Priest Graham
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
TOWARDS NON-BEING This page intentionally left blank Towards Non-Being The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality Graham Priest CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Graham Priest 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926254–3 978–0–19–926254–0 13579108642 For Richard (1936–1996)—non-existent object though you may now be, your Sosein is still with us. Preface ‘If meinongianism isn’t dead, nothing is,’ Gilbert Ryle is reputed to have said in the heyday of Oxford Philosophy.1 I think that Ryle was exactly right. No idea in philosophy is ever past its use-by date, at least, no idea of any substance. We may always come back and find new depths in it, new applications for it, new answers to objections that were taken to be decisive. Thus, for example, platonism has re-emerged many times in the history of Western philosophy, most recently in a perhaps unexpected place: in connection with technical results in the founda- tions of mathematics. Aristotelian virtue ethics has reappeared recently after several hundred years of the dominance of ethics by kantianism and utilitarianism. And so the list goes on. Of course, this is not how Ryle intended his words to be understood. What he meant was that meinongianism was dead for all time. It would perform no Lazarus-like return. For many years I shared Ryle’s view. Educated about thirty years ago in Britain, I took it for granted that Russell had shown that meinongianism was little more than superstition (though one that he himself had subscribed to for some time), and that Quine had shown that it was all just simple obfuscation. That which exists is that over which one can quantify; and that’s that. Thus it was that I was outraged when I met Richard Routley (Sylvan as he later became) in the mid-1970s, and found him stoutly defending a version of meinongianism. (Richard never defended a view in any other way!) I could not understand how the view could possibly be taken seri- ously. It was my good fortune not just to have met Richard, but to have been able to talk with him about the matter over many years. He per- suaded me that all the knock-down arguments that I thought I had were lame or just begged the question; that meinongianism is a very simple, natural, and common-sense view; that the theory has many applications to areas of philosophy where more orthodox views creak at the joints. 1 I have not been able to track down the source of this quote, so it may just be hearsay. The nearest I have found is ‘Gegenstandstheorie ...is dead, buried and not going to be resurrected,’ Ryle (1973), 255. Preface · vii Part of the beauty of meinongianism—or at least of Richard’s approach to it, spelled out at length in Exploring Meinong’s Jungle (1980)—is its technical simplicity. To do full justice to the idea one would seem to need impossible worlds, but these one has anyway, at least if one subscribes to some version of relevant logic. But the main technical trick is just thinking of one’s quantifiers as existentially neutral. ‘∀’is understood as ‘for every’; ‘∃’ is understood as ‘for some’. Existential commitment, when required, has to be provided explicitly, by way of an existence predicate, E, which, pace the way that Kant is often—and erroneously—interpreted, is a perfectly normal predicate. Thus, ‘there exists something such that’ is ∃x(Ex ∧ ...x ...); and ‘all existing things are such that’ is ∀x(Ex ⊃ ...x ...). The action of the theory is mainly, therefore, not at the technical level, but at the philosophical level. Indeed, in one way, Richard’s view was even simpler than Meinong’s. Meinong held that concrete objects exist, abstract objects, like numbers and propositions, subsist, and that merely possible and impossible objects do not in any way exist. They neither exist nor subsist—as Meinong is fre- quently represented as having claimed. Richard simplified this: concrete objects exist; everything else (abstract objects, worlds, merely possible objects, impossible objects) simply do not exist. (Indeed, though I shall not follow him in this, Richard held the even stronger view that it is only present concrete objects that exist. Past and future concrete objects have the same existential status as abstract objects—none.) To distinguish his view from Meinong’s, Richard coined the neologism noneism for it, a usage that I will follow. There is one technical problem that was never really solved in the 1,000-odd pages of Exploring Meinong’s Jungle, however. This is the charac- terization problem. Meinong insisted that the Sein (being) of an object is independent of its Sosein (properties). In particular, objects can be charac- terized in various ways, and have the properties that they are characterized as having, whether or not they exist—existential status is irrelevant. Thus, we specify an object by a certain set of conditions. These might be: was a detective, lived in Baker St., had unusual powers of observation and inference, etc. Let us write the conjunction of these conditions as A(x). Then if we call the object so characterized ‘Sherlock Holmes’, s for short, then s has its characterizing properties, A(s), plus whatever properties follow from these. The idea that an object has those properties that it is char- acterized as having is called the characterization principle (CP). It explains, amongst other things, how we can know some of the things we do about viii · Preface non-existent objects: we know that objects characterized in certain ways have those properties, precisely because they are characterized in that way. Now, the trouble with this idea is that the CP cannot be correct in full generality. If it were, not only could one run the ontological argument to prove the existence of God—and everything else—one could, in fact, prove everything. For let B be any sentence, and consider the condition x = x ∧ B. Let t be the object characterized by this condition. Then the CP gives us: t = t ∧ B, from which B follows. It would seem, then, that only a restricted class of contexts, A(x), can be used in the CP. The problem is, which? This is the characterization problem. There are various gestures towards a solution to the problem in Exploring Meinong’s Jungle, but Richard never achieved there—or anywhere else as far as I am aware—a solution that he regarded as fully satisfactory. I first became attracted to noneism when I found an approach to the characterization problem that I found plausible. The CP can hold unres- trictedly, provided only that its instances may hold, not at this world, but at others. This solution is explained in detail in Ch. 4. That chapter began life as a paper given at a conference in St Andrews in 1999. In later discussions, Byeong Yi persuaded me that I had not done justice to the indeterminacy of some intentional states. Chapter 3, which is an attempt to do better, arose out of discussions with Steven Read. Chapters 3 and 4 are a statement of noneism—or my version of it anyway. In 2001 Jay Garfield invited me to give the annual Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz and Thomas Tymoszko Memorial Logic Lecture at Smith College. I decided to talk about some problems in epistemic logic, and especially the behaviour of identity in epistemic contexts. The first two chapters of the book expand on the topic of that lecture. With this mater- ial in place, it became clear that a coherent semantic and metaphysical picture of intentionality in general was available. This is what is presented in Part 1 of the book (Chs. 1–4). Part 2 of the book (Chs. 5–8) comprises a defence of the view, and especially its noneism, against some natural objections. In the process, a noneist account of various kinds of objects other than the objects of intentional states is articulated. It is widely thought that Quine had demolished meinongianism in his ‘On What There Is’ (1948); but Quine’s demolition was itself demolished by Routley in ‘On What There Isn’t’ (1982).