Abstract
Anderson and Welty have recently advanced an argument for the claim that the laws of logic are ontologically dependent upon a necessarily existent mind, i.e. God. In this paper I argue that a key premise of Anderson and Welty’s argument—viz., a premise which asserts that \(x\) is intrinsically intentional only if \(x\) is mind-dependent—is false, for on a broadly Fregean account of propositions, propositions are intrinsically intentional but not mind-dependent.
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Notes
\(^{1}\) Italics added.
Aside from some minor changes, the derivation here follows that of Bozzo (2012, pp. 1–2), whose paper is included as part of an on-line EPS symposium discussing Anderson and Welty’s paper.
An account that, I should add, has seemed to many philosophers to be compelling and theoretically appealing.
Here I loosely follow the broadly Fregean account of propositions provided by Bradley and Swartz (1979).
Brian Leftow (2012, p. 515) advances a similar argument in his God and Necessity.
Italics in original.
It should be noted that Anderson and Welty claim also that propositions should be construed as intentional mind-dependent entities because such a view is somehow the “simplest and least arbitrary”(p. 335). Indeed, Anderson and Welty go so far as to claim that the principle of parsimony “demands” that propositions be understood in this manner (p. 335). But the line of reasoning here is wholly unpersuasive, for surely an appeal to the principle of parsimony does not by itself show that FPR is mistaken; merely gesturing towards the principle of parsimony, in other words, does not by itself “demand” that the proponent of FPR give up belief in abstract mind-independent propositions. The proponent of FPR can respond to the charge that an appeal to abstract mind-independent propositions violates the principle of parsimony as follows: no one wants to bloat one’s ontology. But since mind-independent abstract propositions perform important explanatory work or possess significant explanatory power, postulating that such entities exist is fully warranted even if doing so somehow violates the principle of parsimony. In other words, the explanatory convenience gained from the postulation of abstract propositions justifies a violation of the principle of parsimony. See Swoyer (2008) and chapter two of Bradley and Swartz (1979) for more on the explanatory power of abstract entities.
An argument, I might add, whose merits Anderson and Welty fail to consider.
Additional arguments for mind-independence can be found in section 7.1 of McGrath (2012).
I should note that Anderson and Welty also seem to badly misrepresent the Fregean account of propositions. For instance, after claiming (on page 335 of their paper) that propositions must be mental, Anderson and Welty approvingly state in footnote 29 that “It was not without reason that Frege referred to propositions as Gedanken (“thoughts”)”. I take it that Anderson and Welty here believe that since Frege called propositions “thoughts” this somehow provides support for the claim that propositions must be mind-dependent. But this goes against a long-standing and widely-accepted interpretation of Frege; while it is true that Frege called propositions “thoughts”, Frege nevertheless held that thoughts are mind-independent, extra-linguistic, acausal, abstract objects akin to numbers, sets, and mathematical functions. As Klement (2005) puts it, “A [Fregean] thought...has a truth-value regardless of whether or not anyone believes it and even whether or not anyone has grasped it at all.” So, from the fact that Frege uses the psychological term “thought” to be that which is the bearer of a truth-value, it does not follow that Frege somehow believed that thoughts are themselves mind-dependent, as Anderson and Welty seem to think. For more on the Platonic nature of Fregean thoughts and his radical anti-psychologism, see Taylor (1998), pp. 25–40.
My thanks to Peter Horban, Steven Davis, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Ruloff, C.P. Divine thoughts and Fregean propositional realism. Int J Philos Relig 76, 41–51 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9445-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9445-6