The last couple of posts have been concerned truth and logic
and, I am sorry to admit, this one and the next will also be concerned with
fairly dry and abstract ratiocination on these themes. I apologize in advance.
I feel my readers may be more interested in stories and critiques of films like
Ghostbusters and A Beautiful
Mind – but I have my reasons for wanting to
write about predicate calculus and ontology. It is all part of the same process.
I am endeavouring to devise a new theory of literary criticism and one cannot
do so properly without addressing these issues. Any account of fiction must
also account for reality.
Today’s post takes as its subject the question of whether
existence is a property of things, a property that individuals can either
possess or lack, or a ‘second order property’, that is, an instantiation of a
first order property. This is a serious issue in logic and metaphysics. The
second view, that existence is not a properly a property but rather the
instantiation of a property, was put forward by Frege and Russel; the first
view was proposed by Meinong. We can explore the difference between the opposed
positions by considering the following two propositions: “Pegasus is a winged
horse” and “There is a winged horse called Pegasus.” According to the
descriptivist account, the one adopted by Frege and Russel, these two
propositions are equivalent and can be alternatively expressed “Something in
the world exists that is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” According
to the descriptivists, both propositions are not only equivalent but also
false. They are false because Pegasus does not exist. For the Meinongian however, these two propositions are qualitatively
different: the first is true and the second false. The first can be alternatively
expressed: “Some individual, either real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” This the Meinongian (or at least some Meinongians) regard
as true, true because an individual need not exist to be the object of a predicate. The second can be alternatively expressed: “Some individual, either
real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings, is a horse and actually
exists.” This second proposition, which ascribes to Pegasus the property of
actual existence, is the one Meinongians would decry as a falsehood.
Although the descriptivist proposal is the one more commonly
accepted, I think I have to throw in my lot with the Meinongians. Extreme
Meinongians believe that for every predicate or set of predicates there is at
least one individual, real or imaginary, which satisfies all the relevant
conditions. This can be contrasted with descriptivists who restrict the domain
of propositional functions to real existing individuals. I am unsure (at the
present state of my understanding) that I would go so far as to describe myself
as an Extreme Meinongian, but I definitely would describe myself as some kind
of Meinongian. I have no choice in the matter. If one wants to say that
interpretations of fictional works can be true or false, we need to allow at
least some imaginary entities into the tent. How else can we talk meaningfully
about them? In the rest of this post, I am going to consider some of the
objections to Meinongianism from I think an unusual perspective, an
epistemological perspective, and attempt to show that these objections fail. (I
should say that this post is indebted to the article on existence included in
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence , for including these objections and forcing me to think of replies. The article is worth a look.)
One objection to Meiongianism is that it permits incomplete
objects. An incomplete object is one that does not have the full set of
properties one associates with a complete object. Consider the proposition
“Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his left shoulder.” According to critics of
Meiongianism, this proposition is neither true nor false and so fails the test
of bivalence (because all propositions must be either be true or false.) It fails
because the object in question is incomplete –all complete objects either have
moles or don’t and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never mentions whether Holmes does or not. I want to disagree politely with this way of construing the
objects predicated by fictive statements. I propose that Holmes is, in fact, a
complete object and that this proposition is definitely either true or false.
The issue is not that the proposition lacks a truth-value but that we have no
way of knowing the proposition’s
truth-value. Consider, as a counter-example, the proposition “Socrates had a
mole on his left shoulder”. This proposition is definitely either true or false
but we have no way of knowing, now, whether it is or not. Socrates’s mole has been lost to the sandstorm of time. The proposition concerning Holmes is comparable.
Perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always imagined Holmes as having a mole on his
left shoulder but never informed anyone; perhaps he even wrote a story that
mentioned it but never published it or told anyone about it. Perhaps this story
was exiled to a remote drawer of an obscure bureau and has never seen the light
again. Just because we don’t know a fact does not mean it does not exist. Not
having any means of knowing the truth-value of a proposition does not mean that
it lacks a truth-value.
