Abstract
In this paper, I argue that sentences that contain ‘omission’ tokens that appear to function as singular terms are meaningful while maintaining the view that omissions are nothing at all or mere absences. I take omissions to be fictional entities and claim that the way in which sentences about fictional characters are true parallels the way in which sentences about omissions are true. I develop a pragmatic account of fictional reference and argue that my fictionalist account of omissions implies a plausible account of the metaphysics of omissions.
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Notes
Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 22, 11th ed. (1911, p. 535).
Note that omissions are distinct from negative existentials (e.g., ‘There are no pink ravens’). An omission will imply some negative existential, however. For example, if one omits to set the napkins correctly, then it will be the case that there are no napkins set correctly. This does not mean that the omission just is the negative existential claim (I discuss this more in Sect. 2). Further, on the fictionalist view of omissions that I defend here, an omission is not identical to some negative characterization of some state of affairs. Again, I argue for this in Sect. 2. Omissions are typically action-oriented. This is because omissions, on the view that I defend, are constituted by norm compliance or norm violation and norms are tied to action in a distinctive way. I discuss this more in Sect. 5. I want to foreground some of this to forestall potential confusions about omissions and the relationship between omissions and other similar ontological categories.
The argument could run several other ways. We might leave FFR-6 and question the inference from FFR-6, -7, and -8 to FFR-9. That is, we might question whether sensible discourse presupposes the truth-evaluability of a broad range of discourse-relevant sentences. I leave aside consideration of this argument for another occasion. For one example of this approach, see Brock (2002). Other strategies might include denying FFR-2 or FFR-4. These strategies, however, depend on heavily revising our pre-theoretic semantic intuitions (and the theories constructed out of these intuitions). Insofar as we want to maintain a relatively intuitive theory of language and reference, we should avoid these revisionary strategies.
I do not mean to suggest that this is Armstrong’s view of omissions; rather, it’s just one (crude) example of what an identificationist account looks like.
As far as I can tell, Bennett thinks that negative behavioral facts will only count as an omission if the agent violates some suitably specified epistemic standard in behaving as she did (cf. Bennett 1988, p. 220).
This seems to be Bennett’s view (1988, p. 21).
Clarke (2014, pp. 38–39) takes a different approach. He claims that omissions are absences and facts are truthbearers (where a truthbearer is something that is made true by a truthmaker). Since no absence is a truthbearer, no absence is a fact. Therefore, no fact is an omission. While this argument has some merit, it seems to beg the question against the negative facts view. In particular, the argument assumes that omissions are absences. But no proponent of the negative facts view would concede that.
Dowe (2001, p. 216) claims that all omissions (or at least any omission that is also a quasi-cause) involves a negative event, or the non-occurrence of an event. Dowe’s use of negative events, however, is ambiguous. If he means that there are events that have distinctively negative characteristics, then I disagree with Dowe that all omissions involve some negative event. If, however, Dowe just means that all omissions involve the absence of an event, this is compatible with the view I advance below. Dowe’s position characterizes how omissions function as quasi-causes, though he does not give an account of what an omission is or the semantics of O-type sentences (see 2001, p. 221). Thus, one can see the current project as a supplement to Dowe’s account of omissive quasi-causation.
This raises an interesting question about the connection between omissions and the psychological states of agents that omit something. For instance, suppose that Walter forgets the bourbon, but a guardian angel realizes this and, because she is looking out for Walter, she slips a bottle of bourbon to him without him noticing (suppose that Walter is carrying a satchel). When Walter gets to the party, there will be bourbon despite the fact that he forgot to pick it up. In this case, did Walter omit to get the bourbon? The larger question is whether an omission is tied (in some way) to the psychological states of the agent. I can think of two possible answers. On the view that I advance below, omissions are partially constituted by norm violation or norm compliance. Thus, there are only omissions where there are norms (a point that I unpack in Sect. 6). In this case, Walter does not violate a norm because he promised to bring bourbon and he brought bourbon. No norm violation, in short, means there is no omission. On this view, psychological states are only indirectly related to omissions insofar as those psychological states figure into norm violations or norm compliance. A second view, however, might provide a different analysis of the Guardian Angel case. One might think that Walter omitted to bring the bourbon, though the bourbon ended up making it to the party. Walter, however, was not active in bringing the bourbon (meaning, roughly, that Walter’s agential capacities were not non-deviantly related to the bourbon’s being brought to the party). Thus, Walter omits to bring the bourbon. These two views are probably not the only views in logical space, and the Guardian Angel case raises interesting questions that deserve separate treatment. I raise them here to note an interesting issue that any theory of omissions can tackle.
