Abstract
This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only facts involving the dead are facts about the relations they stand in—including the relations they bear to the qualities they formerly instantiated, and the intentional relations they stand in to us. Given an appropriate conception of qualities the dead can be said to be quality-less objects: bare particulars. The ‘Bare Particular Theory’ of individuals, it is argued, is coherent if and only if it concedes that the bare particulars it allows for don’t exist. The account of the dead and other former existents as bare particulars does justice to the misfortune of death, and points the way to a general theory of nonexistent objects.
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Notes
He indicates his agreement with what he takes to be Plato’s view: ‘Death, then, Plato seems to be saying, involves a change in your state of existence, not a change in your essence (from which, like a metaphysical shadow, you cannot be separated). In a word, when you die you cease to exist; you do not become a different kind of being. When you die, you cease being a live person and become a dead person.’ Yourgrau 2000 p48.
See Hinchliff 1996 footnote 17 p134.
Merricks in Merricks 2007 argues their incompatibility; he chooses to reject Truthmaker (against which he mounts other arguments) rather than Presentism.
Quine 1980 p4.
See for instance Putnam 1967.
See Hinchliff 2000 in addition to the authors mentioned below.
Bourne 2006 p186.
Monton 2006 p267.
In Yourgrau 1987 p85: ‘There is, of course, in W.V. Quine’s sense, a “notional” kind of love, which we can feel even for Pegasus. But there is also, clearly, a “relational sense” of “love” according to which it is the object itself that we love; and how could one be expected to maintain this relationship when one of the terms is missing?’ In case it isn’t clear to everyone that John’s love for Socrates is relational in this way, I will argue that it is.
In Crane 2001a.
Crane 2001a p33.
Crane himself argues in Crane 2001b for ‘an indispensable role for the concept of an intentional object’ (Crane 2001b p345): ‘Two states of mind may have the same intentional object—they may be about the same object—but differ in the way in which they present that object, or in what they predicate of it. These differences are differences in content. I would also claim that two intentional states may have the same content but differ in their objects (indexical thoughts are an example) but this use of ‘content’ is controversial and I won’t defend it here.’ (Crane 2001b p345) Given that he thus argues that intentional objects are independent of the contents of intentional states, it is hard to see how Crane can avoid acknowledging that our intentional states involve intentional objects as separate relata. But in this paper too he denies this, claiming that intentional objects are only objects in a ‘schematic sense’.
Merricks p121.
Lewis 1986 p204.
See Lewis 2002 pp 6–7.
See Sider 1996.
Hinchliff says that for ‘O was straight at t’ to be true is for O to stand in ‘the having-been-straight-at relation’ to t (Hinchliff 1996 p128). (As Presentism deems past times not to exist, Hinchliff takes t to be a non-existent object.) In the account that follows I keep things simple by focusing on the truthmaker for ‘O was straight’ rather than the truthmaker for ‘O was straight at t’. The truthmaker for the latter, though, I hold, is a fact involving O and being straight, and t and a ternary relation. That is I endorse Hinchliff’s account if it acknowledges that for O and t to stand in ‘the having-been-straight-at relation’ is for O and being straight and t to stand in a ternary relation. It is ok to talk of relativised properties like having-been-straight-at but ‘O was straight at t’ is about the categorical quality being straight no less than it is about O and the ultimate account of what makes ‘O was straight at t’ true should make this clear.
See Hossack 2007 chapter 2 (pp32–99) Note that for a fact, according to this account to involve a particular or a universal is not for it to have the particular or universal as a part. In Hossack’s terminology, the fact that O is bent combines O and being bent. ‘The relation of combination that obtains between a fact and its constituents is sui generis; the terminology of ‘combination’ and ‘constituents’ should not be taken to have any mereological connotations’ (Hossack 2007 p45).
See Cameron 2008.
Merricks 2007 pp22–28 argues that those attracted by Truthmaker should neither allow that it applies only ‘trivially’ to necessary truths, nor shrink from affirming its applicability to necessary truths. If ‘God exists’ or Fermat’s Last Theorem are true, then the motivations for Truthmaker motivate the acceptance that these have truthmakers, and that it would be ‘cheating’ to pass off my mobile phone as what makes ‘God exists’ true.
See Merricks 2007 pp28–34.
See Merricks 2007 pp133–137.
Cameron, bizarrely, denies this: professing to see no impossibility in a black and white polka dotted ‘extended simple’ (see Cameron forthcoming p7). He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. Being extended is being divisible into parts. An extended simple, if there is such a thing, is an item that permits no division according to discontinuities across its extension. A simple, as such, cannot have a distributional property such as that had by a black and white polka dotted individual.
Cameron claims that Eternalists who themselves acknowledge temporal distributional properties can’t criticise Presentists for positing ‘peculiar’ properties (Cameron forthcoming p9); but the criticism that Presentists (unlike Eternalists) can’t consistently posit these properties would be legitimate.
Note I am denying it is about a winged horse; not that it is about Pegasus (I think that Pegasus, like Socrates, is a bare particular).
Merricks 2007 p1.
Hinchliff 1996 Footnote 17 p134.
See Meinong 1960 for an introduction to his Theory of Objects, the inspiration for contemporary Meinongian theories of non-existent objects.
See Parsons 1980.
This denial is articulated in Meinong’s principle of the independence of so-being from being. See Grossman 2001 for a critique.
