DBT
Contributor
How can existence not be a property?
These are all just pretend referents, and statements about them technically are false. The story is not incomprehensible; it's just that, like all fictions, the utterances that compose it are literally false.
Great post, Togo! I appreciate your thoughts. You are ahead of me, having written a paper on this. I'm just trying to catch up.
Do you agree with those who posit Meinongian objects?
As to your three points, I need to think further, but can't resist trying a quickie response now. Here's my attempt. Against:
1): we can talk about the class of bachelors and the class of married people. These classes do not intersect; there is no member of both. hence, we cannot quantify over both classes. In the case you mention, it is false that the thing you are talking about is a married bachelor. You are just making an illicit conjunction of the predicates married and bachelor - illicit by the rules of language. Russell is still correct that it is not the case that there is some x that is married and is a bachelor. So you're really just talking about married x's and bachelors and making a mistake in conjoining them.
2): When an author writes a fiction, s/he makes pretend assertions about objects. The author of the Superman stories makes pretend assertions. They are pretend and not real assertions because they have no reference; Superman does not exist. When we talk about a fiction, though, our assertions do have a reference, because the fiction itself is a created artifact that is a real-world referent. So we and children can make genuine assertions about Superman, the created artifact. So no problem with our or critics' discourse about the properties of the text. The problem is with explaining the nature of the referent of the utterances put by the author into the fiction, but that's not the problem you bring up in 2).
3) the story isn't a counterexample against Russell because all the characters are part of the fiction, the boy as much as the princess. It doesn't matter how many back-levels, shall we say, exist in a narrative, i.e. a character who interacts with characters fictional to him, who may in turn interact with characters fictional to them. These are all just pretend referents, and statements about them technically are false. The story is not incomprehensible; it's just that, like all fictions, the utterances that compose it are literally false. But if they were true, it wouldn't be fiction.
OK, show me where I went wrong! And if you have any views about Meinong, I'd like to hear them. So far I'm not prepared to grant his "objects."
It would have been better if, instead of the above, I had written:
"These are all just pretend referents, and if we treat the author's utterances about them as statements, they are false. But since we all agree that fiction suspends real-world reference, the author's utterances about the characters don't count as statements/assertions. Fictional utterance is not assertion in the strict sense. The story is not incomprehensible; it's just that, like all fictions, the utterances that compose it are, if viewed as assertions, false, and if viewed as fictional discourse, not assertions."
A fictional character may be a body of information, various concepts, imagined characters, creators, invisible beings, etc, cobbled together by a mind into a coherant but fictional entity.
Does that really work?
Consider the statement. "Henry believes that the Loch Ness monster exists." Or simpler, still, "Henry believes that X." From what you've said, this is an assertion if Henry is a real person, and not an assertion if Henry is a fictional character. But in that case it is not possible to tell from the statement itself whether or not it is an assertion, since it depends on the properties of the subject. Which makes it impossible to produce a generalised logic. That leads to the uncomfortable situation where the statement "x=3" may or may be an assertion, depending on whether or not x is considered to be real.
A fictional character may be a body of information, various concepts, imagined characters, creators, invisible beings, etc, cobbled together by a mind into a coherant but fictional entity.
How coherent? I doubt it. In every head they're imagined differently. For instance, you can have canonical Spock from Star Trek, versus fanfic Spock, but that is just one of the conceptualizations, and certainly, not even in the screenplay writers head is Spock a "logical" concept devoid of the interplay of fantasy, conscious and unconscious... pun intended.
As I understand it, in predicate logic that goes back to Russell, it's a quantifier. In an existence claim, you are attributing certain properties to members of a set, and the existential quantifier marks that set as having at least one member. So taking "the present king of France is bald," you can analyze that as
(Ə x) (xF • xG) where F = present king of France and G = bald
I.e. there exists an x such that x is the present king of France and x is bald.
Since there is no x over which this conjunction holds true, the whole proposition is negated. So the original statement is not meaningless but simply false. On this account.
The properties are being king of France now and being bald. Existing isn't a third property.
I may have some of this wrong.
My understanding is that Russell's breakthrough, which helped lead to analytic philosophy, gained support in so many quarters because it resolved many puzzles of language and metaphysics.
Kant, though, had already attacked the Ontological Argument on the grounds that it wrongly treats existence as a predicate. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Objects, which steve_bnk linked, goes into that.
I understand that Meinong, for one, held that existence is a predicate, and he has continued to have followers.
