Intentional Identity

Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet can only be true if Hob and Nob are, as it were, thinking of the same witch.

Hob thinks that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.

But how it could be true? If we read it in the opaque way of reading indirect speech clauses then each that-clause must stand on its own syntactically, but there is no way of interpreting the pronoun ‘she’ as a bound variable. The two thoughts add up, as it were, to ‘for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and x killed Cob’s sow. But we can’t split them up into two separate thoughts, because of the second part of the conjunction. I.e. the following is not well-formed.

* Hob thinks that for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether x killed Cob’s sow.

On the other hand, if we render the original sentence in the transparent way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow. Neither of these are satisfactory. I don’t propose any answer yet, but I will start by noticing that the same problem attaches to saying what sentences say, rather than what people think.

(1) A witch has blighted Bob’s mare.
(2) She killed Cob’s sow.
(3) Sentence (1) says that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare.
(4) Sentence (2) says that she (or the witch) has blighted Bob’s mare.

Clearly sentences (3) and (4) are true, even though sentences (1) and (2) are false. Yet the problem is exactly the same as the problem involving different thoughts. Thus we have simplified the problem. We don’t have to worry about explaining thoughts in different minds, but only how we express the meaning of different sentences. Meanings are a little easier than thoughts.

Reference as target practice

Successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. And what makes a thing the right thing is the intention of the one who refers.

I discussed this 'target practice' theory of reference a while ago. I am not impressed. The purpose of language is to communicate, and the role that reference plays is to communicate which individual the speaker is talking about. Or rather, when the speaker utters a sentence of subject-predicate form, with a referring term as subject, the purpose of reference is to communicate which individual the predicate is said to apply to.
 
So it's not just a matter of hitting the target on the bull's eye. The person you are communicating with has to understand too. How does he know you hit the target? Is it e.g. that he also has to have the target in his or her sights in some way?

We watched American Sniper over the weekend. At the target practice, there was a supervisor with binoculars who would check whether the trainee had hit the target successfully. If that is the analogy, how would it apply to reference? It implies the hearer has some privileged relationship with the target. What if the hearer is an atheist, and does not see, or refuses to see, the target? That implies an atheist cannot understand a Christian’s reference to God. But surely he can. I am sure there are a few atheists or agnostics following this discussion. Are they unable to follow it without binoculars? Surely not.

Arizona Bill commits the existential fallacy

In a post today, Maverick Bill talks about fictional and incomplete objects again, which reminds me of an idea that originally occurred to me in February 2011, and which I developed in a series of posts on logical intransivity.

The idea was that there are certain verbs – I call them logically intransitive – which take a grammatical but not a logical accusative. Let me explain. In the sentence ‘Tom is looking for a wife’ the verb ‘wants’ is logically intransitive. It clearly has a grammatical accusative (‘a wife’), but there is no object corresponding to that term, i.e. the sentence can be true (Tom really is looking for a wife) without there being any person or wife to whom the term corresponds. Clearly so, for Tom would not be looking for one, if he had already found her. By contrast ‘Tom has found a wife’ is logically transitive. It cannot be true unless there is someone to whom ‘a wife’ corresponds.

I developed the idea as follows. There is a certain species of bad philosophy which proceeds by taking sentences which are not existential with respect to their accusative, because of logically intransitive verbs, and converting them into sentences which are existential with respect to the same accusative. This typically happens in two ways.

(1) By converting a logically intransitive verb phrase into a logically transitive one. For example by translating ‘Tom is thinking of a mermaid’ into ‘Tom stands in the relation ‘thinking of’ to some mermaid’. Clearly the first sentence does not imply the existence of mermaids because of the logically intranstive ‘is thinking of’. But the second does, because of the transitivity of ‘stands in the relation ‘thinking of’ to’. Bill commits this fallacy here when he argues “When Tom thinks about a nonexistent item such as a mermaid, he does indeed stand in a relation to something”.

(2) By converting a sentence from a passive to an active form, so that the object of the logically intransitive verb becomes its subject. Since subject terms (generally, not always) are existential, the sentence when converted implies existence, whereas before converted is does not. Both of these are specific versions of the existential fallacy, i.e. arguing from premisses which are not existential to a conclusion which is existential.

Arizona Bill’s blog is a wonderful and rich mine for instances of the fallacy. In today’s post there are at least three. In the first set of sentences below, the verbs ‘want’ and ‘imagine’ are clearly intransitive, and to not imply the existence of any table.

