You are happy

When I utter ‘I am happy’ to myself while alone and having been silent for some while, do I mean that the content of my statement could have been communicated to another person, even though it wasn’t? So that I could inform you (by ‘I’) which entity satisfies ‘— is happy’?

Or do I mean I have privileged access to the referent of ‘I’ in a way that could not be communicated, i.e. so that what I mean to refer to is different from the entity you grasp as *Edward* being happy? In this sense, it would be inconceivable that anyone else could grasp what the referent really was. Only I can grasp the identity. And I don’t mean that as a matter of fact. I mean it’s logically impossible.

What does this mean for numerical identity? Is the referent of ‘you are happy’, uttered by me to you, numerically different from the referent of ‘I am happy’, uttered by you to yourself?

Defining reference

Discussions of linguistic reference rarely define what reference is. An example is the SEP article here, which as far as I can see does not give any definition, merely stating that linguistic reference is ‘a relation that obtains between certain sorts of linguistic expressions and what speakers use those expressions to talk about’. And what relation is that? Slightly more helpfully it characterises it ‘metaphorically’ as a mechanism that enables us to talk about the world – say about George Bush – through referring terms which hook on to the world. But only slightly. What are these hooks?

Let’s try this. If Socrates is not running and Plato is running, ‘Socrates is running’ is false, and ‘Plato is running’  is true. But ‘a man is running’ is true, because Plato is running. The non-referring, i.e. indefinite, statement is true or false regardless of who is running. But the truth of falsity of the singular statements depends on who is running.

So a singular or referring statement is true when there is some particular person such that the predicate is satisfied by that person, and is false when that person fails to satisfy the predicate, even if the predicate is satisfied by other people. But a non-referring or existential statement is true when any individual, no matter who, satisfies the predicate.

Does that work?

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to?

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein (Philosophical Remarks, §64).

‘I have a pain’ is a sign of a completely different kind when I am using the proposition, from what it is to me on the lips of another; the reason being that it is senseless, as far as I’m concerned, on the lips of another until I know through which mouth it was expressed. The propositional sign in this case doesn’t consist in the sound alone, but in the fact that the sound came out of this mouth. Whereas in the case in which I say or think it, the sign is the sound itself.

Proper names as identical twins

A while ago I discussed the Bunuel film where different actresses play the same character, and I discussed later how we try to identify people by their faces, or by the sound of their voice. Dogs do the same by their sense of smell, perhaps.

The difference between the film and reality is that Bunuel signifies the identity by convention. The actresses don’t look that alike, certainly not as identical twins look alike. But Bunuel uses cinematic conventions to convey the identity. One actress is seen opening the door, the other is seen walking through the other side. With actual perception the identity is signified naturally.

Before printing, we identified proper names in the same way. Here are two tokens of the word 'Plato' in Worcester 13 9rb and 11vb. With electronic printing, we are used to the same word looking exactly the same, which is guaranteed by the computer representing the five letters in the name 'Plato' by the ASCII characters 80, 108, 97, 116 and 111 respectively. This is what allows us to search an electronic document for the same name, or perform a Google search for ‘Plato’. Even printing on paper guarantees that the letters will look nearly the same.

Before that, we recognised proper names just as we recognised faces.

Tenth Birthday!

Beyond Necessity is 10 years old today!

The first post was remarkably accurate. “But this being London, the plumber will not be there.” Correct, the plumber never turned up, and when challenged, justified this by saying ‘All plumbers are bastards. I should know, I’m a plumber’. We went to a supposedly reputable upmarket bathroom designer in response, but he took half of our money then went bankrupt. A nice Roumanian plumber fixed it for us in the end, to whom we are forever grateful, although the upstairs loo has problems that delicacy prevents mentioning here.

Best wishes to my small band of readers.

Face blindness

Hume, Treatise Book I Part iii, section 2 (my emphasis):

We readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, though several times absent from and present to the senses; and ascribe to it an identity, notwithstanding the interruption of the perception, whenever we conclude, that if we had kept our eye or hand constantly upon it, it would have conveyed an invariable and uninterrupted perception. But this conclusion beyond the impressions of our senses can be founded only on the connexion of cause and effect; nor can we otherwise have any security, that the object is not changed upon us, however much the new object may resemble that which was formerly present to the senses.

