Getting the Londoners' goat

A post yesterday by the Maverick which is 'guaranteed to get London Ed's goat'. The argument he alludes to can be summarised as follows:

Brian Wilson's song says that there is a girl called Rhonda
The song does not say how tall she was
Therefore there is someone (Rhonda) who is indeterminate with respect to the property of being tall

He ends "The record will show that I myself eschew Meinongianism". It's a mystery to us Londoners.

Are Meinongian objects incomplete objects?

The Maverick asks whether Meinongian objects are 'incomplete'? According to his definition, these are objects which have all and only the properties specified in their descriptions. For example, The Yellow Brick Road is described (in the story) as being yellow, but is not described as being coloured. So The Yellow Brick Road is yellow, because the property of being yellow is ascribed to it, but does have the property of being coloured. So Meinongian objects are 'incomplete'.

Which makes no sense to me. Every yellow object is coloured. Therefore there are no yellow objects which are not coloured. Therefore there is no 'incomplete object' such as Maverick has described. You object: Bill has described such an object, therefore there is such an object as Bill has described. I reply, the verb 'described' is logically intransitive. It takes a grammatical object, i.e. an accusative, but no logical object. 'S describes A' does not entail 'for some x, S describes x'. I can describe a yellow brick road, and perhaps I can even describe a road that is yellow but not coloured. But it does not follow that there is some yellow non-coloured object described by me, for no object is yellow but not coloured.

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.

Quinean and non-Quinean quantification

In a short paper published in 2000, Thomas Hofweber discusses an attempt to defend Meinong by distinguishing what he calls Quinean and non-Quinean quantifiers. A Quinean quantifier (or a Quinean occurrence of a quantifier) is where we can modify it with 'who/which exists' without change of truth conditions of the proposition in which it occurs. Thus in

(a) Something is eating my cheese, probably a mouse.

the occurrence of the quantifier 'something' is Quinean. Clearly 'something which exists' is intended. By contrast, the occurrence of the same quantifier in

(b) Something is keeping me awake at night, namely the monster I dream about.

is non-Quinean. Monsters don't exist, so nothing which exists is keeping me awake at night. Therefore modifying 'something' with 'which exists' would change the truth conditions of the second sentence, therefore the occurrence of the quantifier is non-Quinean.

This is pretty close to the thesis of Peter Lupu's that I was moaning about earlier. The idea is that we can explain the consistency of the conjunction 'Tom is thinking of a mermaid, but nothing is a mermaid' by interpreting the 'nothing' as a Quinean quantifier. That is, the conjunction really means Tom is thinking of a mermaid, but nothing which exists is a mermaid. However, the 'something' in the claim 'there is something Tom is thinking of' is non-Quinean, since it is false that there is something which exists which Tom is thinking of.

I have given enough objections to this sort of thing for now. Enough to say that it can be true that Tom is thinking of a mermaid even if absolutely nothing whatever is a mermaid, i.e. where non-Quinean quantification for 'absolutely nothing' is intended. I have another fundamental objection to this idea, namely the use that Meinongians put it to.

Even if we buy the distinction between Quinean and non-Quinean quantifiers, a further problem is the way Meinongians persistently make inferences from contexts that involve non-Quinean quantification, to contexts that unambiguously require Quinean quantification. I already gave an example here of a move such as this:

Tom is thinking of something, therefore Tom's thinking is directed towards something.

This is illegitimate because (in my terminology) 'is thinking of' is a logically intransitive verb, whereas 'is directed towards' is logically transitive. In Hofweber-speak, even if the first 'something' is non-Quinean, the second is unambiguously Quinean. Nothing can be 'directed towards' something unless it is something which exists. The Meinongian makes these illegitimate moves all the time. Example: he argues (p. 255, my emphasis) that Quinean quantifiers are restricted to things that exist, and so

since non-Quinean quantifiers don't have such a restriction this shows that the domain of quantification really is what the non-Quinean quantifiers range over. Quinean quantifiers range over a subdomain of this domain, namely over all or some of the things in the domain that exist. Thus the true domain of discourse contains non-existent objects ...

