Abstract
This essay considers Meinong’s object theory in light of criticisms originating in Russell’s 1905 essay ‘On Denoting’. A general defense of object theory exposes misinterpretations of Meinong’s writings on Russell’s part, and explains some of the main strengths and advantages of Meinong’s logic and semantic theory overriding Russell’s objections. The problem of offering a generalized theory of definite descriptions to supplement Russell’s analysis for existent definitely described objects is addressed, and an alternative definite description protocol is proposed in a Meinongian semantic environment of existent and nonexistent intended objects and their distinguishing constitutive properties. Meinong’s reference to a golden mountain (discussed previously by Hume and Berkeley) is developed as an analogy for Meinong’s object theory reference domain of existent and nonexistent objects alike, without regard for their ontic status, in accord with Meinong’s doctrine of the Außersein of the pure object. As a window on how Meinong is perceived after Russell’s criticisms, Russell’s previous correspondence with Meinong and reviews of Meinong’s writings are combed for clues as to why Russell so dramatically turns against Meinong’s object theory in unflagging allegiance thereafter to Frege’s referential existentialism and semantic domain of exclusively existent entities.
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Notes
- 1.
See Smith 1985. Griffin 1977, tries to defend Russell on his interpretation of Meinong, and in particular with respect to whether or not Russell falsely attributes the being-predication thesis to Meinong. Griffin makes some valuable points, but overall I find his effort to rehabilitate the accuracy of Russell’s Meinong scholarship inconclusive. Griffin thereby shows, what need not be denied, that Russell sometimes interprets Meinong correctly on the relation of existence and subsistence to being, and on Meinong’s postulation of a realm of objects that are neither existent nor subsistent. The difficulty is rather in the damage done by other passages in which Russell flagrantly misrepresents Meinong’s ontic categories. In some places, Russell asserts that all Meinongian objects must have being in other places, he equates Meinong’s notion of subsistence with being (‘Being’). He confuses Meinong’s ontic neutrality in reference and predication theory, as in the phenomenology of presentation, judgment, emotion, and assumption, with the thesis that intended objects must after all subsist or have being in order to stand as reference and true predication subjects. Close examination of some of the passages Griffin quotes in Russell’s defense reveal further mistakes in his reading of Meinong. The fact that Russell sometimes gets Meinong right does not adequately mitigate the problems created by the overall inconsistencies in his exposition of Meinong’s object theory. Griffin acknowledges that there are also passages in which Russell misinterprets Meinong on these issues, recognizing that these unfortunately have been disproportionately influential in shaping later philosophical opinion about the merits of Meinong’s object theory.
- 2.
Russell, Letter to Alexius Meinong of 15 December 1904; translation in Smith 1985, 347. Russell’s cordial words in this first letter are somewhat mitigated by his formulaic repetition of similar remarks in later letters. Thus, in his later letters to Meinong, after the 1905a publication of ‘On Denoting’, such as Russell’s letter of 5 June 1906, Russell includes the statement, 348: ‘I am also of the opinion that the differences between us are entirely unimportant. In general I find myself to have almost exactly the same viewpoint as you’. The letter of 5 February 1907 offers the same gesture on a different topic, 349: ‘I have carefully read what you have written on the concept of necessity and I believe the difference of opinion between us is not so great as it appears at first sight’.
- 3.
Russell 1904, 205: ‘Before entering upon details, I wish to emphasise the admirable method of Meinong’s researches, which, in a brief epitome, it is quite impossible to preserve. Although empiricism as a philosophy does not appear to be tenable, there is an empirical manner of investigating, which should be applied in every subject-matter. This is possessed in a very perfect form by the works we are considering…Whatever may ultimately prove to be the value of Meinong’s particular contentions, the value of his method is undoubtedly very great; and on this account if on no other, he deserves careful study.’
- 4.
