Abstract
Against the mainstream Quinean meta-ontology, Meinongians claim: “There are things that do not exist”. It is sometimes said that the “there are” in that sentence expresses “Meinongian quantification”. I consider two supposedly knock-down meta-ontological objections to Meinongianism from the literature: (1) an objection from equivocation, to the effect that the view displays a conceptual or semantic misunderstanding, probably of quantificational expressions; and (2) an objection from analyticity, to the effect that sentence is Frege-analytically false i.e., it is synonymous with a logical falsity. Objection (1) is countered via a development of Williamson’s argument against epistemic conceptions of analyticity. Objection (2), which points at alleged linguistic evidence, is countered by resorting to linguistic counter-evidence. The upshot is a set-up of the debate between Quineans and Meinongians, in which the two parties disagree on substantive matters concerning de re the property of existence, taken as a natural property in the Lewis-Sider sense; and in which quick alleged refutations, such as objections from meaning-variance or analytic falsehood, rarely achieve their expected results.
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Notes
- 1.
My translation. Once the easy answer is given, of course, not everything is settled: “there remains room for disagreement over cases” (Quine [22]: 32).
- 2.
To be sure, for authors like Hirsch both PVI and DKL can make a true claim given what each means by the respective quantifier. The Quinean raising the objection from equivocation will not normally grant such symmetry to the Meinongian. In her view, the Meinongian is merely making semantically deviant claims, or pseudo-claims. This may not be the view of the typical deflationist. I am not aware of deflationists explicitly addressing the issue of Meinongian quantification in the literature, but perhaps a Hirschean may take the (Q) vs. (M) debate as shallow, just as the PVI vs. DKL debate.
- 3.
- 4.
Williamson [41]: 91. Williamson’s imaginary characters, Peter and Stephen, are taken as deviant in their use of the quantifier in their denials that every vixen is a vixen. Lewis [14] proposed to have Meinongianism collapse via non-homophonic translation into a generous form of Platonism, followed in this by Burgess and Rosen [3].
- 5.
Some interesting points concerning the ontologists? use of “thing” and “object” are raised by Thomasson [32].
- 6.
They may disagree on how to call such a study. Some Meinongian may resist the term “ontology”, on the ground that it misleadingly injects being in the notion of thing, or object. She may prefer Gegenstandstheorie, “object theory”. This, I take it, would be a merely terminological disagreement: it would only concern whether or not to use a technical term to label a certain philosophical sub-discipline.
- 7.
Thanks to Tuomas Tahko for pressing me on this point. A collection of essays investigating the subject of absolutely unrestricted quantification is Rayo and Uzquiano [23].
- 8.
To be sure, for Sider such a structure making for the naturalness of existence is quantificational structure. But then, Sider is a Quinean.
- 9.
For instance, some Meinongians, e.g., Routley [26], Priest [20], characterize existence univocally as the having of causal powers, and/or spatiotemporal location. Others, and probably Meinong himself, have a more pluralistic approach. For Meinong there are two modes of being: existence properly so called (Existenz) for concreta and subsistence (Bestand) for abstracta (he did not talk this way, but this seems to me a fair reconstruction of his view in contemporary ontological terms). Things like Plato, Holmes, or Obama may (concretely) exist or not, whereas things like sets and functions may (exist the sense of) subsist or not. Existence-as-subsistence may be something like being consistent, or coherent, or well-defined for the involved notion. In this sense the mathematician claims that the set of integers and the operation of division by seven exist, whereas the Russell set and division by zero do not. For a classic introduction to Meinong’s philosophy, see Grossmann [8].
- 10.
For instance, some philosophers (e.g. McGinn [17]) seem to conflate the Quinean meta-ontological view of existence as quantification with the broadly Fregean-Russellian view that existence is reducible to a higher-order feature of some abstract objects (Fregean concepts, properties, or Russellian propositional functions): that of being instantiated. But van Inwagen [37] points at some plausible differences between the two traditions. Though I cannot argue it here, I believe such differences not to prevent a uniform assessment of the two views at a meta-ontological level.
- 11.
Thanks again to Tuomas Tahko for pressing me on this point. I hope I have adequately addressed it in what follows.
- 12.
Van Inwagen adds: “…of formal logic”. But later on, he makes clear that “the meaning of the [formal] quantifiers is given by the phrases of English – or some other natural language – that they abbreviate” (Ibid.). The notation of “formal logic” just helps to clarify the logical structure of quantified sentences of ordinary English.
- 13.
See also the arguments in Evans [5], Ch. 10. Also for Evans “there seems to be very strong evidence that the English word ‘exists’ is used, at least on some occasions, to signify a first-level concept, true of everything” (345).
