Ordinary language and "exists"

In Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen argues that his view that there are no complex artifacts does not contradict (nearly?) universal human belief. The argument is based on his view that the propositions expressed by ordinary statements like “There are three valuable chairs in this room” do not entail the negation of the Radical Claim that there are no artifacts, for such a proposition does not entail that there exist chairs.

I think van Inwagen is right that such ordinary propositions do not entail the negation of the Radical Claim. But he is wrong in thinking that the Radical Claim does not contradict nearly universal human belief. Van Inwagen makes much of the analogy between his view and the Copernican view that the sun does not move. When ordinary people say things like “The sun moved behind the elms”, they don’t contradict Copernicus. Again, I think he is right about the ordinary claims, but nonetheless Copernicus contradicted nearly universal human belief. That was why Copernicus’ view was so surprising, so counterintuitive (cf. some remarks by Merricks on van Inwagen). One can both say that when people prior to Copernicus said “The sun moved behind the elms” they didn’t contradict Copernicanism and that they believed things that entailed that Copernicus is wrong.

People do not assert everything they believe. They typically assert what is salient. What is normally salient is not that the sun actually moved, but that there was a relative motion between the rays pointing to the elms and to the sun. Nonetheless, if ordinary pre-Copernicans said “The sun doesn’t stand still”, they might well have been contradicting the Copernican hypothesis. But rarely in ordinary life is there occasion to say “The sun doesn’t stand still.” Because of the way pragmatics affects semantics (something that van Inwagen apparently agrees on), we simply cannot assume that the proposition expressed by the English sentence “The sun moved behind the elms” entails the proposition expressed by the English sentence “The sun doesn’t stand still.”

Something similar, I suspect, is true for existential language. When an ordinary person says “There are three chairs in the room”, the proposition they express does not contradict the Radical Thesis. But if an ordinary person says things like “Chairs exist” or “Artifacts exist”, they likely would contradict the Radical Thesis, and moreover, these are statements that the ordinary person would be happy to make in denial of the Radical Thesis. But in the ordinary course of life, there is rarely an occasion for such statements.

This is all largely a function of pragmatics than the precise choice of words. Thus, one can say: “Drive slower. Speed limits exist.” The second sentence does not carry ontological commitment to speed limits.

So, how can we check whether an ordinary person believes that tables and chairs exist? I think the best way may be by ostension. We can bid the ordinary person to consider:

1. People, dogs, trees and electrons.

2. Holes, shadows and trends.

We remind the ordinary person that we say “There are three holes in this road” or “The shadow is growing”, but of course there are no holes or shadows, while there are people (we might remind them of the Cogito), dogs, trees and (as far as we can tell) electrons. I think any intelligent person will understand what we mean when we say there are no holes or shadows. And then we ask: “So, are tables and chairs in category 2 or in category 1? Do they exist like people, dogs, trees and electrons, or fail to exist like holes, shadows and trends?” This should work even if like Ray Sorensen they disagree that there are no shadows; they will still understand what we meant when we said that there are no shadows, and that’s enough for picking out what we meant by “exist”. To put in van Inwagen’s terms, this brief ostensive discussion will bring intelligent people into the “ontology room”.

And I suspect, though this is an empirical question and I could be wrong, once inducted into the discussion, most people will say that tables and chairs exist (and that they have believed this all along). But, van Inwagen should say, this nearly universal belief is mistaken.

This story neatly goes between van Inwagen’s view that ordinary people don’t believe things patently incompatible with the Radical Theory and Merricks’ view that ordinary poeple contradict the Radical Theory all the time. Ordinary people do believe things patently incompatible with the Radical Theory, but they rarely express these beliefs. Most ordinary “there exist” statements—whether concerning artifacts or people or particles—do not carry ontological commitment, and those of us who accept the Radical Theory normally aren’t lying when we say “There are three chairs in the room”. But the Radical Theory really is radical.