This argument does not rely on the substantive claim that two things are identical if and only if they share all of the same properties; rather, the argument relies on the claim that two things, x and y, cannot be identical if x has a property that cannot be coinstantiated with some property of y (e.g., the property ‘being spatiotemporally located’ and the property ‘not being spatiotemporally located’).
Additionally, Dowe (2001, p. 220) claims that identificationist views have troubling accounting for omissive causation. I do not address the issue of causation in this paper.
One could also read Moore’s (2009) account of omissions in this way.
Someone might think that the ontology is a bit odd here. I noted in Sect. 1 that the nihilist view I develop takes omissions to be fictional entities. Yet here I claim that fictional characters are non-entities. Plausibly, one might worry that the nihilist account is really a disguised identificationist account, identifying omissions with fictional objects or entities. I argue, however, in Sect. 5 that fictional characters are non-entities and that my account of fictional characters still preserves the truth-values of negative existential claims like ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’.
Note that Kripke does not formulate the problem of fictional names in terms of FFR*. I paraphrase the problem as he presents it in Kripke (2013).
This does not imply that referents of singular terms in F-type sentences exist only when individuals actually imagine those referents. Suppose some author writes a book about a new character and, shortly after completing the book, dies. Later, people stumble onto the manuscript and read the book for the first time. On the penultimate page of the book, let’s say, the protagonist is said to wear a blue hat. Even though no one is currently imagining the protagonist wearing a blue hat, the sentence ‘In this part of the story, the protagonist wears a blue hat’ is true. Actual imaginings do not themselves constitute referents of fictional names. Briefly, what constitutes these referents is: (a) the prescriptions that dictates how one ought to imagine things given the adoption of a certain pretense, and; (b) adopting the intention to follow these prescriptions in virtue of adopting a pretense. Perhaps adopting a pretense just is coming to have an intention to follow the relevant prescriptions. Cf. Walton (1990, pp. 20, 37, 44).
Here, I borrow Kripke’s idea that unicorns necessarily do not exist. Roughly, the reasoning goes like this. ‘Unicorn’ appears to name a natural kind. If it does, then it must rigidly designate one class of entities. In some counterfactual scenario, we can imagine a species of animal that look a lot like unicorns (horse body, single horn on the head, etc.). We can also imagine another such species that looks just as much like unicorns as the other species. Of these two species, which does ‘unicorn’ designate? It cannot be both, because we supposed earlier that kind term designates only one species. And it cannot be either of the two because there is no reason to apply the kind term to one species rather than another. Thus, there is no species designated rigidly by the term ‘unicorn’ because we cannot imagine a unique species that does not fall prey to this sort of counterexample (see Kripke 1980, Appendix).
When I imagine that there are unicorns I am (on this view) imagining (in accordance with some pretense) that a certain abstract object has certain properties. This does not make the abstract object a unicorn because, again, unicorns necessarily do not exist. The point about necessary nonexistence seems also to hold for fictional characters (see Kripke 1980, p. 158; Plantinga 1974, p. 155; Kaplan 1973, pp. 505–508). The parallel between the two cases, then, is quite strong.
This is distinct from Inwagen’s (1977, p. 305) solution to the problem of predication in fictional discourse. Van Inwagen claims that there is a difference between ascription and predication, and only the former applies to fictional characters. Ascription is a three-place relation between a property, a character, and some work of fiction. My account of pretense does not posit a distinct three-place relation, but rather claims that certain predications are contextually sensitive. We predicate properties of characters only relative to a specific context, namely the pretense of the story.