As I understand it, existing is not a third property, or a second property, but a necessary quality of the objects and events of the world. So the present King of France either exists, or he does not exist, he is either bald or he is not bald, of which any of these claims may be falsified by the available evidence.
As I understand it, existing is not a third property, or a second property, but a necessary quality of the objects and events of the world. So the present King of France either exists, or he does not exist, he is either bald or he is not bald, of which any of these claims may be falsified by the available evidence.
I think we may be basically saying the same thing, but do you want to stick with "not a ...property, but a ...quality"? I would think property and quality are synonyms or virtually so.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
IMO sounds like convoluted philosophical nonsense. You may be heading towards the 'are thoughts real discussion?
it is all biochemical states in your brain.. I believe the inability to distinguish between reality and fiction is considered a disorder.
OK, I thought this was a philosophy forum. But I'm down with it's all biochemical states in my brain. Reductionism rocks.
As I understand it, existing is not a third property, or a second property, but a necessary quality of the objects and events of the world. So the present King of France either exists, or he does not exist, he is either bald or he is not bald, of which any of these claims may be falsified by the available evidence.
I think we may be basically saying the same thing, but do you want to stick with "not a ...property, but a ...quality"? I would think property and quality are synonyms or virtually so.
Yeah, virtually synonymous as far as I can see.
As I understand it, existing is not a third property, or a second property, but a necessary quality of the objects and events of the world. So the present King of France either exists, or he does not exist, he is either bald or he is not bald, of which any of these claims may be falsified by the available evidence.
I think we may be basically saying the same thing, but do you want to stick with "not a ...property, but a ...quality"? I would think property and quality are synonyms or virtually so.
Yeah, virtually synonymous as far as I can see.
I think I get it - you mean existence is a necessary predicate of things in the world, not a contingent predicate? If so, I take it that the scope of "necessary" is the if-then relation: if it's an object or event in the world, then necessarily it exists.
I think this account will mess up standard predicate logic, but it may be that I'm wrong about that consequence or that you're fine with it, given that you oppose some of what Russell advocated.
A fictional character may be a body of information, various concepts, imagined characters, creators, invisible beings, etc, cobbled together by a mind into a coherant but fictional entity.
How coherent? I doubt it. In every head they're imagined differently. For instance, you can have canonical Spock from Star Trek, versus fanfic Spock, but that is just one of the conceptualizations, and certainly, not even in the screenplay writers head is Spock a "logical" concept devoid of the interplay of fantasy, conscious and unconscious... pun intended.
I agree with that, but there must be a certain degree of coherence in order for the characters and their adventures to make sense, firstly to the author and that the reader can relate to the characters and events as they are described by the author.
Of course everyone does interpret the narrative in their own way, but that is also true of actual events. Ask 10 witnesses to an accident and you'll probably get 10 different versions of the event, albeit reasonably accurate overall.
Hm.. But it's not enough to declare them false, because their falsity or truth doesn't have any bearing on the case. What matters is whether they are coherent. Russel claims (from memory) are extremely strong - he claims that the idea of an existant unicorn doesn't make sense, even to the person talking about it - that it is literally non-sensical. But in the case of the story, the existance or otherwise of the characters is an essential plot point. Something coherent is being consistently communicated. We can establish, as an observed fact, that existance can coherently be treated as an attribute - within the context of a fiction. Hence my claim that Russel's position is counterfactual - people do in fact make sense of a relationship that he claims doesn't contain any.
A fictional character may be a body of information, various concepts, imagined characters, creators, invisible beings, etc, cobbled together by a mind into a coherant but fictional entity.
How coherent? I doubt it. In every head they're imagined differently. For instance, you can have canonical Spock from Star Trek, versus fanfic Spock, but that is just one of the conceptualizations, and certainly, not even in the screenplay writers head is Spock a "logical" concept devoid of the interplay of fantasy, conscious and unconscious... pun intended.
I agree with that, but there must be a certain degree of coherence in order for the characters and their adventures to make sense, firstly to the author and that the reader can relate to the characters and events as they are described by the author.
Of course everyone does interpret the narrative in their own way, but that is also true of actual events. Ask 10 witnesses to an accident and you'll probably get 10 different versions of the event, albeit reasonably accurate overall.
I'm comparing subjective experiences versus physical experiences, not subjective experiences versus interpretations of physical experiences (which is the same as comparing subjective experiences with subjective experiences). "Versions of the event" is not the same as "actual events".