Abstract
Theories of nonexistent (i.e. beingless) objects, and especially theories of impossible objects, have come under heavy criticism. In this chapter I wish to set out and to evaluate some of the main arguments or objections that have been brought against these theories.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
It is not entirely clear to me that one can give a detailed, logically consistent account of all the ways things would have to be if this, and other situations philosophers tend to count as possible, were the case. If this cannot be done as often as it is supposed, perhaps this shows (at best) that the domain of the possible is not as large as it has been supposed; by itself it does not show that the notion of logical possibility is a useless notion or that there is no such notion.
For Parsons ([1980], p. 42), on the other hand, an object which would satisfy a formula of the form ‘xf & ~ (xf)’ is a contradictory object; but for him there are no such objects, for no contradiction is true. There “are”, however, impossible objects.
See [1980], p. 21 note 4; ch. 4, section 1; and ch. 6, section 3.
See his [1970] and [1980a], p. 243. At times Zalta too says that there is a sense in which his A-objects cannot possibly exist.
Routley thinks ([1980a], p. 239n) that the restriction to nuclear properties may be unwelcome, for he says that it may be the case that an object that is possible with respect to its nuclear properties may be rendered impossible by some extra-nuclear property it has. Zalta ([1988], p. 67), who eschews the distinction between nuclear and extra-nuclear properties, holds that x is a possible but nonactual object iff 0 E!x & -E!x.
More precisely, x is possible = df (∃ x) ((q) (q ∈ = qx) & (∃y) (E!y) & (q) (q ∈ x qy))). Parsons notes that it is possible to define the notion of a possible object without using set variables if we introduce an “actuality” operator into our language, and he appeals to Segerberg [1973] in this connection. Accordingly, x is possible = df (∃y) (E!y & (q) (Actually (qx) qy)).
Russell’s critical remark that nonexistents (i.e. at least impossibles) may not be determinately countable suggests another line of objection frequently brought against nonexistents which I will discuss in 5.3, viz. that they are not objects.
E.g., see Lambert [1974], p. 306; Parsons [1974], p. 562, and [1980], p. 42. Findlay says ([1963], pp. 104–5) that Russell’s second objection is that Meinong’s theory leads to novel applications of the Ontological Argument (which, as a matter of fact, both rejected). I think that Russell’s remarks can be interpreted in this way, for Russell [1905c] immediately goes on to say: ‘This ontological argument cannot be avoided by Kant’s device of saying that existence is not a predicate, for Ameseder [the author of the second essay in the collection] admits that “existing” applies when and only when “being actual (wirklich)” applies, and that the latter is a Sosein. Thus we cannot escape the consequence that “the existent God” both exists and is God; and it is hard to see how it can be maintained, as Mally implies, that this has no bearing on the question whether God exists’ (p. 533). But as we shall see shortly, there is a way out of this objection, and I think that Russell’s remarks lend themselves to another interpretation of his other “main” objection to Meinong’s theory.
Cf. Parsons [1980], p. 38. Linsky ([1977], p. 35) anticipated this, saying that Meinong would certainly reject the premiss that what is square is not round, unless it (the quantifier) is restricted to actual squares.
As Parsons and Routley have both suggested, he could have tried to evade the consequence by insisting upon the non-equivalence of predicate and sentential negation, so that one could not go from ‘the round square is round and not round’ to ‘the round square is round & - (the round square is round)’, but he did not follow this route either.
If he had insisted upon the non-equivalence of predicate and sentential negation, he could have rejected the derivation of (5) from (2).
This, of course, is not the only way Parsons has tried to explain it. His primary suggestion has been that for Meinong (following Mally’s later distinction) being existent is a nuclear property, while existing is an extra-nuclear one. I’ll return to this suggestion later; there is textual evidence which might go against it.