Two open-ended cosmological arguments

First argument:

1. There are no infinite causal regresses or causal loops.

2. Every ordinary entity has a cause.

3. So, there is an extraordinary entity.

Second argument:

4. There is a causal explanation why there are any ordinary entities.

5. Causal explanations are not circular.

6. So, there is an extraordinary entity.

Tables and chairs

Like many philosophers, I don't believe that tables and chairs are fundamental objects. Like a much smaller number of philosophers, I like to say that I don't think tables and chairs exist. I have good reasons for my denial. For instance, it does not appear that there is an exact moment at which a table comes into existence. I take four wooden rods, each two feet long, and stand them on their ends outlining a rectangle. On this precarious perch, I put a sheet of plywood. That's not a table. I put some glue between the rods and the plywood. Initially that's still not a table, since the glue hasn't gripped. But once the bond is strong enough, what I have is a (poorly engineered and ugly) table. But then there must be a time such that a nanosecond before it the bond wasn't strong enough to make for a table and a nanosecond later it was strong enough.[note 1] This is very implausible.

So what should I say? Here are three options:

1. Say in contexts both ordinary and philosophical that there are no tables or chairs (and hence if someone asks me if there are any chairs in a conference room, answer in the negative, and then explain further).
2. Say in ordinary contexts that there are tables and chairs, but deny it in philosophical contexts.
3. Say in all contexts that there are tables and chairs, but in philosophical contexts emphasize that they are not fundamental.

Option (1) would be practically the toughest and (3) would be practically the easiest. Option (3), however, is not satisfactory as the arguments against tables and chairs existing do not seem to be just arguments against their fundamentality.

In the absence of (3), it would be nice too be able to defend (2). But it seems like plain dishonesty. I think, though, it can be defended.

First of all, ordinary folk already make something like this distinction. If you ask someone: "Are there any potholes on your way to work?" they may answer in the positive. But if you press them and ask whether potholes are really existing, if they aren't rather a matter of there not being asphalt there, I expect you will be told something that sounds contradictory like: "Potholes don't exist, but they're there." If this is right, there is in ordinary language a distinction between real existence and just existence in a manner of speaking.

Suppose that a community of English speakers started saying "There is a xyzzy" whenever there was a full moon, and mosquitoes were biting somewhere in Minnesota, and there was a Democratic president in the US. And they even had identity conditions for xyzzies. They would say that there can only be one xyzzy at a time, and that a xyzzy at t₀ is the same xyzzy as the one at t₁ provided that either the same Democrat is president at both times or the two presidents are related by a chain of president to vice-president relations. If we were members of the community, we'd have to say that this summer there was a xyzzy. But I think we'd want to deny the existence of xyzzies. Why? Because the right thing to say is that the logical grammar of "There is a xyzzy" does not match its surface grammar. The surface grammar is "There exists an x such that x is a xyzzy." But the deep logical grammar is "There is a Democratic president, there is a full moon and the mosquitoes are biting somewhere in Minnesota."

I think the same sort of thing should be said about tables and chairs. The surface grammar can involve existence claims (and predications and the like). But the deep logical grammar is different. And in cases where the surface grammar does not match the real logical grammar, we do in fact have two usages: an ordinary usage and a philosophical usage that mirrors the deep logical grammar. This is what we do for holes and this is what we would do for xyzzies. We also do this for some claims that aren't existential. For instance:

4. That overgrown graveyard isn't really spooky. It's just that you are spooked by it.
5. Actually, nobody is annoying. It's just that we are annoyed by some people.

The second sentence in each pair is a way of noting that the deep grammar of "... is spooky" or "... is annoying" is in fact something like: "x is spooked by ..." or "x is annoyed by ...". The use of "really" or "actually", as well as the paradoxicality of the first sentence in each pair, signals that we are doing something other than going with the surface grammar.

Now, to make sense of this, one does, I think, need some view on which there is something like an Aristotelian focal sense of existence (in the tables and chairs case) or predication (in the spookingess and annoyance cases), and in philosophical senses we focus in on the focal sense. Here then would be an example based on Aristotle's own example of focality:

6. There is no such thing as healthy food. There is only food that makes one healthy.

It's tempting to say that (6) is confused: "That's what I mean by healthy food, silly!" But (6) isn't a confusion. It is signaling that food isn't healthy in the focal sense of "healthy". That we can correctly speak of food as healthy in a non-focal sense is not being disputed. But it is denied that there is a property (in a sparse sense) that both the healthy woman and the healthy dinner have in virtue of both being healthy.