- 14.
Priest ascribes such a confusion to Quine, when in Philosophical Logic he makes his famous point on someone’s disputing ex falso quodlibet for negation as “changing the subject”: see Ibid, fn. 4. Williamson claims: “Quine’s epistemological holism in Two Dogmas undermines his notorious later claim about the deviant logician’s predicament” (Williamson [41]: 97).
- 15.
“More often Meinongians instead hold the view that quantification is not ontologically committing in any sense. When I say that there are things that don’t exist, among them Hamlet, I do not mean to ascribe being to Hamlet in any way” (Eklund [2006]: Ibid.). Eklund thus calls these “non-commitment Meinongians”; Priest [20] certainly is one of them.
- 16.
Todays ontologists are not conceptual analysts: few attend to ordinary usage of sentences like chairs exist. […] Their methodology is rather quasi-scientific. They treat competing positions as tentative hypotheses about the world, and assess them with a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Match with ordinary language and belief sometimes plays a role in this assessment, but typically not a dominant one (Sider [28]: 385).
- 17.
I admit I’m not really sure whether Slater has in mind and objection from equivocation here (which may be testified by his talk of “change of language”), rather than an objection to the effect that “Contradictories can be both true” is Frege-analytically false. His use of italics was too nice not to quote him anyway.
- 18.
As the Greeks did not have anything like our “exists” (a later Latin coinage) and different from (their counterpart of) “is”, i.e.,TMst…, they could only use the latter to express existence. In his The Verb Be in Ancient Greek, Charles Kahn lists absolute uses of eînai to express not only actual existence, but possibility (not only of the alethic, but also of the deontic kind: Kahn calls this the “potential construction”), and truth (“the veridical construction”): see Kahn [11]: 294, 336. Accordingly, “is not” was used not only to express nonexistence, but also impossibility or prohibition (“Is not to fight Zeus, son of Kronos”, Iliad 21.193), and falsity (“This word of yours could [not] be”, Iliad 24.56). Aristotle listed the veridical construction as expressing one way of being in the Metaphysics, but deferred its treatment to his works on logic, where it more properly belonged.
- 19.
As pointed out in Moltmann (2009, The Semantics of Existence, Unpublished MS), locational restrictions are acceptable in the case of mass nouns or bare plurals – things work much better here: “Lions exist both in Africa and in Asia”; “With such massive exploitation, soon oil will no longer exist in the Northern Sea”.
- 20.
Exist applies to a subclass of entities that can be in the domain of there-sentences, excluding past and metaphysically possible (but not actual) objects, events, as well as intentional objects […]. The general function of there-sentences appears to be to locate entities within either a larger domain of beings or a domain that is explicitly or implicitly restricted, spatially, temporally, or otherwise, a function that seems to be reflected in the appearance of the locative there. (Ibid., Sect. 2.3).
- 21.
We are happy enough with mereological sums of things that contrast with their surroundings more than they do with one another; and that are adjacent, stick together, and act jointly. […] We have no name for the mereological sum of the right half of my left shoe plus the Moon plus the sum of all Her Majestys ear-rings, except for the long and clumsy name I just gave it […]. It is very sensible to ignore such a thing in our everyday thought and language. But ignoring it wont make it go away. (Lewis [13]: 211–13)
- 22.
Along the same lines, see also Salmon [27]: 56–7. The Medieval logicians conception of quantification smoothly dealt with such contextual domain expansions (see e.g. Ashworth [1], Read [24], Priest [20], Section 3.7). In the mainstream doctrine of the suppositio terminorum, “Some S is P” is by default true if and only if something that is actually currently S is P. But the ordinary suppositio can be expanded in intensional, modal, temporal contexts to possible, past, future objects not currently or actually existing: “Some S has been P”, is true if and only if something that is or has been S, is or has been P, even though it does not exist now (“Some monks have been knights”). “Some S can be P” is true if and only if something that is or could be S is or could be P, even though it is merely possible (“A golden mountain can be as large as Mount Ventoux”).
- 23.
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this paper were presented at the 2013 Tübingen Metaphysics Workshop: thanks to the organizers Thomas Sattig and Alessandro Torza for having me, and to Graham Priest, Jason Turner, Boris Hennig, Bjørn Jespersen, Friederike Moltmann, and especially to Tuomas Tahko as the discussant of my talk, for their useful comments and remarks.
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Berto, F. (2015). “There Is an ‘Is’ in ‘There Is”’: Meinongian Quantification and Existence. In: Torza, A. (eds) Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers: Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. Synthese Library, vol 373. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18362-6_11
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