Back-reference guarantees sameness of subject. Perception doesn’t. Think of the Bunuel film where two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) play the same character (Conchita). I was one of the many people who were fooled into thinking they were the same actress, because of the identity of character. Think also of the meaning of ‘persona’, namely ‘mask’. This idea comes more easily to me I suppose because I suffer from ‘face blindness’. I find it hard to tell when I am meeting the same (relatively unfamiliar) person or not, and rely on tells such as hairstyle, build, age and so on. I am often embarrassed when I meet the same person in the same day but the lighting is different or they have dressed differently and I do not recognise them. I often have to bluff my way out of it. The world of strangers is literally like a world of masks without identity. My wife and daughter guide me through film plots.

Now it might be that perceptual ‘reference’, i.e. reidentification, is some guaranteed and fail safe way of acquiring rapport with the subject, so you always know that the same person is before you. But I think not. I think other people just have better visual processing powers, meaning that a person’s face is a kind of uniquely applying description or ‘look’ that only one person can have. A sort of visual haecceitas, but which is descriptive, for all that. Think of identical twins. Their visual description is the same, so it’s a qualitative identity, not a numerical one.

Aristotle on singular terms

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, chapter 3) in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate logic (MPL), indefinite noun phrases do refer. “The distinctions crucial to MPL between subject expressions like ‘Socrates’ and ‘denoting phrases’ like ‘a senator’ are not crucial in TFL” (p.51).

Where he gets this idea I don’t know. The scholastic logicians followed Aristotle, and Aristotle says (Peri hermenias 17a38) ‘λέγω δὲ καθόλου μὲν ὃ ἐπὶ πλειόνων πέφυκε κατηγορεῖσθαι, καθ’ ἕκαστον δὲ ὃ μή’. ‘By universal I mean what is by nature disposed (πέφυκε) to be predicated of many, by singular what is not [thus disposed]’. He gives the example of ‘man’ as universal, and the proper name ‘Callias’ as singular. The Greek terms καθόλου and ἕκαστον were translated by the Latins as universale and singulare respectively, from which we get the corresponding Latin-English terms. Note the ‘by nature disposed’ bit – Greek πέφυκε, Latin natum est. I.e. it’s in the very nature of a common term like ‘man’ to be predicable of more than one individual. But this is not true of a genuinely singular term, i.e. its nature is such as to be predicable only of one.

Aristotle also says (Metaphysics 1040a28) that we cannot define singular terms, and that we should not be deceived by the fact that some individual objects have attributes that are unique, like ‘going round the earth’ (= the sun according to his geocentric theory). He points out that more than one thing could go round the earth, or none, so the definite description doesn’t really define ‘sun’ (ἥλιος). ‘But the sun was supposed to be an individual (ἕκαστα), like Cleon or Socrates’. So the ‘nature’ of a genuinely singular term is not just to be predicable of one thing alone, like a uniquely applying description, but to be predicable of that thing in virtue of its very meaning. Is Aristotle anticipating Kripke’s doctrine of the rigidity of reference?

Geach has a challenging objection to this. Suppose I say, referring to a meeting I attended ‘a man was shouting’. And suppose the indefinite noun phrase ‘a man’ refers to, i.e. picks out or identifies some man in the crowd, say Frank, or aims to do so. But suppose Frank wasn’t shouting, but Richard was. Then ‘a man was shouting’ is true, because Richard was shouting. Yet I meant to refer to Frank. I meant to say something which is actually false, but which is true because some other person than I meant satisfied the predicate.

The whole point of indefinite noun phrases is not to refer, at least if to refer means to identify or pick out, to tell you which individual I have in mind. In that sense, ‘a man was shouting’ doesn’t tell you which person you have in mind. It is true just so long as at least one man – it absolutely doesn’t matter which – was shouting. This contrasts with definite terms, which are true only when the person identified satisfies the predication.

