Abstract
Many philosophers dislike possible individuals. Professor W. V. Quine is a well-known case in point. According to him, possible individuals create an ontological slum, “a breeding ground for disorderly elements”. At one point, he elaborated his apprehensions as follows: “Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? ... Or ... is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselves and distinct from another? These elements are well-nigh incorrigible.”1
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References
W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1953 (2nd ed., revised, 1961), p. 4.
W. V. Quine, Word and Object, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960. For further elucidation of the precise nature of the indeterminacy of ontology and of radical translation, see also Quine’s reply to Chomsky in Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine (ed. by Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka), D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, 1969.
Notice, however, that there may in principle be non-behavioristic ways of answering Quine’s questions which therefore leave the behavioristic indeterminacy intact.
Dana Scott ‘Advice on Modal Logic’, in Philosophical Problems in Logic: Some Recent Developments (ed. by Karel Lambert), D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, 1970. Richard Montague’s highly important work in this area also uses the idea of ‘prefabricated’ domain of individuals which just show up in the different possible worlds one is considering
see e.g. Richard Montague, ‘Pragmatics’ in Contemporary Philosophy — La philosophie contemporaine Vol. I (ed. by R. Klibansky), La Nuova Italia Editrice, Florence, 1968, pp. 102–122
and Richard Montague, ‘On the Nature of Some Philosophical Entities’, The Monist 53 (1969) 159–194.
The first big wave of work in this area was largely due to Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke; see Stig Kanger, Provability in Logic (Stockholm Studies in Philosophy, Vol. I), Stockholm, 1957
Stig Kanger, ‘The Morning Star Paradox’, Theoria 23 (1957) 1–11
Stig Kanger, ‘A Note on Quantification and Modalities’, ibid. 133–134
Stig Kanger, ‘On the Characterization of Modalities’, ibid. 152–155
Saul Kripke, ‘A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic’, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 24 (1959) 1–14
Saul Kripke, ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic’ (Proceedings of a Colloquium on Modal and Many-Valued Logics, Helsinki, 23–26 August, 1962), Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963) 83–94
Saul Kripke, ‘Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic: I. Normal Modal Propositional Calculi’, Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 9 (1963) 67–96
Saul Kripke, ‘Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic: II, Non-Normal Modal Propositional Calculi’ in The Theory of Models (Proceedings of the 1963 International Symposium at Berkeley, ed. by J. W. Addison, L. Henkin, and A. Tarski), Amsterdam 1965, pp. 206–220
Saul Kripke, ‘The Undecidability of Monadic Modal Quantification Theory’, Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 8 (1962) 113–116. See also Montague’s work, partly mentioned above and partly referred to in these writings of his, and the work of E. J. Lemmon and Dagfinn F0llesdal. Most of my own published work here is collected in Models for Modalities: Selected Essays, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, 1969.
One danger here is to think of ‘possible worlds’ as being something weird and consequently philosophically suspect. Yet nothing is more commonplace in human life and in the life of science than to find someone considering several possibilities as to how some sequence of events might turn out (e.g. considering several possible outcomes of an experiment). Whoever does so, is dealing with as many ‘possible worlds’ in the general sense presupposed here. It is instructive to see how pervasive and how unavoidable precisely analogous considerations are in the foundations of statistics, and how commonplace and innocent some of the intended applications of these concepts are. (Cf. e.g. L. J. Savage The Foundations of Statistics, John Wiley, New York, 1954, especially Savage’s discussion of ‘states of the world’ on pp. 8–10 and of ‘small worlds’ on pp. 82–86.) An ontological standard which (in the name of science?) tries to exorcise possible worlds from our conceptual system is likely to make shambles of statistics and applied probability theory.
There seems to be a bad ambiguity here between compatibility with what someone believes (knows, remembers, etc.) and compatibility (also) with his believing (knowing, remembering, etc.) it. For many purposes, including those of the present paper, we can simply leave the ambiguity there. It only matters when further questions (concerning the details of the behavior of the alternativeness relation, especially its possible transitivity) are asked. Contrary to what has been claimed, I have never traded on the ambiguity myself. Here we can simply leave it alone. (Cf. Jaakko Hintikka, ‘“Knowing that One Knows” Reviewed’, Synthese 21 (1970) 141–162.)
There are nevertheless explicit doctrines to the contrary. Sometimes it is thought that our primary vehicle in referring to individuals are names (individual constants), and that they are mere labels without descriptive content. Then clearly we can refer to individuals only in so far as we have succeeded in pasting these labels on them. As far as our ways with singular terms go, we then have to think ourselves as being rather in the position of an Adam who has associated names with the various beasts because they had come to him to be identified. I have called this view of the functioning of our language ‘logical Adamism’. (Cf. Genesis 2:19.) It is clear that if it were acceptable, all those individuals we can meaningfully talk about can be recognized everywhere by means of their identificatory labels which we (so to speak) have to think of as already being strung to them. It is equally clear, it seems to me, that this is an unrealistic way of thinking about the use of our language. The values of quantifiers will on any reasonable interpretation leave behind all the individuals we have already witnessed and labelled.