(A1) I want a table, but there is no existing table that I want
(A2) I want a table with special features that no existing table possesses.
(A3) In the first case I imagine the table as real; in the second as fictional.

In the next three sentences, he converts grammatical object to grammatical subject, in order to imply the existence of the wanted or imagined objects.

(B1) The two tables I am concerned with, however are both nonexistent.
(B2) There is a merely intentional object before my mind.
(B3) The table imagined as real is possible due to its ontic character of being intended .

Of course, this leads to the inconsistency of implying the existence of a non-existent object. In (B1) above, he asserts the existence of the tables by the apparently referring subject term ‘the tables’, then denies it using the predicate ‘non existent’. Bill usually evades this, when he can be bothered to, by claiming there are two sorts of existence.

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.

Intentional being

Maverick has a nice post on intentional being.  He mentions Aquinas, but here is the magnificient Ockham on the very same subject.

Indexical facts and materialism

The Maverick as ever has come out with a characteristically challenging post here asking whether 'indexical facts' are a threat to materialism.  He concludes that they are.  More later, but I have a brief prologemena here. 

Meanwhile, some preliminary ideas from Buridan, in his fifth question on the first book of his Questions on the Prior Analytics.  What is signified by the expression 'for a man to drink wine'?  He lists out some opinions. According to some it signifies the the sentence (propositio) 'a man drinks wine'.  According to others, it is a sort of signifiable complex entity on the side of reality (a parte rei), corresponding to the proposition 'a man drinks wine'.  Others say that for a man to drink wine is simply the man as he is related in that way to wine.  Yet others say that it is a sort of accident inhering in the man as he is related in that way to wine. More later.

Ockham himself is not drinking wine, as he has an attack of the gout, due to his habit of slouching comfortably in the corner like an eighteenth century gentleman, squinting at the assembled company through a glass of red wine or port, passing trollish and mischievous comments.  This behaviour needs to stop, according to his wife.  Or he could obtain a gout stool, but unfortunately there is no Wikipedia article about it.

Reference and intention

I start my discussion of Kripke’s theory of reference by questioning whether it is necessary that we intend to use a name with the same reference as the person we learned the name from. In at least one simple example, this is neither necessary nor sufficient. Imagine a game were a group of people make up a story by successive members of the group uttering successive sentences of the story. So the first member starts:

(1) A soldier called ‘Alex’ returned from the war.

And the second member goes on

(2) Alex was looking forward to seeing his wife, Jenny, and his daughter Lucy.

And the third continues

(3) Jenny was only eight years old.

Now clearly the third speaker got it wrong. She probably meant to say ‘Lucy’; she meant the daughter, since it is a matter of biology that the wife cannot be eight years old. But her meaning or intentions are irrelevant in any case. For she has successfully used the name ‘Jenny’ with the same reference as the second speaker, and has successfully communicated the proposition that the soldier’s wife was only eight years old, even though she did not intend to use the name that way. What is relevant is not the intention of the speaker, but rather the rules of use of proper names (or other referring terms like pronouns or descriptions), plus an informational background available to both speaker and audience*.

Causation and intention are irrelevant, at least in this particular case. I shall argue in subsequent posts that all the different ways of passing on a reference are reducible to examples such as this one.

*Or an assumed background, which I shall discuss later.

Aardvarks and reference fixing

Kripke writes:

A rough statement of a theory [of reference] might be the following: An initial 'baptism' takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description. When then name is 'passed from link to link', the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. If I hear the name 'Napoleon' and decide it would be a nice name for my pet aardvark, I do not satisfy this condition. (Perhaps it is some such failure to keep the reference fixed which accounts for the divergence of present uses of 'Santa Claus' from the alleged original use.

Is that right?  How do we intend to use a name with the same reference as the person from whom we heard the name from?

The Soft Machine

I will post some more about the intriguing thought experiment suggested by Michael Heap. Meanwhile, some music by the Soft Machine from 1967. The group were named after the book by the American writer William Burroughs.  The name itself refers to the human body.  (Michael's thought experiment involves recording the brain states of a person on a computer, thus copying the form of experience encoded in a soft machine made of DNA, onto a hard machine like a computer.

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?

Thinking about Frodo

Dr Vallicella has a post about intentionality here which reminds me I haven’t addressed the question of when two people are having thoughts about the same individual.