I hold that all singular ‘reference’, i.e. telling the audience which individual is said to satisfy the predicate, is intralinguistic, and that there are chains of back-reference which originate in some indefinite noun phrase, e.g. ‘a certain young man’. This originating phrase does not refer in the sense that it ‘tells us which’. Clearly it can be satisfied, i.e. true of some man. But it doesn’t tell us which man it was. For example, some have thought that the man in Mark 14:51 was Mark himself, i.e. the author of the gospel. After all, all the other disciples had fled, so who knew about the man in the linen cloth, apart from the author himself? On the other hand, there were other witnesses present, and the story might have been passed around until Mark heard it, who put it in his account.

Indefinite reference

14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] a certain young man (νεανίσκος) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him. 14:52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.

The pronouns ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’ etc. clearly refer back to ‘a certain young man’. On the theory of extralinguistic reference, they do not refer in themselves, but inherit their reference from the antecedent. But the antecedent is an indefinite noun phrase. Can that refer? Surely not. Mark says ‘νεανίσκος τις’. The article τις (Latin quidam) means ‘a certain’, often used to suggest that the writer either cannot or will not speak more particularly. Commentators have speculated that the man was Mark himself, the author of the gospel, which if true means that ‘a certain young man’ and the pronouns, could be replaced with ‘I’, salva veritate. But Mark deliberately does not tell us. So in what sense does it refer?

Or suppose it does refer. Then as Geach argues (Reference and Generality chapter 1), the sentence ‘some man was wearing a linen cloth’ is true if some man – any man – was wearing a linen cloth. Even if the speaker has some particular man in mind, say Frank, and he means to say that Frank was wearing a linen cloth, it could have been the case that Frank wasn’t wearing a linen cloth, but some other man was, say Dick. So Dick was wearing a linen cloth, and so what the speaker actually said, i.e. ‘some man was wearing a linen cloth’, is true. But what the speaker meant to say is false.

It gets more difficult. If it is true that some man was wearing a linen cloth, whoever he was, then it is true to say that he was wearing a linen cloth. Note I use the pronoun ‘he’. I wrote ‘he was wearing a linen cloth’. But the subject of that sentence is a definite noun phrase, and so the sentence is true if and only if that man, and no other, satisfied the predicate. E.g. if that man was Frank, then the pronominal sentence is true if Frank satisfied the predicate, and false if he didn’t, even if Dick was wearing a linen cloth. Furthermore:

(1) Some man was wearing a linen cloth
(2) Sentence (1) is true if and only he – that man – was wearing a linen cloth.

How weird. Didn’t I say that sentence (1) can be true so long as someone – anyone satisfied ‘was wearing a linen cloth’? Yes, that’s still correct, because he, that man, could be any of the men. He could be Frank, Dick or Raymond. The whole point is that sentence (1) has an indefinite subject, and so doesn’t tell us which person satisfies the predicate. We know that he satisfies it, if the sentence is true. But we don’t know who he is.

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.

The primacy of proper names

Bill Vallicella argues here that a pronoun inherits its referent from the noun of which it is the antecedent. I say ‘John left the party saying he was ill.’ My use of ‘John’ makes an extra-linguistic reference to some person who is not a part of speech or a bit of language. ‘He’ also refers extra-linguistically. But the pronoun ‘he’ inherits its referent from John. It has no independent referential role to play, no role independent of that of ‘John.’

The scholastics might have expressed his point by saying that the proper name refers per se, ‘through itself’, whereas the pronoun refers per alium, or ‘through another’, i.e. through the proper name ‘John’.

I am not sure. There is a strange passage in Mark 14:51-2 about a man who is not mentioned anywhere else in Mark, nor in the other gospels.

[51] And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, [52] but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

If Vallicella is right, i.e. if the reference of the pronoun is always per alium, through another, and if the ‘another’ is always a proper name, it follows there must be some proper name that ‘he’ (intralinguistically) refers back to. But there isn’t. The man is never mentioned by name, and there is no other reference to him anywhere in the New Testament. Absolutely everything we know about him is from these two verses. The pronoun seems to inherit its reference from the indefinite description ‘a young man’.  I shall discuss the reference of such indefinite noun phrases later.