Parsons says, at the end of [1975], that the theory he is developing is based on a Meinongian metaphysics which is quite different in kind and motivation from possible-worlds metaphysics. He says that we know that Pegasus is a winged horse in the real (i.e. actual) world, not just that Pegasus is a winged horse in some world. He notes, however, that nothing he has said in this essay should be taken to imply that one could not develop a possible-worlds theory of fictional objects which is as good as the Meinongian one he tries to develop. On my view, it is contentious to say that Meinong endorses a metaphysics which is quite different in kind and motivation from possible-worlds metaphysics. Of course he does not have the terminology and distinctions of possible-worlds semantics at hand, but that can hardly be decisive. For Ersatzers, there are literally no other-worldly horses, winged or otherwise. In place of a robust, this-worldly Pegasus, there is some (typically) abstract, this-worldly surrogate, e.g. a set of properties. If, on the other hand, Meinong thinks that Pegasus is a concrete, robust individual, I see no decisive reason to think that he would not endorse a Lewisian metaphysics for possibles. If, for Meinong, Pegasus is a concrete individual, then on one reading of him (e.g. Kalsi’s) Pegasus is completely determined (i.e. a complete, not incomplete, object), in which case another of Lewis’s disagreements with Meinong vanishes.
Though the distinction between nuclear and extra-nuclear properties has yet to appear on Meinong’s stage, I cannot (for the same reason) see that Russell would reject it tout court (or fail to understand it), even if existence, unlike being existent, is an extra-nuclear property for Meinong.
Parsons offers this suggestion in [1980], p. 43. In [1974], p. 574, he suggests that we could say that the (nuclear) property of being existent is just that universal property among individuals, and its definition, i is existent = df (3i’) (i’= i), has the form of definitions of existence that have occasionally been proposed. In this connection, he cites Hintikka [1966].
See Priest and Routley [1984], ch. 3, for a good discussion of this.
Of course, if for some paraconsistent theorists conjunction is not really conjunction, or negation is not really negation (i.e. if conjunction or negation behave non-classically), then the dispute between such a theorist who says that some contradiction is true and a classical logician who says that no contradiction is true appears to be terminological. But in relevant paraconsistent logic, conjunction and negation allegedly behave classically.
See his [1974], p. 573, and [1980], ch. 2.
See his [1974a], pp. 159–60 and 221–2.
That thinking of an existing round square differs from thinking of a round square can, says Routley (11980a], pp. 167–68), be explained not by the existing of the one and the nonexisting of the other, but by the intensional differences of the objects. The existing round square presents itself as existing, or has suppositious existence as Meinong later put it, whereas the round square does not; hence, they are Leibniz-different. Leibniz-difference is enough for thoughts of them to be different; extensional difference is not required to distinguish objects in highly intensional settings. Routley notes (p. 468) that on Parsons’ theory, which excludes assumptibility where the properties in question are not nuclear, the existing round square and the round square are extensionally distinct anyway, since the round square is round, but the existing round square is not; ‘the existing round square’ does not stand for an object.
See, e.g., Findlay [1963], p. 106f; Grossmann [1974a], pp. 160 and 222; Lambert [1974], p. 308. The distinction between nuclear and extra-nuclear properties, first introduced by Mally in 1912, appears in Meinong’s [1915].
This is rather puzzling. Since he had objected in [1906/7] that in affirming that there are no such things as impossible objects, Russell is compelled to make objectives about them and thus tacitly admit them, one would have thought that Meinong would have thought that in affirming the impossibility of assuming, judging, etc. that an objective possesses the modal moment when it does not, or that the round square exists when it does not, he too must implicitly admit the very thing that is supposed to be impossible. Meinong could presumably try to get past this difficulty by an appeal to his [1917] notion of a defective object. When one attempts to assume that an objective possesses the modal moment when it does not, he could claim that the “object” of this assumption is not impossible, but defective, and hence lacks even aufiersein, in which case one is not really confronted with an object at all.
Alternatively, there are the propositional functions (open sentences) ‘x is a golden mountain’ and ‘x is a round square’, to which we apply various meta-linguistic predicates, e.g. ’is always false’.
For Zalta [1988], the existent round square encodes existence but does not exemplify it; in fact, for him it exemplifies the property of nonexistence. Nevertheless, for him it is true a priori that the existent round square is existent, and mutatis mutandis for Meinong’s other “dark” sayings, as long as the ‘is’ in question is the is-of-encoding.
Rapaport ([1978], p. 160) conceded that Meinong had only one mode of predication, and he said that the introduction of his two modes of predication constituted a change in Meinong’s theory. If I’m right here, Rapaport can retract that concession.
See, e.g., Findlay [1963], pp. 58 and 341f.
I believe that Parsons was the first in print to have utilized this approach, though Castenada also had it in hand. Neither, however, identifies nonexistents with sets of properties (guises).