Note the verb 'contains'. This verb is unambiguously logically transitive, i.e. 'a contains an F' is always inconsistent with 'nothing is an F'. Thus the quantifier 'an F', as it occurs as the accusative of 'contains', is Quinean. Even if we buy the distinction between Quinean and non-Quinean, the quantifier 'everything' in 'everything that the true domain of discourse contains' is Quinean. Thus everything the Meinongian wants to talk about, he cannot talk about. Therefore he should remain silent. Another example of language on holiday tomorrow.

* "Quantification and non-existent objects", in *Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence*, Stanford 2000, pp 249-273.

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.

Quantifying over intentional objects

I emphasised earlier that the nominalist must at all cost pre-empt the Intentionalist’s driving a wedge between ‘some thing’ and ‘some existing thing’. This appears to be just what Peter Lupu has done here. Peter agrees that the consequence ‘Tom is thinking of a mermaid, so there are mermaids’ is invalid, but (apparently) for the reason that in the antecedent sentence the term ‘mermaid’ ranges over mermaids thought-of, i.e. intentional mermaids, and so is true. In the consequent, the same term ranges over ‘ordinary objects’, and so is false, and so the consequence is invalid.

There are many reasons against this. Some I have already given. I will repeat them, together with some more.

1. If Peter’s reason is correct, then the consequent of ‘Tom is thinking of an intentional object, therefore there are intentional objects’ is false, as the term ‘intentional objects’ ranges over ordinary objects (intentional objects being weird, not ordinary). But as I argued here and here, it would not be possible for the intentionalist and the nominalist to disagree at all unless they agreed on the meaning of categorical statements like 'no A is B' or 'some A is not B'. When the nominalist says that there aren't any intentional objects, he is denying exactly what the intentionalist asserts when he asserts that there are such things. They both agree that the scope of ‘intentional objects’ includes potentially any kind of objects, queer and straight, and the nominalist is denying there are any queer ones.

2. In ‘Tom is thinking of a mermaid, but there are no such things as mermaids’, the second ‘mermaid’ clearly picks up the scope of the first. So if the first ranges over queer objects, so does the second. But the second denies there are any such things. Indeed, we could leave out the second ‘mermaids’ and just say ‘Tom is thinking of a mermaid, but there is no such thing’, where it is clear that what the second sentence denies the existence of precisely what Tom is thinking of.

3. The sentence ‘Tom wants a cigarette’ does not assert that Tom wants some weird object that ‘a cigarette’ ranges over. No: Tom wants a real cigarette, and the only reason he wants one is because none is there. Intentional cigarettes are so unsatisfying.

4. Similarly in ‘this house lacks a bathroom’, the scope of term ‘bathroom’ does not include a non-existing bathroom. The statement is merely equivalent to the negative statement ‘this house does-not-have a bathroom’.

Continental to Anglo

David Brightly offers this hilarious translation of Continental philosophy into Anglo-analytic at Bill Vallicella's website here.

Continental	Anglo
In reality every cube has 12 edges. But one could think of a cube without thinking of something that has 12 edges, and indeed without thinking of something that lacks 12 edges. If you know what a cube is, and I ask you, "How many edges does a cube have," you might reply, "I don't know." During this exchange you are most assuredly thinking of a cube, but a cube indeterminate in respect of the property of having 12 edges. What you have before your mind is an incomplete object, one that, because incomplete, cannot exist. Your thought has an intentional object, but it is an object that does not exist.	In reality every cube has 12 edges. But one could think of a cube without thinking it has 12 edges, and indeed without thinking that it has edges at all. If you know what a cube is, and I ask you, "How many edges does a cube have," you might reply, "I don't know." During this exchange you are most assuredly thinking of something, but you are neither thinking it has 12 edges nor thinking it has some other number of edges.
Another example. Peter shows up at my door. I note that he is wearing a brown leather vest. Now anything made of leather must be made of cow leather or horse leather or alligator leather or . . . . But the leather vest that is before my mind as the object of my visual experience is indeterminate with respect to type of leather. What is before my mind is an intentional object.	Another example. Peter shows up at my door. I note that he is wearing a brown leather vest. Now anything made of leather must be made of cow leather or horse leather or alligator leather or . . . . But I don't know of what kind of leather the vest I can see is made. What I can faithfully say about the vest is severely limited.
Peter's vest is brown, and in reality everything brown is colored. But the intentional object of my visual experiencing is brown but not colored. Extracting the principle, we may erect the following thesis:	Peter's vest is brown, and everything brown is coloured. But though I think of the vest as brown I don't at this moment think of it as coloured. Extracting the principle, we may erect the following thesis:
Non-Closure Under Property-Entailment: Intentional objects, reflecting as they do the finitude of the human mind, are not closed under property-entailment.	Non-Closure Under Property-Entailment: We can't know everything about a thing and at any moment there can be aspects of it that we are not thinking about. If an X is a Y and I'm thinking about an X it doesn't follow that I'm thinking that it is a Y.
It follows from this principle that no merely intentional object exists. (For everything that exists is complete.) But that is not to say that they are denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein. Talk of merely intentional objects does not commit one to Meinongianism. One could take the line that merely intentional objects are "ontically heteronomous" to borrow a phrase from Roman Ingarden: their existence is parasitic upon the existence of the mental acts whose intentional objects they are.

Meaning and Meinong

David Brightly asks whether we can avoid Meinong quite so easily. Meinong draws a distinction between being and existing. Thus some things which have Being may not exist - the golden mountain which I am thinking of, perhaps?

I already engaged with this objection in my second point here. The problem for the Meinongian thesis is that "Vallicella is thinking of a non-existent thing" is perfectly consistent with "no thing is non-existent", where scope of 'no thing' covers every object whatsoever, and is therefore inconsistent with "some non-existent thing has Being". So the Meinongian solution doesn't solve anything.

I suppose the Meinongian could object that the scope of 'no thing' may fail to cover those things that have Being but which are non-existent. But (a) I can still insist that I mean nothing whatsoever, not just nothing that is not a non-existent Being. And (b) as I argued here it would not be possible for the Meinongian and the anti-realist to have an argument at all unless they agreed on the meaning of categorical statements like 'no A is B' or 'some A is not B'. When the anti-realist says that there aren't any non-existent, he is denying exactly what the Meinongian asserts when he asserts that there are such things. The expression 'there are' is completely unambiguous in this argument, and has to be, in order that there can be an argument at all.

David also comments on the curious fact we can reason about apparently non-existent objects. Indeed. The Square of Opposition seems to work for fictional characters. 'All the characters in Lord of the Rings are hobbits' implies 'some of the characters in Lord of the Rings are hobbits', is the contrary of 'none of the characters in Lord of the Rings are hobbits' and is the contradictory of 'some of the characters in Lord of the Rings are not hobbits'. More is needed.

Meinong's gambit

In yesterday’s post I argued that not only is the inference

(*) Vallicella is discussing a non-existent thing, therefore something is non-existent

invalid, but that practically everyone will agree it is invalid. Even the most hardened and extreme realist or Meinongian will concede the possibility that nothing is non-existent (even though, as a matter of fact, they believe that some things actually are non-existent). It follows that they cannot use Meinong's gambit to explain intentionality. They can’t explain Bill’s thought as being somehow about a non-existing thing, because they concede that he could have the same thought even if there were no such objects at all.

With this in mind, we can approach the problem which (according to Bill Vallicella here) is central to the phenomenon of intentionality. Bill says that the problem can be expressed in terms of an aporetic triad, saying that while each of these propositions has some claim to plausibility, all three cannot be correct. At least one must be false. Which?

W1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
W2. Intentionality is a relation between thinker and object of thought.
W3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

I will begin by ‘Ockhamising’ these propositions so that they express the same problem, but in language more acceptable to an Ockhamist. (E.g. I argued here that a term like ‘the nonexistent’ is question-begging).

O1. The proposition ‘Bill is discussing a nonexistent thing’ can be true even when there are no nonexistent things.
O2. The proposition ‘Bill is discussing a nonexistent thing’ expresses a relation between two things.
O3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, all of its relata exist.