What if Mark had given the man in the linen cloth a proper name, as Luke does to Zacheus in chapter 19 of his gospel?

[2] And behold, there was a man named Zacheus, who was the chief of the publicans: and he was rich […] [5] And when Jesus was come to the place, looking up, he saw him and said to him: Zacheus, make haste and come down: for this day I must abide in thy house.

Yet there is still the problem that Zacheus is introduced via the indefinite description ‘a man named Zacheus’.  Why shouldn’t the pronoun in ‘he was rich’ and the proper name in ‘Zacheus, make haste’ both inherit their reference from the indefinite description. What is so special about proper names?

Sometimes Mark, like the other gospel writers, introduces people without such an indefinite introduction. Mark 15:40 says “There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.

But what is the sense of the very first occurrence of a proper name in a narrative? Does it tell us which individual its predicate is true of? Not at all. ‘Simon the leper’ is mentioned only once in Mark 14:3. ‘While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard’. What information does the first and only use of the name convey about Simon? Nothing at all, beyond the fact that he was called ‘Simon’, and that he presumably suffered from leprosy. The passage could have read ‘reclining at the table in the home of a man called “Simon the Leper”‘ without loss of meaning.

In summary, in a narrative context there is nothing special about proper names that distinguishes them from pronouns. Both have to identify an individual in order for them to have their full sense, but they can only identify an individual by inheriting their reference from a previously occurring noun phrase. They cannot refer per se, only per alium.  And ultimately they can do this only through indefinite noun phrases. These alone, by their very nature, are unable to inherit reference.  That suggests that they refer per se, but this raises the question of whether ‘a man’, ‘a certain woman’, ‘one of the disciples’ can refer at all. I shall discuss this in the next post.

This useful page itemises all the characters, both named and anonymous, who are mentioned in Mark.

Exegetical neutrality

The Maverick Philosopher agrees that the Quran contains tokens of 'Moses' (or its Arabic equivalent). He is still not sure whether those tokens refer to Moses or not. I suggested the following questions.

1. Do the OT and NT also contain tokens of 'Moses' (or Hebrew or Greek or Latin equivalent)?

2. Do the OT tokens of ‘Moses’ refer to Moses?

3. Does a ‘yes’ answer to the question immediately above, where I use the name ‘Moses’ also answer the question of whether I can refer to Moses?

4. Do the NT tokens of ‘Moses’ refer to Moses?

5. Some passages in the Quran (not all) that use tokens of ‘Moses’ are clearly quotations from the OT. If we agree that the OT passages refer to Moses, do we also agree that the quoted passages in the Quran also refer to him?

6. If we don’t agree that the quoted passages using ‘Moses’ refer to Moses, what happens if a Muslim printer publishes a copy of the OT? Does the reference failure result from identity or religious beliefs of the person printing or copying all or part of the OT? What happens if a Muslim printer publishes an annotated edition of the Quran which copies (as footnotes) the OT passages verbatim? I.e. does the reference of ‘Moses’ in an OT passage depend on its printed location?

7. If we agree that the passages in the Quran which quote the OT ‘Moses’ passages do refer to Moses, what about the passages which are not obvious quotes. Do they also refer to Moses, or not?

8. If we answer ‘no’ to the question immediately above, what about such passages which are not quotations from OT, but which use pronouns such as ‘he’ to refer back to passages which are quotations? If we agree that in the quotation passages the tokens of ‘Moses’ refer to Moses, is any subsequent pronominal back-reference also a reference to Moses?

This Wikipedia article is useful in matching Biblical and Quranic texts. Note that it gives the Arabic as well as the Romanised names. Thus ‘Moses’ corresponds to the Arabic موسى. So in translating the Arabic name to the Romanised one, do we translate the reference as well? I.e. do we assume that ‘Moses’ always refers to one mentioned in the Old Testament, and that the translation of موسى as ‘Moses’ guarantees that the Quran refers to Moses? Imagine an Arabic-English dictionary which as well as translating nouns, adjectives and verbs, also translates proper names, so that ‘Moses’ is given as the meaning for موسى. Or has the translator violated the principal of exegetical neutrality in assuming sameness of reference?