See also Russell 1905b, 530–1: ‘Presentations, judgments and assumptions, Meinong points out, always have objects; and these objects are independent of the states of mind in which they are apprehended. This independence has been obscured hitherto by the ‘prejudice in favour of the existent’ (des Wirklichen), which has led people to suppose that, when a thought has a non-existent object, there is really no object distinct from the thought. But this is an error: existents are only an infinitesimal part of the objects of knowledge. This is illustrated by mathematics, which never deals with anything to which existence is essential, and deals in the main with objects which cannot exist, such as numbers. Now we do not need first to study the knowledge of objects before we study the objects themselves; hence the study of objects is essentially independent of both psychology and theory of knowledge. It may be objected that the study of objects must be coextensive with all knowledge; but we may consider separately the more general properties and kinds of objects, and this is an essential part of philosophy. It is this that Meinong calls Gegenstandstheorie.’
- 5.
See Routley 1980, 496. Jacquette 1985–1986;1996a, 80–91. Meinong’s concept of the modal moment and watering-down extraconstitutive properties to constitutive versions lacking the modal moment of full-strength factuality is presented in AMG VI, 266. Also Findlay 1995, 103–4. I once thought that the constitutive versus extraconstitutive property distinction was sufficient to forestall Russell’s problem of the existent golden mountain and its variants, but as the argument of Chap. 7 makes clear, I no longer believe that object theory can be adequately defended without combining the constitutive and extraconstitutive property distinction with Meinong’s watering-down of extraconstitutive properties lacking the modal moment of full-strength factuality. What if we begin by speaking of a presumed contradictory proposition in mathematics as ‘Contradictory m’, and it later proves not to be contradictory? There are several ways to explain this usage without breaking faith with Meinong’s distinction between constitutive and extraconstitutive properties. We cannot attach too much weight to conventional linguistic practice, where inexactitudes are rife. Calling a certain mathematical result ‘Contradictory m’ does not logically imply that m is contradictory, any more than calling a horse ‘Courageous h’ makes h courageous. It is never suggested in Meinong that an object’s characterizing Sosein can be read off from the object’s referential designation. The relation is more complex and interesting, exploration-worthy in its own right, but for a number of reasons such examples do not show that we cannot live without watered-down extraconstitutive properties. If the latter is true, which I continue increasingly to think, it must be for other reasons and in light of very different challenges.
- 6.
Meinong’s solution to Russell’s problem of the existent golden mountain is presented in AMG V, 278–82.
- 7.
- 8.
See Routley 1980, 496: ‘…logically important though the modal moment is, the [constitutive-extraconstitutive] property distinction alone, properly applied, is enough to meet all objections to theories of objects based on illegitimate appeals to the Characterisation Postulate [Routley’s version of Meinong’s thesis of the Independence of Sosein (so-being) from Sein (being)]. The Meinong whose theory includes an unrestricted Characterisation Postulate is accordingly, like Meinong the super-platonist, a mythological Meinong.’
- 9.
In ‘On Denoting’, Russell seems to assimilate Meinong’s Außersein with his own concept of being; he writes 1905a, 485: ‘Hence, it would appear, it must always be self-contradictory to deny the being of anything; but we have seen, in connexion with Meinong, that to admit being also sometimes leads to contradictions.’ Russell’s argument here and in the Principles of Mathematics recalls Socrates discussion with the Eleatic Stranger in Plato’s dialogue, the Sophist.
- 10.
- 11.
Reicher has recently tried to breathe new life into Russell’s objection by arguing that Russell’s problem needs to be seriously addressed by defenders of a Meinongian object theory. Reicher 2005 concludes, 191: ‘If one likes pointed formulations, perhaps one might wish to put it this way: Russell might not have succeeded in defeating object theory tout court, but he succeeded in defeating Meinongian object theory.’ A key assumption in Reicher’s effort to resuscitate Russell’s existent present King of France problem nevertheless seems false, and to my knowledge falsely attributed to Meinong in any of his formulations of object theory. Reicher maintains that Meinong is committed to what she calls ‘The description principle’, 2005, 171: ‘If we use a particular description in order to ‘pick out’ a nonexistent object, the object has all those properties that are mentioned in the description.’ On the strength of this principle, she offers a four-step argument to show that the same reasoning involving the ‘description principle’ (together with other principles in my opinion less controversially attributed to Meinong), that supports the inclusion of a present King of France in a Meinongian extraontological semantic domain must also be extended to an existent present King of France that we can agree does not exist. My objection to Reicher’s interpretation is that the description principle as she characterizes it is too strong, subject to counterexamples that depend on considerations that in other ways are independent of Meinong’s object theory, and that Meinong himself, for good reasons, I would say, nowhere explicitly accepts Reicher’s ‘description principle’ as she formulates it, although he does accept a similar principle. The version of the principle that I prefer in this context states, adapting Reicher’s formulation: ‘If we use a particular description in order to ‘pick out’ a nonexistent object, then the object has all the properties that are essential to picking it out (distinguishing it from all other objects).’ Is the mention of ‘existent’ in the ‘existent present King of France’ essential to picking out the Meinongian object of reference? The answer rather depends on exactly what object we believe ourselves to be picking out. We should avoid unnecessarily opening the door to all properties that are merely ‘mentioned’ in a description that picks out a nonexistent object, although that assumption is obviously required for Russell’s objection and Reicher’s discussion. Here is an analogy borrowed from Kripke’s 1980 and 2013 discussions of reference in non-Meinongian terms. Suppose that I speak of the man with the martini across the room who in fact has Perrier and no alcohol in his glass. In this case, I think it is most natural to say that I refer to the man across the room and I falsely attribute to him the property of holding a martini. I would not be inclined to say, as Reicher and Russell apparently believe Meinong is obligated, that I am referring in that situation to another (nonexistent) object that truly has the properties of being a man, being across from me in the room I occupy, and is holding a martini. The same is true of a thought described as being ostensibly about the existent present King of France. If I use this definite description, then I refer to the present King of France, and I falsely attribute to that (nonexistent) object (in 1905a, the then or still present King of France) the property of being existent.
- 12.
Russell 1905a, 483–4: ‘But now consider ‘the King of France is bald.’ By parity of form [with ‘the King of England is bald’], this also ought to be about the denotation of the phrase ‘the King of France’. But this phrase, though it has a meaning, provided ‘the King of England’ has a meaning, has certainly no denotation, at least in no obvious sense. Hence one would suppose that ‘the King of France is bald: ought to be nonsense; but it is not nonsense, since it is plainly false.’
- 13.
Findlay 1995, 43: ‘Meinong also holds that there are many true statements that we can make about [nonexistent objects]. Though it is not a fact that the golden mountain or the round square exists, he thinks it is unquestionably a fact that the golden mountain is golden and mountainous, and that the round square is both round and square.’
- 14.
An argument to this effect is given by Parsons 1974, 571.
- 15.
- 16.
This is obviously true if Russell’s Principia Mathematica proposition (*14.02) is invoked in this connection to analyze being mythological (transposed in the present notation) as: ∃x[Fx ∧ ∀y[Fy ↔ y ≠ x]]. Logically contingent statements of this or that object being mythological will then all turn out to be logically impossible by virtue of entailing the outright contradiction of existing, while at the same time failing to be identical to any existent entity. Note that we cannot simply apply *14.02 to the right-hand side of (6.3), which admittedly is not even well-formed in Principia Mathematica, because of differences in Russell’s interpretation of both the existence E! property and the existential quantifier. The right-hand side of (6.3) is an appropriately modified version of the kind of analysis Russell himself would be prepared to give. It is ‘Russellian’ only in the sense that it conforms to the main lines of Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions in its commitment to referential extensionalism, in sharp contrast with Meinong’s referential intensionalism. A similar criticism of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions is sketched in Jacquette 1991a, 1994b.
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Jacquette, D. (2015). Meditations on Meinong’s Golden Mountain. In: Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being. Synthese Library, vol 360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18075-5_6
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