Suppose that we are given two characters in two different romans à clef, both compatible with all my beliefs and asked whether they are the same person (individual) or not. One thing we can try to do is to follow each of them back and forward in his respective roman. The possibility of doing so of course depends heavily on spatial and temporal continuity of individuals within each possible world. If we are lucky, we can trace the two characters to the common part of the two novels, i.e. the part which represents my positive beliefs about the world. If they coincide there, they are identical; if they are separate there, they are different. This strategy may of course fail. Then we fall back on some suitable requirements of similarity between the two individuals. Such criteria of cross-identification do not seem very sharp nor very conclusive. However, this probably is as it should be. We are in this case dealing with two ‘possible individuals’ about whom I have no beliefs. No wonder there is little one can say of the identification of such underdetermined individuals between my belief-worlds (worlds compatible with what I believe).
See the essays included in Models for Modalities (Reference 5 above), especially ‘Semantics for Propositional Attitudes’ and ‘Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions’.
For the pros and cons here, see my ‘Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions’ (Reference 10 above). There it is also shown how this particular mode of good behavior on the part of individuals is connected with the problem of the substitutivity of individuals. Gail Stine has claimed in effect that we cannot rule out splitting in the case of belief. (See ‘Hintikka on Quantification and Belief, Nous 3 (1969) 349–408.) I am prepared to reserve judgement here, pending further discussion. This problem, vital to the evaluation of the Quine-Føllesdal position (as I am interpreting it), does not affect my constructive suggestions in this paper or elsewhere.
The precise conditions on which the usual quantificational laws apply in different circumstances are studied in ‘Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions’ (Reference 10 above). The next few paragraphs present only an intuitive summary of an analysis that can be made much tighter.
For Quine’s distinction between objectual and substitutional quantification, see his new book, Ontological Relativity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, especially pp. 63–67, 104–108. See also W. V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Random House, New York, 1966, Ch. 14
and Ruth Barcan Marcus, ‘Interpreting Quantification’, Inquiry 5 (1962) 252–259, ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’, Synthese 13 (1961) 303–322. I want to be especially emphatic here because a substitutional interpretation of quantifiers has mistakenly been attributed to me.
In ‘Semantics for Propositional Attitudes’ (Reference 10 above).
Of course, formally one might very well try to handle the situation in terms of one big unified class of individuating functions. Then each of them would have to be thought of as being defined only for some subclass of the class of all possible worlds we are considering.
Technically, this means — in rough-and-ready terms — that the kinds of auxiliary premises contemplated in Section VII above do not coincide but have to be distinguished from each other in almost all interesting cases.
We might perhaps express the relativity involved here by saying that what counts as an individual depends on the context of-discussion. (The Prime Minister of Norway is a well-defined individual as far as Prof. Føllesdal’s knowledge is concerned, for he knows who that high official of his country is, whereas the same Prime Minister unfortunately is not a well-defined individual as far as my knowledge and ignorance are concerned.) This relativity of individuals has a terminological consequence which tends to create unnecessary confusion and perhaps even disagreement in this area. The inhabitants of each possible world, when this world is considered alone, are as good individuals as one can possibly hope. However, when our attention switches and we consider the same world (say) just as one particular alternative to another given world, these inhabitants suddenly become only so many ‘embodiments’ or ‘manifestations’ of the ‘real’ individuals who can also make their entrances and exits in other worlds, or perhaps rather so many different roles these individuals play. Hence referring to the good old inhabitants of one particular possible world as individuals may be perfectly appropriate in one context and yet quite misleading in another. The same goes for the intuitive meaning one associates with the truth of an identity a = b in some particular possible world. In one context, what is involved is a perfectly good identity between genuine individuals, while in another context only an identity between the ephemeral ‘stages’ or ‘manifestations’ of genuine individuals is what we ought to be thinking in terms of. The main moral of this terminological and interpretational relativity is, it seems to me, that we need not be confused or misled by it.
With the following (and with the preceding section) compare the related discussion in ‘Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions’, Sections XVI-XVII.
In ‘Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions’, Section XIX.
See e.g. W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Reference 1 above), Ch. 8; Word and Object (Reference 2 above), Ch. 6; The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Random House, New York, 1966, Chapters 13–15. Cf. also Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Quine on Modality’ in Words and Objections (Reference 2 above), with further references.
This is especially clearly in evidence in Ontological Relativity (Reference 12 above).
See Jaakko Hintikka, ‘The Objects of Knowledge and Belief: Acquaintances and Public Figures’, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970).
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Hintikka, J. (1972). The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology. In: Davidson, D., Harman, G. (eds) Semantics of Natural Language. Synthese Library, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_12
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