In any case, Wikipedia appears to violate the principle. E.g. it says “Islam believes that God thoroughly forgave Adam and Eve their transgression when they begged His mercy”. Presumably the names have their standard reference?

Linguistic Idealism?

Prior ("Oratio obliqua", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 37 (1963) 115-26, reprinted in Papers in Logic and Ethics, London:Duckworth, 1976) writes

When we describe our ordinary historical belief as a belief that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the words "Julius Caesar" do not have reference but only cross-reference. Proper names may acquire intelligibility either through our being introduced in some way to their bearers, or by being incorporated into a story – "Once upon a time someone lived in Rome who was called "Julius Caesar", and this Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, and so forth".

We believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the sense that we believe the relevant part of this story; there is no one to whom we are related as believing the whole story of him, but we identify the subject of the later part of the story, ultimately, as simply the "someone" with whom the story begins. ... there is no one of whom I say that he crossed the Rubicon; but I do say that someone crossed the Rubicon, and I have previously said (among much else) that this same someone was called "Julius Caesar".

We have a mass of historical documentation concerning Caesar, and a further, even greater mass of documentation about other people of his era, with multiple cross-references between them. We can extend this documentation by writing a biography of Caesar, using the same method of cross-reference, i.e. reference to historical documentation, which makes the name meaningful. Taking all the historical documentation as a whole, including later speculations (including biographies and historical studies) which attempt to remove contradiction or inconsistency, then you have a massive indefinite description of reality. ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ is definite, of course, but only because of this cross-reference.

Is this linguistic idealism? Surely not. For that historical documentation gives us information about the past. Think of cross-reference as a neat way of locating information. (Think of history as a massive set of old-fashioned metal filing cabinets, where you can make ‘singular reference’ to individual sections of a cabinet, and check for cross-references).

Assertion and reference

Lydia McGrew appears to suggest here that when the Quran says something like ‘Noah built an ark’, it is not saying just that the referent of ‘Noah’ built an Ark, but also that the referent of ‘Noah’ here is the same as the referent of ‘Noah’ in the Bible. Is the identity of reference asserted, as she seems to suggest, or is it required in order that to understand what the sentence says? I claim that it is a prerequisite, rather than an assertion, for the following reasons.

1. Generally it’s problematic to say that sentences contain assertions about what their component words mean. Does ‘Noah built an ark’ contain the assertion that ‘ark’ means a boat or ship? But then you have the problem of the sentence being false. Is it false because Noah didn’t built a boat or ship, or because he did, but ‘ark’ means something else, like ‘Wednesday’ or ‘fries with ketchup’.

2. What do we do about the passages in the Quran which quote the Bible? The English translation of Exodus 4 reads ‘Moses threw it [his staff] on the ground and it became a snake’. The version in the Quran (20:20) reads ‘Moses threw it down, and thereupon it turned into a slithering serpent’. Is the reference of ‘Moses’ different in the Quran from that in the Bible? If so, how can we accurately quote any passage from the Bible, given that the passage as we quote it may be about different individuals?

3. We use Biblical names in this kind of discussion all the time. E.g. you use the name ‘Abraham’. Are you making the claim that your referent of ‘Abraham’ is identical to the referent of that name as used in the Bible? How do I verify or test that claim? Is it down to same mental intention of yours? But I am not a clairvoyant.

4. How could you confirm your claim? For example, you could say ‘When I use the name ‘Abraham’, my intended referent is identical with the referent of the name as it occurs in the Bible’. But in order to do this you had to use the definite description ‘the referent of the name as it occurs in the Bible’. Are you now making yet another claim that the referent of this definite description is also identical with the referent in the Bible?? And doesn’t this lead to an infinite regress? The problem is that any claim that we are referring to N must itself refer to N.

Bill Vallicella makes a somewhat related claim here, which I will look at tomorrow.

Enjoy yourself

A Happy New Year to my readers. Here is Prince Buster.

Enjoy yourself it's later than you think.
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by, as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

Which has some affinity with the poem by Horace here, no?