This resolves an ambiguity in Kripke’s account. Kripke sometimes talks about pretended reference and pretend propositions, but he is not clear about whether pretend reference is distinct from the actual reference relation or whether pretend propositions are distinct from actual propositions (see Kripke 2013, pp. 23–24, 29, 46, 81). What Kripke means by these terms is that there can be reference and the expression of propositions simpliciter and reference and the expression of propositions under some pretense. This, I think, is all that this aspect of his account claims.
The account need not presuppose that propositions are the truth-bearers for sentences. To see this, consider an alternative explanation. We could take the truth of a sentence as a complex semantic notion that is reducible to three more basic semantic notions, namely reference, predication, and saturation. This means that we can explain the complex semantic properties of sentences like ‘being true’ in terms of basic semantic properties of the expressions that compose the sentence. Reference is one such basic property (see Field 1972, pp. 350–51). Here, reference is just a primitive relation between linguistic expressions and objects or relations between objects that those expressions designate. If an expression in the sentence does not refer, then that expression lacks a property that is partially constitutive of the sentence’s truth-property. So, when a fictional name does refer, the reference relation confers on the fictional name the property that then constitutes the truth-property of the sentence. We can then analyze this truth-property in different ways (e.g., we might say that the truth-property is just some relation between the sentence and a suitable translation in the meta-language).
Fictionalism is not the only kind of nihilistic theory of omissions. Nihilism about omissions only presumes the claim that (at least some) omissions are absences. Fictionalism presumes the further claim that these absences are akin to fictional entities.
One interesting upshot of this is that this is how the fictionalist interprets the author of a theory. The author need not have (and in most cases likely does not have) these intentions when composing a theory.
I say ‘seems’ because a proponent of fictionalism about omissions might appeal to something besides norms here.
According to Henne et al. (2016) people are much more likely to cite an omission as a cause when the omission violates some norm or expectation. This is compatible with the fictionalist account that I present here, though the data does not uniquely support the fictionalist view. One could say that norm violations make particular omissions more salient than others, not that norm violations partially constitute what the omission is. But it is worth mentioning that the fictionalist view is compatible with recent empirical evidence even if it is not uniquely compatible.
Note that this example shows that agents can omit to A in order to comply with a norm that one ought not A. This seems to be a virtue of the account, insofar as there seem to be some norms that demand us to omit certain things. For instance, the norm ‘Thou shalt not steal’ seems on its face to be a norm that demands us to omit to steal. This makes intuitive sense, because when one omits to steal something that person also fails to do a number of other things. The norm here partially constitutes the omission of stealing.
This aspect of the account is compatible with Dowe’s (2001) account of omissive quasi-causation. As mentioned earlier, if we take Dowe’s characterization of negative events to pick out the absences of events, then the fictionalist account of omissions provides the metaphysical and semantic underpinnings of Dowe’s quasi-causal account. Fitting my fictionalist account to Dowe’s, however, requires a more specific reductive characterization of omissions than I offer here (see Dowe 2001, pp. 221–22). Roughly, it would go like this. Suppose a husband promises to his wife to pick up milk on his way home. He forgets, however, and thereby omits to get milk. In this case, we can characterize the omission in terms of all the positive events that occur during the drive home. The omission just is whatever certain norms pick out among a range of salient counterfactuals that include relevant alternative events (like the husband’s purchasing of the milk) and imagining that the counterfactual has certain properties (like ‘being the thing that the husband ought to have done’). Thus, the abstracta in question are limited to counterfactuals and more would need to be said about the properties that one ought to imagine (though this will also be a function of the operative norms that select the salient counterfactual).
For one attempt at a theory of responsibility for omissions that is neutral on the metaphysics and semantics of omissions, see Murray and Vargas (manuscript). Clarke’s (2014) impure nihilist account of omissions does not figure into his discussion of the responsibility conditions on omissions.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Joe Salerno, Justin Noia, and Randy Clarke for comments on drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for suggestions that strengthened this essay considerably. Part of my work on this paper was supported by a grant from Florida State University through the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project.
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Murray, S. Reference fiction, and omission. Synthese 195, 235–257 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1211-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1211-0