Number and Existence

I go away for a week or two and look what happens. Discussing the Maverick's post on number and existence, and Brandon's comment, Michael Sullivan argues against conflating statements about number with existential statements. Consider:

(a) The number of cats in the room right now is two.

(b) Of the four hobbits that set out for Mount Doom, the number that arrived is two.

The two statements are true: his cats are two and Frodo and Sam are two, and in the same sense of 'two'.

But obviously the two hobbits don't have existence in the way that the cats do: my cats have actual existence and the hobbits don't and never did.

Thus we cannot conflate existence with number.

Contra: we clearly can reduce statements about number to existential statements, even when they are in a book. For example

(1) Tolkien said that two hobbits arrived at Mount Doom
(2) Tolkien said that a hobbit arrived with another hobbit at Mount Doom
(3) Tolkien said for some x, y: x was a hobbit, y was a hobbit, not x = y, and x arrived at Mount Doom and y arrived at Mount Doom

But we can't infer from any of these that there are such things as hobbits, or that hobbits exist. What about the claim that 'Hobbits don't have existence in the way that cats do'? Wrong: it's not that hobbits have a different kind of existence. They don't have any existence at all. The book says that, or pretends that hobbits exist. Indeed, it pretends or states that two hobbits – two existing hobbits – arrived at Mount Doom. But what it says is literally false. Nothing of the sort really happened. No hobbits arrived at any mountain. There is an implicit 'says that' or 'pretends that' operator around 'true' fictional statements such as 'two hobbits arrived at Mount Doom', which blocks any inference to existing things.

The problem is that we easily confuse such operators with spatial operators like 'In Europe', 'In London' and so on. We tend to move easily from statements like (4) below to (6), via (5).

(4) According to The Lord of the Rings, two hobbits arrived at Mount Doom
(5) In The Lord of the Rings, two hobbits arrived at Mount Doom
(6) In the universe of The Lord of the Rings, two hobbits arrived at Mount Doom

Now 'In Europe, there are hobbits' implies 'there are hobbits'. But 'In the universe of The Lord of the Rings there are hobbits' doesn't, because there are no hobbits anywhere. Objection: Can we not say that there are hobbits somewhere, namely in the universe of LOTR? Reply: yes, if 'somewhere' means 'it is said somewhere that …'. But then we are equivocating on 'somewhere'. There should be a special name for this fallacy, but I don't think there is one.

The narrative conception of reference

Sentences like “I noticed the dark-haired girl I had met the other night” drive me to frustration. I read fiction in a slapdash way, and have a poor memory for detail. So I leaf through the pages, trying to find when ‘the other night’ was, and when I have, try to find the dark-haired girl. But who or what am I really trying to find here? It’s a piece of fiction, there was no such girl. And what do I mean ‘no such girl’? There are billions of dark-haired girls, and thousands of ‘other nights’.

However, frustration aside, the example throws light on an idea I have discussed earlier, namely that the semantics of a definite description are ‘external’ to the proposition that contains it. According to the classic theory of descriptions, the semantics of the description is ‘internal’ to the proposition. We understand the meaning of ‘the first dog born at sea’ by understanding the dictionary meanings of ‘first’, ‘dog’, ‘sea’ etc. But we don’t understand ‘the dark-haired girl I had met the other night’ simply by understanding a dictionary. I have to locate a passage from a previous part of the narrative in order to understand it. The description is incomplete, and we require information external to its proposition in order to understand its meaning.

It also illuminates the conception of reference that I have defended in many posts here, the conception of reference as essentially embedded in a narrative. When the author used that description, he or she was doing so in the knowledge that information provided earlier would be available to me. They knew that because they had written the narrative that included the information, and they knew it would be available in a text presented (either in print or in hypertext) in an ordered sequence. They knew that I would be reading ‘the dark-haired girl’ on p. 46 after I had read ‘a dark-haired girl’ on p.15.

I would argue that all descriptions are presented to us in essentially the same way. The author of the description uses it with the expectation that the background information necessary to understand it are available to his audience. A work of history, for example, is no different from a work of fiction. Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall is written as a single work covering more than a thousand years of history. But if he wrote it correctly, i.e. such that his intended meaning was available to any diligent person reading it, recurring descriptions, even when incomplete in the sense above, should be intelligible to the reader. In writing his history, Gibbon knew, or intended, that the persons reading it would have the whole work available, and that proper understanding of it requires reading it in the intended order.