Note that Parsons himself doesn’t count Socrates as an example of a non-existent object—he is an Eternalist (see Parsons 1980 p11).
See for instance McMichael and Zalta 1980 p306–307.
Linsky and Zalta 1991 p442: ‘The ghost in John’s nightmare last night is composed, in some sense, of the property of being a ghost without exemplifying it.’
See for example Zalta 2006.
Priest 2005 p84.
In response to a reviewer’s query, I note that I cannot make my account simpler by explaining all the truths about Socrates, including truths about how Socrates was, like ‘Socrates was a philosopher’, as down to the intentional relations the living stand in to Socrates. If Socrates didn’t stand in any intentional relations to the living ‘Socrates was a philosopher’ would still be true. Nor can I simplify the account by explaining all the truths about Socrates, including truths about the relations Socrates stands in to the living, as truths about the relations Socrates stands in to the qualities he formerly instantiated. The fact that I love Socrates must involve me. The identity relation, further, which Socrates stands in to himself, cannot be reduced to a relation of another sort.
See Johansson 1989 ch. 8, pp. 110–123 for an explanation of ‘grounded relations’: relations that are ‘derivable from the qualities of the relata’ (Johansson 1989 p. 121). David Lewis uses a different name for the same category of relations: he defines a (binary) ‘internal relation,’ as a relation that is ‘determined by the two intrinsic natures of its two relata’ (Lewis 1986 p. 176). Johansson reserves the term ‘internal relation’ for ‘relations where it is logically impossible for the relata to exist independently of each other’ (Johansson 1989 p. 121).
Bradley in Bradley 2009 (p107), taking ‘negative properties’ like ‘not being pleased’ to be intrinsic properties, credits the dead with intrinsic properties; but he denies, as I wish to, that they instantiate ‘paradigmatic examples of intrinsic properties’ (p107). Bradley’s position is that the dead are ‘not located’ at this time. I find it hard to square this with his claim that they (currently) have a ‘well-being level’ even if having a well-being level doesn’t involve having qualities because, as a Presentist, I think that if Socrates is not located at this time then there is nothing to have Socrates’s well-being level.
See O’Leary Hawthorne 1995.
See Rosenkrantz 1993.
A related objection, due to J.P. Moreland, is that that any ‘bare particulars’ would have to have the ‘qualities’ of: ‘particularity’ and ‘simplicity’ (Moreland 1998, 261). But to say that something is a particular is not to say that it is some way; if it is to say anything it is to say the object in question stands in the identity relation to itself and doesn’t stand in that relation to anything else. And being simple is a matter of not having qualities or parts; but there are no negative qualities
Moreland, it should be noted, is advocating the version of the Bare Particular Theory according to which tables and chairs and so on have bare particulars as proper parts.
Moreland 1998 pp260–261
The existence of physical entities for instance is just their having their physical qualities: mass, shape etc. I tentatively suggest that if there are ‘abstract’ individuals that count as existents, their existence is a matter of having structural qualities (through having parts or a structure of some sort). It is disputable whether some alleged examples (numbers for instance) really exist. A reviewer of this paper suggested a university as an arguable example of an abstract existent. Another reviewer felt that it didn’t make sense to talk of students attending an abstract object. But a university is an item whose existence can be explained as a matter of its instantiating structural qualities: like the quality of being composed of a school of humanities and a school of science.
My position is (and some readers may find this objectionable) radically anti-essentialist. A thing of a given kind does not belong to that kind in every possible situation in which it is to be found: in some possible situations it is a bare particular. However my views are compatible with the view that a thing of a given kind belongs to that kind in every possible situation in which it exists. Some readers may feel that the change from being a person, say, to being a bare particular is just too radical a change. I would plead in my defense that turning into a bare particular involves ceasing to exist, and as such, is not a commonplace sort of change. The change involved in ceasing to exist has to be a radical change. I concede that while still existing, the sorts of changes objects undergo may be circumscribed. But in ceasing to exist one becomes a mere non-entity. Saying anything less would be failing to do justice to the seriousness of death and destruction.
Sider 2006 pp. 395–396.
See Linsky and Zalta 1991, p452.
Tim Crane in Crane 2001b takes the word ‘entity’ to apply not just to (existing) individual objects (particulars) but to items of other categories: ‘If he means by ‘object’ what is usually meant when we contrast objects with properties, relations, events, propositions, facts or states of affairs—that is, particular objects—then the claim that all intentional objects (defined above as ‘what some intentional state is about’) are objects in this sense is simply false.… Searle cannot mean object in this sense; he must rather mean something like ordinary existing thing or entity (where thing or entity is the most general ontological category: properties, relations and so on are all things or entities).’ (Crane 2001b p337).
I am not sure if, for instance, facts can be said to exist, but if properties, facts etc. count as entities I suggest (tentatively) it is because they have natures composed of higher order or structural qualities. They are things of certain kinds. Crane in this paper rightly denies that non-existent intentional objects count as entities. His proposal that they count as objects in a ‘schematic sense’ of ‘object’ doesn’t allow that they can stand in relations though. I suggest that the proposal that non-existent intentional objects are bare particulars is a better way of reconciling their status as non-entities with their indispensability in the explanation of intentionality.
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Connolly, N. How the Dead Live. Philosophia 39, 83–103 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9258-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9258-5