With my previous comments in mind, the answer may now be obvious. We can assume that the first proposition is true. The third proposition must also be true. As argued above, the realist cannot plead the ‘nonexistence’ amendment. He can’t argue that the third proposition is false because Bill’s thought may relate him to a nonexistent thing. For the problem remains even when there are no nonexistent things. It is not that we sometimes think of the nonexistent. It is that the predicate "Bill is thinking of ---" may not apply to anything at all, rather than applying to some nonexistent something. Thus, even if there were nonexistent things, this would not explain the problem of intentionality, i.e. the problem that all three propositions above are inconsistent.

It remains that the second proposition must be false. Indeed, isn’t this obvious? The simplest and most economical hypothesis to explain this is that while the proposition ‘Bill is discussing a nonexistent thing’ has grammatically the form of a relation, and is syntactically similar to ‘Bill is meeting his wife’, it does not actually express or signify a relation. What other explanation is there? The second proposition has no claim to plausibility at all.

This explanation involves no recourse to ‘queer objects’ of any kind. The underlying logic of the proposition must be different to the underlying logic of ‘Bill is meeting his wife’. As is manifest and provable, for the latter implies ‘someone is such that Bill is talking to her’. ‘Something is such that Bill is discussing it’.

The meaning of Meinong

Bill Vallicella has an interesting defence of Meinong here. The statement

(1) There are items that have no being

is clearly self-contradictory. This is the reading attributed to Meinong by analytic philosophers (boo!) reading Meinong. But perhaps Meining meant this

(2) Some items have no being.

which (Bill argues) is not self-contradictory.

This argument entirely depends on the meaning of the word ‘being’. Bill’s claim that (1) is self-contradictory suggests he is reading it as expressing what ‘there are’ expresses. I.e. he would regard ‘there are blue buttercups’ as semantically equivalent to ‘blue buttercups have being’. Call this the ‘being/there are’ equivalence thesis. By contrast, his claim that (2) is not self-contradictory suggests he is reading ‘some’ statements as not expressing being. I.e. he would regard ‘some buttercups are blue’ as different both from ‘blue buttercups have being’ and ‘there are blue buttercups’. Call this the ‘some/there are’ non-equivalence thesis.

But what if I say

(3) There are no items that do not have being ?

Am I contradicting one who claims that some items have no being? Apparently not, for if according to Bill we are to read statements beginning ‘there are’ as expressive of ‘being’, then (3) does not deny (2) at all, indeed is perfectly consistent with it. I show this as follows. The statement

(4) ‘There are no X’s that are Y’ is equivalent to ‘any X that is Y does not have being’

follows from Bill's ‘being/there are’ equivalence implied above. I then substitute (4) into (3) to give

(5) Any item that does not have being, does not have being

Thus the statement that there are no items that fail to have being is apparently consistent with the statement that some items fail to have being. But that hardly seems correct. The natural reading of (3) is as the denial of (2), and hence its contradictoru. If one is true, the other is false.

Bill’s error (as I see it) is in denying the equivalence of ‘some’ and ‘there are’ statement. Is there really any logical difference between ‘there are blue buttercups’ and ‘some buttercups are blue’? Or between ‘there is a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’ and ‘a bridge crosses the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’? I doubt it. But if we uphold ‘some/there are’ equivalence, and we uphold the ‘being/there are’ equivalence, we are led into contradiction again: if (1) is self-contradictory, (2) is.

Alternatively we could deny the ‘being/there are’ equivalence. But then we have the difficulty of what ‘being’ statements mean. We have no difficulty understanding ‘there are’ statements. You know what I mean when I say ‘there is a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’. If you are stuck in Barnes and want to get to Chiswick via Hammersmith, it is very helpful to learn that statement is true, and you can act upon it accordingly. But ‘a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith has being’ is obscure, and not one a motorist can readily deal with. He either interprets it as meaning *there is* a bridge crossing the river. But that is no different from ‘some bridge crosses the river’ or ‘at least one bridge crosses the river’, and it follows a simili that (2) is self-contradictory. Or he regards it as altogether mysterious, and it follows that Meinong’s claim is mysterious and obscure. That is the dilemma.