It may seem to be different in the case of narratives which do not have a definite order, but I will discuss these cases later.

Ambiguous proper names

Earlier, I suggested that the problem of when a person is thinking about X – which involves the difficult question of empirically unobservable entities such as ‘thoughts’, can be reduced to the apparently simpler problem of when two occurrences of a proper name have the same sense or meaning. Specifically

(*) Tom has a thought about Sherlock Holmes

is true if and only if Tom has a thought which, if expressed, would contain a term synonymous with the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as it occurs in the sentence above (*). The problem is now to explain when any occurrence of the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’, has the same meaning as used above. This would be simple question to resolve if proper names always had the same meaning. Clearly in the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories it does. Conan Doyle uses it only to refer to the same fictional detective. But as I noted here, there is a living person called 'Sherlock Holmes' (a minister of the church in Massachusetts, America). If Tom is having a thought about the fictional detective, and if by 'Sherlock Holmes' above (*) I mean that person living in Massachusetts, then (*) is false. So how do we determine when proper names are not being used ambiguously? What do we mean by ‘having the same sense’? Isn’t this almost as difficult as explaining when two thoughts are the same?

Reference and intention

In my last post I asked which towers Tolkien was referring to in his title 'The Two Towers'.  I should have said intending to refer to.  For (as I am using the term), we cannot fail to refer.  I argued this here, but there is more to say.  Consider:

"Tales out of the South", Gollum went on again, "about the tall Men with the shining eyes, and their houses like hills of stone, and the silver crown of their King and his White Tree: wonderful tales. They built very tall towers, and one they raised was silver-white, and in it there was a stone like the Moon, and round it were great white walls. O yes, there were many tales about  the Tower of the Moon."

"That would be Minas Ithil that Isildur the son of Elendil built," said Frodo. "It was Isildur who cut off the finger of the Enemy."

"Yes, He has only four on the Black Hand, but they are enough," said Gollum shuddering. "And He hated Isildur's city."

"What does he not hate?" said Frodo. "But what has the Tower of the Moon to do with us?"

I have emphasised the co-referring expressions.  There are actually two sets.  The first begins with an indefinite noun phrase 'one', and continues with the terms 'it', 'it', 'the Tower of the Moon' as uttered by Gollum, the relative pronoun 'that' uttered by Frodo, and 'the Tower of the Moon' as uttered by Frodo at the end.  The reason for the co-reference is entirely due to rules of use for singular terms.  Even if Tolkien had intended to refer to different things, he would have failed, because of rules like these.  His intention is realised only by the instruments - the signs - he is using, which give a fixed and determinate reference. The other set has one member in this passage: 'Minas Ithil'.  This set was begun much earlier in the book, and each member has likewise a determinate reference back to the previous ones.  Tolkien joins them at the point where Frodo says "That would be Minas Ithil".  Now we know (as long as we know the identity statement uttered at this point) that the two chains are co-referring.  But this identity is not a grammatical rule or some other 'rule of narrative', but is contingent upon a statement made within the narrative - the identity statement "A (that tower) = B (Minas Ithil)".

The possibility of there being separate 'referential chains' within a narrative which are identified as co-referring at some later point provides a device that writers have used for dramatic purposes. In Dumas' The Vicomte de Bragellone, we are introduced to a traveller at a hostelry in Blois, 'a man of scarcely 30 years, handsome, tall, austere, or rather melancholy, in all his gestures and looks'. In the story that follows, this person is referred to as 'the gentleman', 'the traveller' and, intriguingly, as 'the unknown'. Intriguingly, because the expression 'the unknown' identifies the stranger perfectly well within the story, where he is actually 'known' or identifiable, but not outside the story, even though the expression signals that he is known or identifiable under another name or description. Later we learn that he is Charles II, King of England.

Sometimes, as with 'The Two Towers', an author may fail to disclose a fictional identity. In this case, we can ask what he may have intended to refer to. The point is that reference is always fixed and determinate, and depends on meaning and convention. Intended reference is not.

Augustine in the Logic Museum

Augustine On Lying is now in the Logic Museum. He discusses some subtle cases beyond those which I discussed here. For example (4.4) if lying is telling a falsehood with the purpose of deceiving, what if I purposely say something false to someone who I know will not believe me, but who believes I am serious? Conversely, there is the opposite case of a person who speaks the truth in order to deceive. Knowing he will not be believed, he speaks the truth on purpose because he knows or thinks that what he says will be reckoned false, merely because it is spoken by him.

He also mentions the case of joking, which are not lies “seeing they bear with them in the tone of voice, and in the very mood of the joker a most evident indication that he means no deceit”.

Augustine on lying

Quapropter videndum est quid sit mendacium. Non enim omnis qui falsum dicit mentitur, si credit aut opinatur verum esse quod dicit.  "For which purpose we must see what a lie is. For not every one who says a false thing lies, if he believes or opines that to be true which he says".

See also here.

An apparently serious objection

Peter Lupu makes an apparently serious objection to my view that ‘reference’ is not a relation. (Correctly stated, my view is that ‘refers to’ is a logically intransitive verb – the noun phrase which it takes as a grammatical object has no existential import). He writes “By denying that reference is a relation … [Edward] deprives language from its most important and distinctive way of communicating.” And “To deny that reference is a relation, like Edward professes to do, is to undermine one of the central purposes of language which is to communicate about the world.”

I reply as follows.

1. If any piece of language has an important communication function, we should be able to tell whether it has an important communication function. One of the most important features of communicating with someone is that they should know they are being communicated to. They should also be able to say with reasonable certainty what is being communicated.

2. It follows from this that if non-empty proper names have a vitally important communication function that empty proper names don’t have, then we should know whether or not a name is communicating this vital information, and we should be able to say precisely what the name is communicating.

3. The New Testament contains many proper names. If any of these is non-empty, it is communicating information to us in an important and distinctive way, according to Peter. If it is empty, it is communicating nothing of the sort.

4. Thus (from 2 above) we should be able to tell of that name whether it is communicating information to us in the important and distinctive way which is peculiar to non-empty names.  Thus, we should be able to tell which names are empty and which are not.

5. But (assumption) we cannot tell this. We do not know for certain whether the Christ Myth theory is true or not, and thus we don't know whether the name 'Jesus' is empty or not. Thus we do not know whether the name ‘Jesus’ is communicating information to us in the important and distinctive way that is, according to Peter, the peculiar and distinctive mark of a non-empty proper name.

6. I conclude that Peter’s claim is absurd. The information that a proper name communicates to us is exhausted by what it would communicate us even if it had no ‘referent’ at all. The mere fact of the existence of a referent adds no further information to what the name already tells us.

The 'Frodo'-Frodo theory of reference

I have argued here for a theory of reference that I have called the 'relativity theory' of reference.  All reference is semantically indistinguishable from story-relative reference. Just as we can be told which hobbit carried the ring to Mount Doom (Frodo), so we can be told which US President's dog was killed by an assassin (Fido, Abraham Lincoln's dog).  History, like stories about hobbits, is just a story (although history, unlike stories about hobbits, is true).

But we could equally call it the 'Frodo'-Frodo theory of reference, after the well-known 'Fido'-Fido theory of meaning. According to 'Fido'-Fido theory, the most economical explanation of the meaning of the proper name 'Fido' is to say that it means, well, Fido.  Similarly, according to the 'Frodo'-Frodo theory, the simplest and the most economical explanation of the meaning of the proper name 'Frodo' is to say that it means, well, Frodo. You know, that hobbit. The one who carried the accursed Ring to Mordor.

All philosophical theories come with a curse, of course, just as the Ring did. If there were any simple explanation of a philosophical problem, the problem would have been resolved thousands of years ago.  The curse of the 'Frodo'-Frodo theory is Meinong.  It seems - though it actually doesn't - to commit us to the existence of non-existent objects. 

It doesn't, as I say. "'Frodo' means Frodo" is true, as is "'Frodo' means someone".  But this does not entail "someone is such that 'Frodo' means that person".  The verb 'means' is logically intransitive.  But by this time, you will have said Too long, didn't read.  Oh well.

On the reference of 'Sherlock Holmes'

Bill asks here "What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?"

And I ask "What makes my utterance of 'Sherlock Holmes' refer to Holmes rather than someone or something else?"  It's not simple.  There actually is a person called 'Sherlock Holmes' who is a minister of the church living in Massachusetts.  There is an article about him in the Sherlock Holmes society journal here.  So I could use the name to refer to him, as that article does.  Yet a character of the same name appears in the novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, but in this case it is made clear that the character is the same person as the one Conan Doyle wrote about. Meyer's book is an extension of the 'Holmes mythos'.  And also of the Ruritania mythos - in the book, Holmes meets Rudolf Rassendyll, hero of Prisoner of Zenda.

So we can use the name of a fictional character either (i) to refer to the character in a 'textual criticism' context (ii) to write more fiction in the same genre or mythos, (iii) to refer to a real person who happens to share the same name.  What a tangled net, no wonder so many clever people have been ensnared by it.

Gospel truth

In my last post, I mentioned two fundamental differences between the account of fiction I have defended here, and the account given by Peter van Inwagen in "Creatures of fiction". The first is that, according to me, sentences in fiction have a truth value. They are typically false (although works of fiction may contain many true statements, such as that Napoleon was short, that Paris is a city in France, that Baker street is in London etc). The second is that fictional names refer. Van Inwagen, by contrast, holds that (i) sentences in fiction typically assert nothing at at all and (ii) fictional names do not refer.

Taking the first point first. Van Inwagen's position is essentially the neo-Fregean view of assertion, namely that the same thought or proposition may occur now asserted, now unasserted, that I have criticised in many places, particularly here, arguing that assertion is part of the semantics of a sentence, and that every complete sentence (i.e. one that is not a subordinate or noun clause) can be analysed into a sign for the content of the sentence - that which it states or expresses, usually signified by a 'that' clause, and a sign for assertion or denial.  Thus "Snow is white" = "It is the case / that snow is white".  If this is correct, then even fictional sentences contain an assertoric component, and hence are capable of truth or falsity, independent of what the narrator means or intends when he or she utters them.  This is exactly what Van Inwagen denies, and it is, of course, why he calls sentences vehicles of assertion. 

The same view is defended by Alvin Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity, Oxford, 1974, Ch. VIII, pp. 153-163 especially), who cites a famous passage by the English poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).

Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth. He citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in troth, not laboring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be. And therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true he lieth not; without we will say that Nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to David; which, as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I none so simple would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who thinketh that Aesop wrote it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.

This is not right. For it is not true, as Sidney implies, that there is absolutely no gap between saying something false, and lying. There are at least two things in between. The dictionary definition of ‘to lie’ is ‘to utter something that is false with the intention to deceive’. Thus (1) in the case of stories, the narrator utters something he knows to be false, but with no intention to deceive. There is a compact between the narrator and his audience. The audience knows that these are falsehoods, the narrator knows that they know this, and both sides agree the same. This does not change the fact that the things said are (typically) falsehoods. And (2) in many cases a person uttering falsehoods does not know they are false, but rather believes sincerely in their truth, and so does not intend to deceive either. For example, a story about some miracle that (we will assume) cannot be true, but which the teller genuinely and sincerely and believes, and which, to paraphrase Sidney “he telleth for true”.

Someone who is not a Biblical fundamentalist must deal with the possibility that some or all of the events recounted in the Gospel are not literally true. If so, then according to Inwagen’s neo-Fregean view of assertion, one who recounts the Gospels is not asserting anything, and is not saying anything true or false. Clearly not: the fundamentalist, for one, will strenuously defend the literal truth of everything that is stated there. The ‘truth’ of the Resurrection is fundamental to Christian belief, and is even something a Christian has to publicly state they believe in.

Nor can Van Inwagen exclude such texts from his account. For his account is designed to explain the truth and falsity of statements of textual criticism, in which Biblical criticism must be included. For example, in “Discipleship and minor characters in mark's gospel” Joel Williams writes.

The main character groups in Mark's Gospel are the disciples, the opponents of Jesus, and the crowd. In addition to these groups, a number of individual characters are included in Mark's narrative. Some of them, such as Andrew or Peter, are disciples, while others, such as the high priest or Pilate, oppose Jesus. Also a number of minor characters function neither as Jesus' disciples nor as His opponents.

The statements are clearly true, and they include the sort of quantification (“some of them … others…”) that Inwagen’s account is designed to explain. But they are inconsistent with one of his key assumptions, which is that ‘textual criticism’ statements are vehicles of assertion, whereas the sentences in the texts they are criticising are not.

I will discuss the second point about 'reference' later.

Vehicles of assertion

I read Creatures of Fiction* more carefully over the break, and I now see I have fundamentally misunderstood Inwagen's position. I had assumed that he saw no fundamental difference between sentences like this

(i) She was a fat old woman, this Mrs. Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the showing the white of it (Martin Chuzzlewit, XIX)

and sentences like this:

(ii) Mrs. Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness (From Dickens's preface to an 1867 edition of Martin Chuzzlewit)

The first is a sentence from the novel itself, and so belongs in English literature. The second is from an essay about the novel, and so belongs in English literary criticism.  It turns out (p. 301) that while Van Inwagen regards the second type of sentence, i.e. the sentence belonging to the genre of literary criticism, as being the vehicle of assertion and thus capable of truth and falsity (the second one is probably true, for example), he does not regard the first type as being a vehicle of assertion.  He writes:

There is no point in debating what sort of thing Dickens was writing about when he wrote (i) or debating what sort of fact or proposition he was asserting, since he was not writing about anything and was asserting nothing. Sentence (i) does not represent an attempt at reference or description.

He mentions (in a footnote) that this is an important point and that the reader who does not concede it will get little out of reading further.  He says that the arguments establishing it will be found in Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974) Ch. VIII, pp. 153-163 especially, and J. O. Urmson, "Fiction," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 4 13 (1976), pp. 153-157.  Much of what Plantinga says is visible on limited preview here.

Thus the two positions that I have defended in many places here, namely (a) that sentences in fiction are the vehicles of assertion, and that what is asserted is mostly false and (b) that proper names refer even in a fictional context, are inconsistent with Van Inwagen's position.  For he says in the passage cited above that an author of fiction asserts nothing, and he says that there is no attempt at reference. And later (p.307) he says that we can only denote fictional characters, by means of descriptions which are true only of them.

How it is we are able to use the proper name "Mrs. Gamp" to refer to a certain creature of fiction ? Normally, an object gets a proper name by being dubbed or baptized. But no one ever dubbed or baptized the main satiric villainess of Martin Chuzzlewit "Mrs. Gamp."There is no corresponding problem about how it is this creature of fiction is denoted by "the main satiric villainess of Martin Chuzzlewit," for this is a quite straightforward definite description that names what we also call "Mrs. Gamp" for the same reason that "the tallest structure in Paris in 1905" names what we also call "the Eiffel Tower" : in each of these cases, a definite description denotes a certain object in virtue of a certain property that that object has uniquely. I think that if we are to have a satisfactory theory of how it is that we manage to refer to particular creatures of fiction, this theory will have to treat such descriptions as "the main satiric villainess" as the primary means of reference to these objects, and proper names as a secondary (though more common) means of reference.

 In subsequent posts, I will clarify and add to my earlier views on the two positions (a) and (b) above.

* Page references that follow are to American Philosophical Quarterly 14, October 1977.

More Holmes

There's a in-some-way-similar discussion about fiction over at Peter Smith's residence.  In this case, in relation to the truth of mathematical statement and the, er, 'ontological status' of numbers and thingies.  I've only just caught hold of it, and now Easter looms.

To have and to hold

Thanks to the link that Peter van Inwagen sent, I was able to look at his paper “Creatures of Fiction”* which has a much clearer explanation and justification of his thesis that fictional characters can be such and such without having the property of being such and such. Caution: the paper was written in 1977, 34 years ago, and I don’t know if van Inwagen still holds the views expressed there.

The distinction is motivated by the problem of sentences such as “Some fictional characters are witches”. Van Inwagen holds that such sentences are true, and because he is an anti-Meinongian (or rather, as I have argued, because he holds Brentano’s Thesis), he holds that it is equivalent to ‘Fictional characters that are witches exist’, and so implies ‘Witches exist’. But witches don’t exist. Inwagen gets round the difficulty by asserting that predication has different senses. “Witches don’t exist’ has the conventional sense, meaning that nothing has the property of being a witch.  But “Some fictional characters are witches” has a non-standard sense, and does not imply that anything does have the property of being a witch, and so is consistent with "witches don’t exist".

He justifies this by an argument from analogy. His example is a Cartesian who holds that people are immaterial substances. Hence Jake, who is a person, is an immaterial substance. But the sentence “Jake is 6 feet tall” can’t be literally true, for an immaterial substance is unextended, and can’t be 6 feet tall. The Cartesian can get round this by claiming that in ordinary speech we often say "is" when strictly speaking we should say "animates a body that is": the predicate ‘is F’, when predicated of a person, really and strictly means "animates a body that is F". Thus what looks like predication in ordinary speech is not always predication. And so “Alexandra Medford is a witch”, said of the witch played by Cher in The Witches of Eastwick, does not imply that anyone has the property of being a witch. Thus (as I interpret Inwagen) there is no inconsistency between his view that Alexandra Medford exists, but that witches do not, for the following syllogism is invalid:

No one is a witch
Alexandra Medford is a witch
No one is Alexandra Medford

It is invalid because ‘is’ is equivocal in the major and the minor. In the major, it means ‘nothing has the property of being a witch’. In the minor, it is not the ‘is’ of predication, and thus is not equivalent to “Alexandra Medford has the property of being a witch”. Fallacy of equivocation. Thus we can consistently claim that Alexandra Medford exists, i.e. that someone is Alexandra Medford, that she is a witch, although she does not have the property of being a witch, and that no one has the property of being a witch.

My only reply to this (although I am sure there will be more to say), is to invoke Ockham’s other razor, which I discussed some time ago. To one who claims that the verb 'to be' is ambiguous in certain arguments, he objects that this is completely irrational, he says "for it amounts to destroying every argument form. For whenever it pleases me, I will say that 'to be' is equivocal in the premisses, and I will ascribe at will a fallacy of equivocation to every syllogism".

* American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 4, October 1977

Van Inwagen on existence

I had a brief correspondence with Van Inwagen earlier this week, but he came up with nothing that resolved some of my other puzzles about his theory.  Here is one. From what he says, Inwagen seems committed to the following:

(1) 'Some x is A' is equivalent to 'some x-that-is-A exists'. 

(2) 'Holmes does not exist' is equivalent to 'no one has all the properties Sherlock Holmes holds'.

(3) Someone, namely Holmes, holds all the properties held by Sherlock Holmes

(4) No one has all the properties held by Holmes.

But this leads to a contradiction, as follows.

(5) Holmes does not exist (from 2, 4).

(6) Someone, namely Holmes, who holds all the properties held by Sherlock Holmes, exists (from 1, 3).

(7)  Holmes exists (from 6, elimination)

(8) Contradiction (5, 7)

Spelling it out.  Van Inwagen is trying to get over the problem of 'someone' having the properties ascribed to Holmes, through his distinction between 'having' and 'holding'.  No one has the properties that Holmes holds, and so Holmes does not exist.  But this does not evade the problem.  By the very same reasoning, someone holds the properties that Holmes does not have.  And there is still 'someone', and so Holmes does exist.  Van Inwagen can evade this by dropping his commitment to the equivalence of 'some thing' with 'some existing thing'.  But that would commit him to the variety of Meinongianism to which he is so fundamentally opposed.

More facts about fiction

There is a nice preprint of a paper here by Inwagen where he discusses different theories of being, and particularly the 'neo-Meinongian' theories such as those held by Terry Parsons and Colin Mcginn.   He writes

When I say that everything exists and the neo-Meinongian denies that everything exists, we’re not talking past each another—not, at any rate, because we mean different things by ‘everything’. It is precisely because the neo-Meinongian knows that I mean just what he does by ‘everything’ that he indignantly rises to dispute my contention that everything exists.

This is not a hundred miles from what I argued here.  Maverick philosopher also discusses Inwagen's paper here, though I confess I don't understand his objections to it.  The force of Inwagen's paper is neo-Meinongianism is a theory about the meaning of 'exists', rather than a theory about what exists.

I also found a paper by Amie Thomasson about fictional entities.  She mentions, but rejects, the explanation of discourse about fiction by the use of a 'fiction operator'.