Routley [1980a] takes the line that one does not have to say that there are never any difficulties in distinguishing (or identifying) nonexistent objects; all that needs to be shown is that some nonexistents are distinct from others. According to Lewis ([1986], pp. 248–63) there is a great range of cases in which there is no determinate, right answer to questions about representation de re.
Routley also argues ([1980a], pp. 462–63) that if the desk which Meinong imagines has all the properties he imagines it to have and all those further properties which follow from these (as Grossmann’s parenthetical remark suggests), then it does not have all and only those properties which Meinong imagines it to have. Grossmann’s parenthetical remark is therefore incoherent; it contradicts, says Routley, the ‘most revealing admission’ Meinong is alleged to have made and blocks the inference to Grossmann’s conclusion here. I, however, fail to see the “incoherence” of Grossmann’s position. As he has pointed out to me in correspondence, he only put the parenthetical remark in to give Meinong a run for his money, and (as I noted earlier) Meinong does on occasion seem to think that nonexistents not only “have” the properties included in their (identifying) descriptions, but ones which follow logically from these (see, e.g., his [1917], Kalsi edition, p. 20). Grossmann is not, he assures me, suggesting a certain mind-dependence of imagined (nonexistent) objects which Meinong is presumably eager to avoid; rather, he is merely suggesting that if we ask Meinong what the properties of the imagined desk are, he can only reply that they are the ones we imagine it to have (and perhaps the logically implied ones as well).
Cf. Zalta [1988], p. 140. His theory, like the one I impute to Meinong, does not imply that, e.g., anything exemplifies both goldenness and mountainhood, and so he thinks that it is an advantage of his theory that he does not need to abandon or restrict the notion of an existence-entailing property. On his diagnosis, one of the reasons why one might be tempted to appeal to the notion of a beingless object is precisely to avoid commitment to nonexistent objects that exemplify existence-entailing properties. But armed with the logic of encoding, that motivation (among others) becomes groundless for Zalta.
Surprisingly few ersatzers or actualists have followed this route, at least for long. One notable exception is Lycan, both in conversation and in print ([1979], pp. 313–4).
As far as I am aware, Naylor [1986] was the first in print to formulate explicitly the Parallel-Case Argument, though it was anticipated by Skyrms [1976]. Of course, in the hands of Naylor and most others, this argument is not presented as part of a serious defence of impossible worlds, but as a kind of reductio of Lewis’s “ordinary language” argument for possible worlds in [1973a1. Yagisawa himself officially leaves it to his readers to decide whether to use his conditional thesis as the first premiss of the modus ponens or of the modus tollens, though his paper taken as a whole can certainly be read as a serious attempt to use it as the former.
Just as Lewis [1986] had to try to expose the disadvantages of constructing ersatz possible “worlds” and their inhabitants in favour of the advantages of admitting genuine possible worlds and their inhabitants, an extended modal realist (including, perhaps, certain Meinongians) would have to try to expose the disadvantages of onstructing ersatz impossible “worlds” and their inhabitants,whether they are constructed out of ersatz or genuine possibles, in favour of the advantages of admitting genuine impossibles. This would be no small task.
One does not have to dig too deeply into Routley [1980a] to find similar-sounding claims made on behalf of his noneism.
Of course, an S-5 model structure can partition worlds into equivalence classes so that worlds in one equivalence class are not accessible to worlds in another. But it simply does not follow from this that worlds in one equivalence class are parts of a different logical space or that they are logically impossible.
Cf. Skyrms [1976]. Yagisawa might protest that his transfinite hierarchy of super-worlds is not a set and cannot be quantified over. But even if that is right, that would surely be a different theory than one which endorsed robust impossible worlds and would change the terms of the debate.
Lewis is not alone in this. E.g., in Stalnaker [1984], when the antecedent of a conditional is impossible, the selection function is undefined. While he allows that one might leave counterpossible conditionals undefined, or give truth-conditions according to some other rule, his analysis stipulates that such conditionals are vacuously true.
See Lewis [1973b]. Stalnaker [1968] introduced the notion of the absurd world -- ‘the world in which contradictions and all their consequences are true’ -- as a mere technical device for the purpose of allowing for an interpretation of conditionals with impossible antecedents. The absurd world also appears in Stalnaker and Thomason [1970], where they are quick to note that they do not regard it as a world.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Perszyk, K.J. (1993). Main Arguments Against Nonexistents. In: Nonexistent Objects. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8214-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8214-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4319-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8214-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive