Abstract
Abstract artifacts such as musical works and fictional entities are human creations; they are intentional products of our actions and activities. One line of argument against abstract artifacts is that abstract objects are not the kind of objects that can be created. This is so, it is argued, because abstract objects are causally inert. Since creation requires being caused to exist, abstract objects cannot be created. One common way to refute this argument is to reject the causal inefficacy of abstracta. I argue that creationists should rather reject the principle that creation requires causation. Creation, in my view, is a non-causal relation that can be explained using an appropriate notion of ontological dependence. The existence and the creation of abstract artifacts depend on certain individuals with appropriate intentions, along with events of a certain kind that include but are not limited to creations of certain concrete objects.
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Notes
I am leaving aside the nominalist option (the rejection (A1)), for my purpose here is to defend creationism against the competing Platonist views about the entities in question.
Creationist authors in the ontology of music do not explicitly share this assumption. However, the terminology they use; i.e. indication, selection, or determination to describe the act of musical creation is amenable to being interpreted as a causal relation [Levinson (1980, pp. 21–22), Howell (2002, p. 107) and Trivedi (2002, p. 78)]. Evnine (2009, p. 215; 2016, pp. 137–138) is one exception. He argues that one can act with respect to the matter without causally manipulating it. The composer’s work does not modify the sound structure in a causal manner but “involves selection and display.” Although different from mine, Evnine’s conception of creation is also based on the rejection of (A3).
In all fairness, Mag Uidhir raises further problems with this alternative. I address these problems below.
The use of ontological dependence in metaphysical theories goes back to Aristotle (Corkum 2008). More recent accounts of ontological dependence, such as Lowe’s, reveal a family of relations that can potentially explain the relation between sets and their members, wholes and their parts, holes and their hosts, tropes and their bearers, etc. (Koslicki 2013, p. 31).
Thomasson has abandoned some of her claims about the metaphysical nature of dependence relations between abstract artifacts and the creative activities of their authors. In her more recent work, Thomasson argues that the artifactual theory of fiction she developed in Fiction and Metaphysics should be combined with her deflationary metaontology (Thomasson 2007, pp. 110–125; 2015a, b, pp. 258–262). Although I am sympathetic to her metaontological views, the argument of this paper does not require any commitment to a particular metaontological theory.
Bennett (2017, pp. 71–83) argues that causation, along with grounding, composition, and realization, is what she calls a building relation. In her view, building relations as a unified family share certain central features such as directedness, necessitation and generativity. Notice that the proponent of No Creation needs to commit only to the generativity of causation.
This characterization of causation relies on a common idea that causation is a productive relation. Since No Creation argument requires a productive or a generative conception of causation, I will ignore the problems and complications that come with this view. For a discussion of a productive notion of causation, see Psillos (2002, p. 6).
Notice that an alternative account of non-causal creation that makes use of metaphysical grounding instead of modal existential dependence would be free of this problem. Bennett (2017, p. 12), Schaffer (2016, p. 82) and Trogdon (2018, p. 189) argue that grounding satisfies both conditions and thus it is a necessarily generative relation.
Although controversial, the view that impure sets exist when their concrete ur-elements come into existence is quite common. Gideon Rosen attributes this view to David Lewis (Rosen 2020). For others who adopt a similar view see Dodd (2002, p. 397), Caplan and Matheson (2004, p. 123), Rossberg (2012, p. 63), Mag Uidhir (2013, p. 140).
A similar distinction is made by Cray (2017, p. 291). Cray takes generation to be a broader notion and reserve creation for intentional generation of artifacts. Nothing in our discussion here depends on this terminological choice.
For a similar view about fictional characters, see Thomasson (1999, pp. 25–42).
I am assuming once again that composition is not identity.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank anonymous referees for their useful comments. For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Asya Passinsky, Simon Evnine, James Miller, Ned Markosian, Friederike Moltmann, Damiano Costa, and Philipp Blum.
Funding
Funding was provided by Bogazici University Research Fund (Grant No. 10321SUP).
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Irmak, N. The problem of creation and abstract artifacts. Synthese 198, 9695–9708 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02672-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02672-6