Internal discourse by readers can still be held to be true even though it involves non-referring names, since these claims are plausibly held to be implicitly prefixed with a fiction operator, where “According to the fiction, Holmes solved his first mystery in his college years” may be true even if the simple claim “Holmes solved his first mystery in his college years” would be false. Cross-fictional statements can be handled similarly by taking them to fall in the context of an ‘agglomerative’ story operator that appeals to the total content of the relevant stories, taken together, e.g. “According to (Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary [taken agglomeratively]), Anna Karenina was more intelligent than Emma Bovary”

Fictional operator theories are attractive, and I will try to discuss them next week.

Obscure objects: Bouquet and Molina

Here is another scene from the film I discussed earlier. Mathieu and Conchita [Carole Bouquet] are sitting at a table in the garden. Conchita says "I have something to say, but not here". Mathieu gets up, and she follows him up a short flight of stairs, into the house. Mathieu shows her through the door. [Cut to interior of house] Mathieu accompanies Conchita [Angelina Molina] into the living room, where she says "Mathieu, I'll explain what happened last night".

Thus the identity is expressed by the context. We see a woman walk through a door in the exterior.  We cut to a woman walking through a door into the interior.  Therefore we assume it is the same door, and the same woman.  It is all fiction - there is no woman, and no identity.  But the film is telling us there is a woman, and it is telling us there is an identity.

Individuation in perception

I argued earlier, e.g. here and here, that 'verbal' individuation, where we have only linguistic information about a set of characters, and where we use proper names or pronouns to learn which character is being talked about, is object independent.  No F actually has to exist, for us to be told which thing is F.  There are no hobbits, yet Tolkien can tell us which hobbit carried the ring into Mordor, which hobbit was his gardener, and so on.  Is the same true about 'perceptual individuation'? This is where we tell which individual is being pointed to, or who is the reference of a demonstrative proposition, or simply which person we are seeing or hearing.  Can we understand the demonstrative 'this rose' without there being an actual rose that is pointed to? Can you draw my attention to something, if there isn't a something?

Let's begin with films.  We can tell a story in a film, and usually the story begins in a verbal format, a screenplay.  Here, as I have argued, individuation is object-independent.  In That Obscure Object of Desire, (Luis Bunuel, 1977), the two main characters are Mathieu, a middle-aged wealthy Frenchman, and Conchita, a beautiful Spanish dancer, who ensnares Mathieu.  You can read the synopsis in Wikipeda, where the proper names 'Mathieu' and 'Conchita' tell us which character is the subject of each proposition in the synopsis.

The same story is told, in somewhat more detail, in the film itself. This scene here, for example, visually expresses the proposition "Mathieu is talking to Conchita, dressed in a maid's uniform, against the background of a flowers on a table etc.".  But we don't use proper names to individuate.  Rather, we use the images projected on the computer screen.  One image resembles a man with certain features, the other a woman with certain features.  These images are what some philosophers (such as Reid, although the medieval philosophers had the same idea) called natural signs.  We individuate each character in the film by a combination of facial features and (particularly in this film) by the context in which the features occur.  Bunuel's film is peculiar in that the same character is played by two different actresses.  Carole Bouquet (above left) plays Conchita in the scene linked to above.  In a scene shortly afterwards,  Angela Molina plays her.  Even though the actresses do not actually look that similar, the context - the uniform, the action and the logic of the scene - express the identity.  Famously, many people sat through the film without realising there were different actresses (I plead guilty).

So, a film can express a complex proposition involving many different characters. We can tell which characters is which by visual, verbal and contextual cues.  But no such character has to exist, for the story to tell us this.  At least some demonstrative reference is object-independent.

Reference, truth and fiction

David Brightly perceptively writes

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?

First point: we aren’t doing without the notion of reference. As I pointed out here, we sometimes need to ask which fictional character is being referred to. A GCSE paper may ask which character is being referred to, and the answer might be

(*) Shakespeare is referring to Gertrude.

This means that ‘refers to’ is logically instransitive. We can refer to a dragon by name, and we can grasp which dragon is being referred to, even though nothing is a dragon.