Genesis and Reference

Ed Feser has an interesting post about Christians, Muslims, and the reference of “God”.  Nearly 300 comments, including some very bad philosophy. The issue is essentially a linguistic and semantical one, not theological. Ed correctly points out that a speaker’s erroneous beliefs don’t entail that he is not referring to the same thing that speakers with correct beliefs are referring to, mentioning the example made famous by Keith Donellan.  He points out that it is “perfectly coherent to say that Muslims are “importantly” and “crucially” wrong precisely because they are referring to the very same thing Christians are when they use the word “God,” and that they go on to make erroneous claims about this referent.  That the errors are “important” or “crucial” is not by itself sufficient to prevent successful reference.

But then Ed claims (in a comment on his own post) that Jews, Christians and Muslims also use “God” to mean “the uncaused cause of everything other than himself, who is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.”  “

Why? By ‘God’ don’t they all just mean the being referred to at the beginning of Genesis “In the beginning GOD created the heavens and the earth”, and who is referred to continuously throughout the old Testament?  When any of them uses the name used in the Bible, they are using it with the same reference as the Bible, the text from which they learned the name.

So it is perfectly rational for a Christian to deny that God (i.e. the being referred to in Genesis et al) is the uncaused cause of everything other than himself. I.e. the proposition ‘God is the uncaused cause of everything other than himself’ is synthetic rather than analytic.   But it is contradictory to say that God is not the being referred to at the beginning of Genesis, at least if the use of ‘God’ is intended to continue the chain of reference begun in Genesis and which extends throughout the Bible.

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.

On the mode of being of poets

Arizona Bill has some more ideas about modes of being here, so we can pick up where we left off last year (see modes of being of hobbits). Bill picks up on a passage from Scotus’s Ordinatio cited by Lukas Novak (Ord. I, dist. 36, q. un., n. 46 (ed. Vat. VI, 289). The Latin is from the Logic Museum, the English from Bill’s post.

Latin

English

[46] Et si velis quaerere aliquod esse verum huius obiecti ut sic, nullum est quaerere nisi 'secundum quid', nisi quod istud 'esse secundum quid' reducitur ad aliquod esse simpliciter, quod est esse ipsius intellectionis; sed istud 'esse simpliciter' non est formaliter esse eius quod dicitur 'esse secundum quid', sed est eius terminative vel principiative, ita quod ad istud 'verum esse secundum quid' reducitur sic quod sine isto vero esse istius non esset illud 'esse secundum quid' illius.

And if you are looking for some “true being” of this object as such [viz. of the object qua conceived], there is none to be found over and above that “being in a qualified sense”, except that this “being in a qualified sense” can be reduced to some “being in an unqualified sense”, which is the being of the respective intellection. But this being in an unqualified sense does not belong to that which is said to “be in a qualified sense” formally, but only terminatively or principiatively — which means that to this “true being” that “being in a qualified sense” is reduced, so that without the true being of this [intellection] there would be no “being in a qualified sense” of that [object qua conceived].

The puzzle about the ‘being’ of objects of thought was a common topic in medieval literature and there were many attempts at solving it. Peter of Cornwall has a go at it here. (The English translation is my hurried attempt).

Latin

English

Sed nomen accidentis aliquando repraesentat aliquid in opinione secundum Aristotelem; ut ‘Homerus est aliquid, ut poeta’, hic ‘poeta’ repraesentat aliquid in opinione, quia secundum Aristotelem Homerus est poeta non sequitur ‘ergo Homerus est’. Ergo nomen substantiae potest aliquid repraesentare in opinione. Ergo sic dicendo ‘Caesar est homo’ potest ly ‘homo’ stare pro homine in opinione. Et sic erit vera.

But the name of an accident sometimes represents something in opinion according to Aristotle [De. Int. 11 21a25sqq]. For example ‘Homer is something, namely a poet’ – here ‘poet’ represents something in opinion, for according to Aristotle, Homer is a poet, but ‘Homer exists [est]’ does not follow. Therefore the name of a substance can represent something-in-opinion. Therefore when we say ‘Caesar is a man’, the word ‘man’ can stand for a man-in-opinion, so it will be true” Note that according to the medievals, past objects such as Caesar or Homer no longer exist.

Bill objects that this kind of thing is a form of ‘psychologism’.

For if the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, then the purely intentional object has mental or psychic being -- which is not the case. The object is not a psychic content. It is not the act or a part of the act; not is it any other sort of psychic reality.

According to this objection, Homer is a poet and a man, and not an opinion or an intellection. I reply, Homer as conceived or as represented or as the object of opinion is a man. And ‘Homer’ stands for a man as the object of opinion, or as Peter Cornwall says ‘man in opinion’. So this trivial objection to the view does not stand. Whether it withstands deeper scrutiny is a more difficult question. Ockham has a more sophisticated view, see here, p. 366, by distinguishing the mode of reference or ‘supposition’ of words like ‘chimera’. Is the sentence ‘a chimera is understood’ or ‘thought about’ true or false? Ockham says that if the term ‘chimera’ is read as having ‘personal supposition’, so that the sentence is true if ‘chimera’ is satisfied by something in reality which is thought about, then if it false. But if it is read as having ‘simple’ or ‘material’ supposition, i.e. as referring to language or concepts, then it is true. For Ockham’s understanding of supposition theory, see here.

Macaulay on Scholastic logic

“Mr. Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description. His arguments are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; his divisions are awfully formal; and his style is generally as dry as that of Euclid’s Elements. Whether this be a merit, we must be permitted to doubt. Thus much is certain: that the ages in which the true principles of philosophy were least understood were those in which the ceremonial of logic was most strictly observed, and that the time from which we date the rapid progress of the experimental sciences was also the time at which a less exact and formal way of writing came into use.

“The style which the Utilitarians admire suits only those subjects on which it is possible to reason a priori. It grew up with the verbal sophistry which flourished during the dark ages. With that sophistry it fell before the Baconian philosophy in the day of the great deliverance of the human mind. The inductive method not only endured but required greater freedom of diction. It was impossible to reason from phenomena up to principles, to mark slight shades of difference in quality, or to estimate the comparative effect of two opposite considerations between which there was no common measure, by means of the naked and meagre jargon of the schoolmen. Of those schoolmen Mr. Mill has inherited both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century, born out of due season. We have here an elaborate treatise on Government, from which, but for two or three passing allusions, it would not appear that the author was aware that any governments actually existed among men. Certain propensities of human nature are assumed; and from these premises the whole science of politics is synthetically deduced! We can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are not reading a book written before the time of Bacon and Galileo,—a book written in those days in which physicians reasoned from the nature of heat to the treatment of fever, and astronomers proved syllogistically that the planets could have no independent motion,—because the heavens were incorruptible, and nature abhorred a vacuum!” [Edinburgh Review, March 1829]

Discuss.

Philosophical naivety

Attentive readers of this blog will know that I have been working on a book about Wikipedia for the past year. As part of the background research, I have been reading Lewis Hyde’s book Common as Air. The following passage deserves quoting in full:

The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion once addressed himself to the puzzle of how to psychoanalyze a liar and at one point in his argument he makes this striking claim: "The lie requires a thinker to think. The truth, or true thought, does not require a thinker—he is not logically necessary."

What can this mean? Bion compares the working psychoanalyst to a scientist, and in the case of science the point would seem to be that truths of the natural world are independent of the particular people who conceive of them. If Franklin and his friends were right that electrical charges always appear in equal and opposite amounts, the correctness of the insight would still exist had they never been born. Once the Leyden jar had been invented, someone else would have soon come upon this truth. Similarly, once Franklin declared his idea, anyone else could do the experiments in question and arrive at the same conclusion. Of "work that corroborates the discovery of others," Bion writes, "even if it requires a thinker it does not require a particular thinker and in this resembles truths—thoughts that require no thinker." Human minds in general are where such thoughts appear, but these thoughts do not depend on any one such mind.