We can view the imaginary objects represented by literature
in the following way: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had access to another world, call
it Holmes-world, and selected facts about this world to inform his stories.
Doyle is an absolute authority on Holmes-world in the same way that Tolkien is
an absolute authority on Middle-Earth. With respect to the characters, locales
and events peculiar to Middle-Earth, Tolkien is, like the Pope, infallible. Putting our faith in Tolkien, we can truly say that Gimli is a dwalf,
Frodo is a hobbit and Arogorn truly the rightful scion to Gondor’s
throne. All of these propositions are true, because Tolkien says so, and because Tolkien is the only one with privileged access to the domain of
individuals and relationships that constitute the fictional world of
Middle-Earth. (I appreciate the fact that Tolkien’s account may be internally
inconsistent. Such inconsistencies are problematic for the proposal now under
consideration but I do not have space to explore this issue here.)
A second objection to Meiongianism relates back the example
I gave at the beginning of the essay. I quote the Stanford entry on existence:
“Consider the condition of being winged, being a horse, and existing. By the
naïve comprehension principle, there is an object with exactly those features.
But then this object exists, as existing is one of its characterizing features.
Intuitively, however, there is no existent winged horse; existing seems to
require a bit more substance… This is overpopulation not of being but of
existence as well.”
The hole in this objection concerns the argument’s use of
the word ‘intuitively’. It is not intuitively
obvious that Pegasus does not exist. Perhaps Pegasus is tenanted in Area 51
with Sasquatch, the water-powered automobile and Elvis. In truth, Pegasus’s
lack of existence is something we accept on faith – it is part of ‘consensus
reality’, the shared system of beliefs that inform our language and behaviour.
The definition of Pegasus that most people accept is “a mythical winged horse”:
if I say Pegasus is winged, or is a horse, or is mythical, I am making true
statements – because a majority of people, I think, accept that these
propositions are true. If I say that Pegasus exists in the real world, only a
confused minority, I think, would believe me. This is, by the way, the problem
with most discourse about logic. It depends too heavily on ‘intuitive’ (read
‘obvious’) facts.
I am arguing that true statements are true not because they
correspond to entities in the world but because they conform to what people
believe. And our beliefs not only concern ordinary properties but also concern
whether objects are real, mythical, fictional or nonsensical. This is not to
suggest that consensus reality is homogenous. People disagree frequently about
many issues all the time. (I often find myself totally at odds with consensus
reality.) Sometimes empirical facts have input into these debates, as when a
scientist performs an experiment, but generally, when there is uncertainty,
people make decisions about what to believe by trusting in some authoritative
source. I believe that light can usefully be thought of as consisting of
photons but my belief in this is based not on direct observation but on my
faith in my Physics textbook; I believe that Socrates was mortal but this is
because I trust in those sources that say he died when forced to
ingest hemlock in 399 BC, rather than those sources that say he is still alive
and is now domiciled in Area 51 with Elvis and the other aliens. If we are to
accept that knowledge is phenomenological, we must also accept some form of
Meiongianism, because we must accept that the reality of entities is
contestable.
Other objections to Meiongianism involve paradoxes related
to meta-logic. I am not going to attempt to counter these objections here
except to say that the descriptivist accounts are not free of paradox themselves.
Consider, for example, ‘the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves’ or
the issue of whether the word ‘heterological’ refers to itself or not. (I might
mention in passing that the greatest problem with Predicate Calculus is not to
do with fictional characters but rather the issue of time and change. Does the
domain of a Quantifier cover only individuals existing currently? Or should it
be extended to cover entities that used to exist but now no longer do? And, if
so, should it also be extended to cover those entities that don’t exist, have
never existed but will in the future?)
The key idea I want readers to take away from this is that a fiction
is a partial description of another, albeit fictional, world and that the
author of a fiction is an absolute authority on the elements of that world.
There is another way of approaching the issue, employing the notion of speech-acts as
proposed by John Searle. This will be the subject of my next post.
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