It follows that the truth-conditions of sentences like ‘Shakespeare is referring to Gertrude’ involve nothing in the world, at least as far as ‘Gertrude’ is concerned. The ‘reference’ in question is not some mysterious semantic relation between Shakespeare and some mysterious, non-existing fictional object. There is no such object and no such relation. “Shakespeare is referring to Gertrude” clearly has truth-conditions, but these can only involve word-word relations, and possibly authorial intentions. More about that later.

David’s second point is more problematic. What determines the truth of a set of sentences, such as in the Dido and Aeneas story? According to classical logic, the sentence ‘Fa’ is true when the logically proper name ‘a’ individuates or identifies or locates or ‘refers’ to a really existing object, and when the predicate ‘F-' is satisfied by that object. It is this account that David is probably alluding to when he says “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”. It means we must countenance semantic relations between proper names and the world, and between predicates and the world. I have denied the existence of any such relations. Understanding the meaning of a sentence cannot be dependent on the existence of any objects except language and the mind. Meaning is object independent. But then how do we explain truth? More later.

Do fictional characters exist?

David Brightly asks whether there is really any problem with Van Inwagen’s position that Sherlock Holmes ‘holds’ the property of being a detective rather than ‘having’ such a property. Surely there is. Inwagen’s position is inconsistent with the three main theses he puts forward in the paper. First, he holds that certain kinds of statements about fiction are true. For example, ‘There is a fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in that novel or is a model for a character who does’, or just ‘there are fictional characters’. Second, he holds that ‘there is’ is equivalent to ‘there exists’. Thus, it is true that fictional characters exist. Finally, there is a simple correspondence between the predicate calculus and ordinary language. For example, ‘There are fictional characters’ translates to ‘for some x, fictional_character(x)’ and back.


This is inconsistent with his position that ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ is true, and that he holds, but does not have, the property of being a detective. If it is possible to translate between ordinary language and predicate calculus and back, it follows that any valid inference in predicate calculus is also valid for the corresponding ordinary language statements, and conversely, and that anything true we can say about the predicate calculus statements, is true of the ordinary language ones. So take ‘Some fictional characters are detectives’, which Inwagen (presumably) holds to be true. Thus at least one fictional character is a detective, and thus has, rather than holds that property. Furthermore, if the corresponding predicate calculus statement ‘Ex, fictional_character(x) & detective(x)’ is true, there must be at least one object a in the domain such that fictional_character(a) & detective(a). For example a = sherlock Holmes. But the predicate detective() expresses the property of having, not holding the property of being a detective, so Inwagen’s claim that Holmes (or whatever x satisfies the predicate) does not have that property, is false.


Furthermore, Inwagen holds that 'All fictional characters exist’ is true, and clearly holds that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. And he holds that these can be simply translated into predicate calculus, so – according to him - the following are true.


(x) fictional_character(x) implies exist(x)
fictional_character(Holmes)


But these together imply exist(Holmes). This translates back into ‘Holmes exists’, and so his claim that ‘Holmes exists’ is false is contradictory.

Does Sherlock Holmes exist?

Earlier I discussed Peter van Inwagen's view of quantification in fiction. Van Inwagen holds that the existential quantifier expresses the meaning of 'there is' and 'there exists' in ordinary English. Since he holds that some existentially quantified sentences involving fiction are true, including 'Ex, x is a fictional character', it follows that he holds the paradoxical thesis that fictional characters exist. But what, he asks (p. 246), about our firm conviction that Tom Sawyer and Sherlock Holmes do not exist?

His answer involves distinguishing between properties that fictional characters 'hold', and those which they 'have'. Sherlock Holmes 'holds' the property of being a detective. He does not 'have' that property. The only properties that fictional characters have are existence and self-identity. Thus one interpretation of 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' is 'no one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds'.

This is not a comfortable solution for a few reasons. Here are two. (i) The distinction between 'have' and 'hold' is arbitrary and the only reason for making seems to be to avoid a serious difficulty with his theory. (ii) The primary motive for Inwagen's theory was the principle that formal logic is simply a regimentation of ordinary English. But then it turns out we cannot express perfectly arguments in ordinary English such as

Fictional characters exist, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, therefore, Sherlock Holmes exists

by any simple translation or 'regimentation'. Indeed, according to Inwagen, the argument above should not even be valid.