The point gains clarity by way of its opposite: "The lie and its thinker are inseparable," Bion writes. "The thinker is of no consequence to the truth ... In contrast, the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar." Lies require a liar, and as such they say something about the liar, they are thus better fitted than truths to the task of gratifying the self-regard or narcissism of the individual who makes them. Any work that simply replicates a truth known to others lacks narcissistic appeal. No "I" can get much from it. When it comes to truth, however, as the poet Rimbaud wrote, "it is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought"

Eighteenth-century thinkers might have framed ideas such as these not so much in terms of truth versus lies as of truth versus opinions. Opinion, in Franklin's day, acted as a sort at middle term between truth and error, denoting any belief that was not yet, or could never be, confirmed by sense experience, experiment, and reason. Like lies in Bion's view, opinions reside with particular peoples in particular places. Englishmen in London observe the first day of the week as their day of worship, Turks in Constantinople observe the sixth: there may be truth in one case and error in the other, but no experiment or line of logic will tell us which is which. True knowledge, on the other hand, does not suffer the contingency of opinion. Lightning is electricity no matter if it is described by Dalibard in Paris or by Franklin in Philadelphia. As Newton suggested in his "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy", the cause of the tailing of stones should be the same "in Europe and in America"; the cause of "the reflection of light* should be die same "on our earth and the planets."

Opinions can never be detached from persons and places in that way. More to the point, because they require a thinker, as Bion says of lies, opinions are potentially divisive. Truth, needing no particular embodiment, can lead to concord; opinion, on the other hand, produces sects and tactions, and makes it difficult to move from any group of private selves to "the public good."

What is he on about? It is a wonderful example of “the confusions and absurdities of scientists and science journalists when they encroach ineptly upon philosophical territory”, as Vallicella neatly puts it (although Hyde is not a scientist, but a professor of creative writing). Taking the points in turn.

“… truths of the natural world are independent of the particular people who conceive of them”. Of course, but so are falsehoods. It is false that the earth is flat, and it is false that the moon is made of green cheese. These falsehoods are equally independent of the particular people who conceive of them. And yes, the correctness of the insight that electrical charges always appear in equal and opposite amounts would still exist had Franklin never been born. But equally, the claim that there is substance with negative weight that is released during combustion would be incorrrect, even if the inventor of the phlogiston theory (Johann Becher ) had never been born. If Hyde means that truth is mind-independent in some way that falsity is not, he is wrong. Both are mind-independent.

“.. once Franklin declared his idea, anyone else could do the experiments in question and arrive at the same conclusion”. Certainly, but the essential repeatability of scientific experiments is based on certain assumptions about causality, to which logical and epistemological issues are irrelevant. Certain true or false claims can be tested by experiment. Others cannot, e.g. claims about life after death, claims about parts of the universe which we could never possibly observe.

“Human minds in general are where such thoughts appear, but these thoughts do not depend on any one such mind”. False. Any thought depends on a thinker, and any thinker must have a mind. What Hyde probably means is that the truth of such thoughts is mind-independent. Sure, but as noted above, the falsity of such thoughts is mind-independent too.

“Lies require a liar, and as such they say something about the liar, they are thus better fitted than truths to the task of gratifying the self-regard or narcissism of the individual who makes them”.  To start with, this confuses lying with falsehood. A lie is an utterance known to be false, uttered with the intention to deceive. An actor is not a liar (not having the intention to deceive). One who utters a falsehood in good faith is not lying (because he or she does not realise it is a falsehood). And why shouldn’t truths be equally well-fitted to gratify self-regard? We often assert things we believe to be true in order to increase the esteem or regard in which others hold us. Why should truth be privileged over falsehood in this respect?

“… as the poet Rimbaud wrote, "it is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought" ” It is unclear how this observation about thinking relates to truth and falsehood. If I think that the earth is flat, can’t I equally say that ‘I am thought’?

“Eighteenth-century thinkers might have framed ideas such as these not so much in terms of truth versus lies as of truth versus opinions.” The definition of opinion that he attributes to Franklin is idiosyncratic, and does not seem true of other eighteenth-century thinkers (Hume? Reid? Adam Smith?)

“… opinions are potentially divisive” Why? Is he suggesting that the truth is somehow privileged, that, merely as truth, it has some inherent power denied to error? I discussed Mill’s view on that here. “A piece of idle sentimentality”, Mill says, “which all experience refutes”.