I characterised intentionality in this series of posts and particularly this. I have argued that it is merely a semantic phenomenon: certain verbs are ‘logically intransitive’ – they have a grammatical accusative, but no logical one. ‘Tom wants a cigarette’ has the grammatical subject ‘Tom’ and the grammatical accusative ‘a cigarette’. But, unlike ‘Tom is smoking a cigarette’, the sentence is consistent with ‘nothing is a cigarette’. Thus the verb ‘wants’ is logically intransitive. I also argued that we can parse a sentence like ‘Tom has a thought about a hobbit’ in two ways. First, as

Tom / has a thought about / a hobbit

where the verb phrase ‘has a thought about’ is logically intransitive (it appears to relate two objects: Tom and a hobbit, but clearly it can’t, as there are no hobbits). The other way of parsing it is

Tom / has / a thought about / a hobbit

where the verb ‘has’ relates Tom and a thought. This is logically transitive, given that there are such things as thoughts, and given that Tom can be related to his thoughts by thinking them. That suggests we can analyse any sentence containing a logically intransitive verb phrase into a sentence containing a logically transitive one. If possible, that would explain intentionality completely. But what about

(*) Tom has a thought about Frodo ?

It seems easy to explain a thought ‘about hobbits’. It is a thought we would express using the word ‘hobbit’, or which would involve the attributes we commonly attribute to hobbits (being short, having furry feet, being prone to finding magic rings etc). But Frodo? How do we explain the possibility of two different people having a thought about the same individual fictional character, without being drawn into Meinong’s junkyard of non-existing objects?

To resolve this, I shall invoke two principles. The first is the ancient view that thought is a form of silent speech which, if expressed, would signify to the thought to another. Since signification is in some sense public – many people can grasp the meaning of speech, which is indeed the whole point of language - this resolves the apparent problem of thoughts being unobservable or inaccessible. The second is that the term ‘thought of X’ is true of any thought which, if expressed, would contain a term synonymous with ‘X’. I.e. ‘Tom has a thought about Frodo’ is true iff Tom has a thought which, if expressed, would contain a term synonymous with the name ‘Frodo’ as it occurs in ‘Tom has a thought about Frodo’.

Thus the apparently intractable problem of explaining when two thoughts – scientifically unobservable events – can be reduced to the simpler problem of explaining when two proper names have the same meaning. More tomorrow.

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.

Nothing fails to exist

David Brightly asks whether my claim that "The meaning of the proper name is simply to tell us which individual is the subject of the proposition, and it can tell us this without there being any such individual. " comes perilously close to saying that there are non-existent individuals? Close, maybe, but not perilously close. When I say that there may be no such individual, I mean just that. The range of my quantifer 'no' covers absolutely everything. Not just everything that exists, for that would allow the Meinongian to drive a wedge between 'something' and 'some existing thing'. I mean: absolutely everything. So long as my quantifier ranges over absolutely everything without qualification, I am not committed to non-existing individuals. Hence I am fundamentally opposed to anything like this:

(*) Tolkien tells us which hobbit carried the ring to Mordor, but nothing (at least, nothing real or existing) is a hobbit,

where the bracketed qualification opens the door to something unreal or non-existing being a hobbit. This reminds me of something that Thomas Hofweber says, which I will discuss tomorrow.

An interesting net

Bill Vallicella mentions another argument for non-existent objects here. He writes

Imagination of a mermaid is not consciousness of a mental image or other content
of consciousness but precisely consciousness of a mermaid. Consciousness of a
mermaid is just as outer-directed and revelatory of a material item as
consciousness of a dolphin. But mermaids do not exist. Therefore, some objects
do not exist.

Here is the argument expressed in numbered statements. I have added some additional premisses and logical steps

1. (A) Tom is conscious of a mermaid
2. (A) Consciousness of a mermaid is just as outer-directed and revelatory of a material item as consciousness of a dolphin.
3. (interpreting 2) If Tom is conscious of a mermaid then Tom is conscious of some object which is a mermaid.
4. (from 1, 3) Tom is conscious of some object which is a mermaid.
5. (A) 'Is conscious of' is a logically transitive verb.
6. (from 4, 5) some object is a mermaid.
7. (A) Mermaids do not exist.
8. (from 6, 7) Therefore, some objects do not exist.

The questionable assumption is (5). I argued earlier that a 'logically transitive verb' Ø is such that the truth of 'a Ø's an F' is inconsistent with the truth of 'nothing is an F', and so implies 'something is an F'. Bill needs to justify the assumption that 'is conscious of' is logically transitive. This is questionable. 'Bill is conscious of a mermaid' is clearly consistent with 'nothing is a mermaid'.

"A clever man got caught in this net of language! So it must be an interesting net. "

Contemplation and logical transitivity

Some verbs may be logically transitive or intransitive, depending on sense or context. 'Contemplate' has a number of different senses, including

(1) To think about intently
(2) to look at thoughtfully
(3) to have in mind as a possibility.

The first sense is clearly logically intransitive - you can intently think about a mermaid without there being a mermaid. The second sense by contrast is (logically) transitive. You cannot look thoughtfully about a mermaid without there being a mermaid you are looking at. With the third sense, we are back to logically intransitive. God can contemplate creating a mermaid, even though there are no mermaids.

But, pace Vallicella, this doesn't entail there are any 'incomplete beings'. How?

Logically intransitive verbs

I looked at the posts for January and February and while there are many passing references to the distinction between ‘intentional’ and ‘non intentional’ verbs, there is no specific post about it. So I’m writing one now. I’m going to use a new terminology and distinguish between ‘logically transitive’ and ‘logically intransitive verbs. A logically transitive verb is one which takes a logical as well as a grammatical accusative, such that there must be an object that verifies the accusative. That is, if ‘S V O’ is true, there must be an object corresponding to the accusative noun phrase ‘O’. All the verbs in the following propositions – note the last – are logically transitive.

1. Tom owns a house in the desert
2. Tom is building a house in the desert
3. Tom / has / a thought about a house in the desert

That is, if Tom owns a house in the desert, at least one house (Tom’s) is in the desert. So ‘owns’, in this context, is logically transitive. If he is building a house in the desert, there must be at least one house in the desert that he is building. And if he has a thought about the house, there must be at least one thought that he has, namely the one about a house in the desert. The verb ‘has’ is logically transitive in this context.

A logically intransitive verb is one which may have a grammatical accusative, but does not need a logical accusative to verify it. I.e. ‘S V O’ may be true without there being any object that satisfies 'O'. Thus all the verbs in the following are logically intransitive.

4. Tom wants a house in the desert
5. Tom is looking for a house in the desert
6. Tom / has a thought about / a house in the desert

If Tom wants or is looking for a house in the desert, it does not follow there is any such house. The verbs ‘want’ and ‘looking for’ are logically intransitive. Note well that proposition (3) is the same as proposition (6). But there are two different verb phrases: ‘has’ and ‘has a thought about’. The object of ‘has’ is ‘a thought’, and that must exist in order for there to be a thought. The object of ‘has a thought about’ is ‘a house in the desert’, but no such house has to be in order for there to be such a thought. So ‘has a thought about’ is logically intransitive.

Tomorrow, as we approach the problem of proper names, I will talk about verbs of reference and individuation.

Intentionality and Proper Names

The Maverick Philosopher has an insightful post on modes of being, haecceity and proper names. Proper names are the real difficulty for a theory of intentionality. We can express the difficulty by means of the following ‘aporetic tetrad’. (I define ‘empty name’ as a proper name that does not signify an existing object).

1. An empty name signifies something
2. Every thing is an existing thing
3. A name does not signify a concept
4. A (significant) term signifies a concept or an object.

Taken together, the four are inconsistent. If (1) an empty term signifies something, and if (2) every thing is an existing thing, then an empty term signifies an existing thing. But (3) that existing thing is not a concept, so (4) an empty name signifies an existing object. But (from the definition of ‘empty name’) an empty does not signify an existing object. Contradiction.

Yet each of the four propositions has a strong claim to our acceptance. (1) Surely the semantics of an empty name are no different from a non-empty one. We can’t tell whether there was such a person as John the Baptist by analysing the meaning of the name as used in the New Testament. (2) There is plenty of evidence for the ‘Brentano thesis’ that I have discussed frequently. (3) There are plausible arguments against proper names signifying concepts – see Maverick’s argument, for example. (4) The distinction between concept and object is practically a given. No contemporary philosopher of language has seriously challenged it, as far as I know.

There are three known resolutions to the tetrad, according as philosophers have denied proposition 1, 2, or 3 respectively. Direct reference theorists deny (1). They hold (implausibly, to my mind) that an empty name does not signify. To the argument that we cannot tell whether a name (e.g. ‘John the Baptist’) is empty from its semantics alone, they reply that this is ‘Cartesianism’. If there is no such person as John the Baptist, direct referentialists claim that we know this, even though we utter things like ‘we do not know whether the name ‘John the Baptist’ signifies or not’. The Maverick and other Meinongians-in-denial deny (2), by driving a wedge between being a thing, and being a thing that exists. And (3) people like Mark Sainsbury, and indeed Edward Ockham himself, argue that proper names signify ‘singular concepts’.

In posts for this month (March 2011), I will put forward some arguments in defence of singular concepts. More later!

Wine Dark Sea

In a burst of self-improvement this week I am now halfway through Virgil’s Aeneid, in the Penguin Classics translation by David West. Whenever I read an ancient author I am mindful of Colin Wilson’s claim in The Occult that the ancients were colour-blind, citing Homer’s famous expression ‘wine dark sea’ as proof that ancient people could not distinguish between blue and red. This has always struck me as an astonishing and implausible claim. (1) I’m not an expert, but elementary psychology suggests both that colour blindness has a neurological basis and elementary biology suggests that neurological changes in the human brain take millions of years, not a few thousand years; (2) there are ancient paintings with reasonably accurate colours such as those at Pompeii (3) people wrote about rainbows in the book of Genesis.

Nonetheless I kept a sharp eye out for colour words in Virgil, and it turns out there are a few. Mostly purple, but lots of greens and yellows. Also two references so far to things that have ‘many colours’. The first a flock of birds, the second to the ‘thousand colours of the rainbow’.

As for Homer’s sea, there is a discussion here about whether or why Homer got it wrong. I always took it as a poetic allusion. The sea in the Mediterranean can look like dark wine sometimes, particularly when deep and transparent. In any case, a better translation is ‘wine faced’. There is something else here suggesting that the ancient Greeks did have a limited colour perception - Xenophanes apparently described the rainbow as having three bands of color: purple, green/yellow, and red. But this conflicts with Virgil’s allusion to the ‘thousand colours’ of the rainbow – perhaps it was a Greek vs Roman thing? See also this.

Why I am not reading Virgil in the original Latin? Well I do, but it is hard going. Partly because my Latin vocabulary is limited to technical terms of logic and philosophy – there no colour words in Ockham as I recall. Partly because the Latin poets did not use a natural word order and reading them is a bit like undoing a complex jigsaw puzzle.

On the fact that philosophical and logical vocabulary is so limited, perhaps this supports my claim that the reason for believing in ‘queer objects’ must not be observable or empirical, that arguments for their existence should involve no reference to the observable world. The reason Ockham does not use many colour words is not to do with colour blindness.

Being, subsistence, existence etc.

Vallicella is still going on about the Intentionality problem. Here is his ‘aporetic triad’ again.

1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation that ties a thinker to an object of thought.
3. Every relation is such that, if it holds, then all its relata exist.

He wonders (albeit hesitantly) if we can resolve the problem by distinguishing between different ‘modes of being’. He says

Some will be tempted at this point to distinguish between two modes of being,
a strong mode and a weak mode if you will, call them existence and
subsistence. The relations principle could then be reformulated to say
that if a relation R holds, then all of R's relata have being (either exist or
subsist). This seems to allow a solution of our problem. When Tom
thinks about a nonexistent item such as a mermaid, he does indeed stand in a
relation to something, it's just that the item in question subsists rather than
exists. The object of thought has being but does not exist.

But of course we already addressed that problem in a few places, e.g. here. Consider

Tom is thinking about a mermaid, but nothing is a mermaid.

The range of ‘thing’ in ‘nothing’ covers absolutely everything whatsoever – existing objects, objects with being, subsisting objects. ‘Thinking of the nonexistent’ covers even ‘thinking of a non-thing’. A mermaid is not a thing, not any kind of thing, not even a subsisting Meinongian thing, and still Tom can think of a mermaid. Different kinds of existence or being is no good.

A Braille eye (thought experiment)

Imagine the following scenario. Instead of light rays, the page of text before me throws out a film consisting of a braille version of the page, which somehow reaches my eye (Lucretius has a similar idea, though without the Braille). Unlike light, this film is solid and can be felt. Inside my eye is a miniature finger that moves across the film until it finds the word it was looking for (for example ‘dog’).

Two questions: (1) what is the proximate object of my search? Is it the film itself, which the miniature fingertip is feeling its way across? Or is it the original text which emitted the film? (2) How actually is this different from the way that my fovea searches the retinal image? The image stays constant and fixed while my retina moves around it – rather as though the fingertip were attached to the eye, and I had to move the whole eye in order to move the fingertip.