there exists’ in English.

* ‘For some x, x is a fictional character’ is true.

* There are fictional characters, i.e. fictional characters exist.

Thus Inwagen is a Meinongian in the first sense. He affirms the reality of fictional characters in the most direct way, claiming that they exist. But he is not a Meinongian in the second sense. For he upholds the Brentano thesis - ‘For some x, x is a fictional character’ = ‘There are fictional characters’ = ‘Fictional characters exist’.

Van Inwagen recognises he must explain the apparent truth of sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’. I will discuss his explanation tomorrow.

* "Quantification in fictional discourse", in Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, Stanford 2000, pp. 235-247.

Existential import at Answers.com

Whenever I check the traffic for this blog, I always have a look at the Google queries that got people here. Some of them are quite eccentric, such as people asking whether it will rain tomorrow, and getting this post on future contingents, which they probably didn't want. However, those asking for Existential Import probably got what they wanted. Google ranks this blog #3. As for the second, at Answers.com, their answer illustrates perfectly the conflation that I discuss here. It says:

Existential Import: The implications of a proposition as to what exists. If a proposition entails the existence of something, then it has existential import. It should be noticed that in the predicate calculus the universal quantification (∀x)(Fx → Gx) has no existential import, since it is true when nothing is F.

This confuses the question of whether (A) a universal proposition like "all dragons are fire-breathing" implies what traditional logicians call the particular or I proposition "some dragons are fire-breathing ", and (B) whether the I proposition "some dragons are fire-breathing" implies the existential proposition "fire-breathing dragons exist". The first part of the definition 'the implications of a proposition as to what exists' is correct. But the second part (that the universal can be true although nothing is F) is too strong. Those of a realist disposition (such as Meinong and possibly the Phoenicians over at camp Vallicella) may hold that 'some things are F' may be true even when no F's exist.

The nonexistent

Sadly, Bill finally had enough of my comments on intentionality. I'm not sure exactly what underlies it, but I suspect it is my persistence on the 'Brentano equivalence'. There is more here and very much more here. Briefly, a Brentano equivalence holds when we can convert existential sentences of the form 'an A-B exists' and categorical sentences of the form 'Some A is B'. There is much evidence that such an equivalence holds in ordinary subject-predicate sentences. Thus 'some buttercups are yellow' is convertible with 'yellow buttercups exist' and 'no buttercups are blue' with 'blue buttercups do not exist'. And as I commented here, there seems little difference between 'Tom's worship has an object' and 'there is an object of Tom's worship' or 'there exists an object of Tom's worship'.

Hence my objection to Bill's claim that 'We sometimes think about the nonexistent'. 'The nonexistent' is an abstract noun phrases built out of an adjective, like 'the unemployed', 'the French', 'the damned', which appear to refer to a whole class of things (unemployed people, French people, damned souls). If the same is true of 'the nonexistent', then it refers to a whole class of things - things which do not exist - and we can divide all things in reality into those which do exist (mountains, horses, yellow buttercups) and those which do not (golden mountains, unicorns, blue buttercups, four-leaf clovers and so on). You can see the idea in the picture on the left (from the Logic Now and Then symposium in 2008 - I don't remember who the speaker was).

Clearly, no one who divides reality up in this way can consistently hold the Brentano equivalence, according to which any thing is also an existing thing. If 'the nonexistent' refers at all, it refers to nonexistent things. But a nonexistent thing is a thing which does not exist, and so is a thing such that there is no such thing. But there is no such thing. So 'the nonexistent' does not refer. Accordingly, we cannot think of the nonexistent, if the Brentano equivalence is valid.

Clearly there is a problem, as true sentences like 'the Greeks worshipped Zeus' or 'Tom is thinking of Pegasus' suggest. But I will talk about this in the next post.

Brentano and the convertibility of ‘exists’

Brentano held that a thought must have an object. Did he mean to qualify this by ‘existing object’? According to at least one important thing he said, he would not have drawn any distinction between ‘object’ and ‘existing object’. According to what is now called the Brentano-Venn analysis of propositions, every categorical proposition (one of the form ‘A is B’) is convertible with an existential proposition ‘An A-B exists’. He says, for example

The categorical proposition "Some man is sick", has the same meaning as the
existential proposition "A sick man exists" or "There is a sick man".

It follows from this that 'some hobbit is thought about by some man' is convertible with 'some hobbit thought by some man exists' or 'there is a hobbit thought about by some man'. I have more to say on the history of this here.