Abstract
A number of philosophers have argued in recent years that certain kinds of metaphysical debates—e.g., debates over the existence of past and future objects, mereological sums, and coincident objects—are merely verbal. (Roughly speaking, a merely verbal dispute is one in which the two parties to the dispute don’t disagree about any non-verbal facts and only seem to disagree because they mean different things by their words.) It is argued in this paper that metaphysical debates (of a certain very broad kind) are not merely verbal. The paper proceeds by uncovering and describing a pattern that can be found in a very wide range of philosophical problems and then explaining how, in connection with any problem of this general kind, there is always a non-verbal debate to be had. Indeed, the paper provides a recipe for locating the non-verbal debates that surround these philosophical problems. This undermines metametaphysical verbalist views of our metaphysical questions—i.e., views that say that there is no non-verbal debate to be had about some metaphysical question. Finally, the paper also provides a quick argument against actual-literature verbalist views of our metaphysical questions; in other words, the paper argues that in connection with all of our metaphysical questions, it is easy to find examples of non-verbal debates in the actual philosophical literature.
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Notes
For an argument for this sort of semantic externalism, see Burge (1979).
There could, however, be a “pragmatic winner”; for it could be that we should use the term in one of the two ways.
To see why I’ve included this parenthetical qualifier, consider the debate over the truth value of (Dinosaur) and notice that even if we limit our attention to languages like Presentese and Eternalese, there are still non-verbal debates to be had about this sentence. Suppose, e.g., that Jane thinks that there were never any such things as dinosaurs and, hence, that (Dinosaur) is false in Eternalese; then the rest of us (who think that (Dinosaur) is true in Eternalese) could obviously have a non-verbal debate with Jane about this–in Eternalese. But this wouldn’t be a metaphysical debate in any interesting sense; it would be a debate about zoological history. This is why I include ‘(metaphysical)’ in the definition of metametaphysical verbalism. The idea is that there’s no non-verbal metaphysical debate to be had about the given metaphysical question.
Eklund (2016) draws a distinction between kinds of mere-verbalism that’s similar to the distinction I’m drawing here between actual-literature views and metametaphysical views.
I should note that even if you endorse metametaphysical verbalism about MQ, you could still claim that there’s something worth debating in connection with MQ because you could claim that there’s an interesting/important metalinguistic debate to be had about what sort of language (or which words or concepts) we should employ. For views along these lines, see, e.g., Plunkett and Sundell (2013), Thomasson (2016), and Belleri (2016).
There are two different ways to develop a non-weighty-truth-condition view: you can offer a non-face-value view of the logical form of the sentences, or you can accept the face-value form and endorse an alternative view of the kinds of objects involved. So, e.g., in the philosophy of mathematics, if-thenists follow the first strategy, claiming that ‘3 is prime’ really says that if there were numbers, then 3 would be prime; and advocates of psychologism follow the second strategy, claiming that sentences like ‘3 is prime’ make claims about mental objects, not abstract objects.
You might wonder whether pleonastic view (or easy-ontology views) should be classified as cell-R views or cell-T views. (I’m thinking here of views like Rayo’s (2013) trivialist platonism; on his view, the sentence ‘Numbers exist’ is true but this is just because it follows trivially from sentences like ‘There are no witches’ (and the idea is that since the latter is just a negative existential, it doesn’t involve any reference to, or quantification over, numbers). Others to endorse views of this general kind include Thomasson (2015).) As I’m conceiving of things, views like this are cell-T views, not cell-R views. This is because these views don’t entail the existence of objects of the relevant controversial kind; e.g., Rayo’s view doesn’t entail the existence of abstract objects. (His view does entail the existence of numbers (or at any rate, it entails that the sentence ‘There are numbers’ comes out true according to the rules of ordinary English), but it doesn’t entail the existence of full-blown abstract objects—i.e., non-physical, non-mental objects that fully exist but not in space and time. This is why Rayo calls his view “trivialist platonism”.).
You might worry that when I introduced the matrix in Sect. 4.1, I was talking about sentences that seem obviously true to us, whereas (Dinosaur) doesn’t seem obviously true to us. But the fact that (Dinosaur) doesn’t strikes us as obviously true won’t matter at all in what follows. Nothing I’m going to say will depend on the claim that (Dinosaur) seems true to us, and what’s more, if I wanted to, I could run essentially the same argument in terms of a sentence that does seem true to us—e.g., ‘Queen Elizabeth is a direct descendent of William the Conqueror.’ The reason I’ve decided to run the argument in terms of (Dinosaur), instead of some true-seeming sentence like the one about William the Conqueror, is just that it’s simpler in this context to work with an existence claim.
I’m assuming here that the sentence ‘There used to be dinosaurs’ is to be interpreted in an ontologically innocent way; if it’s interpreted as being ontologically committing—e.g., as saying that there exists a time, prior to the present time, at which dinosaurs exist—then it might be natural to say that, in Thickese, this sentence does analytically entail (Dinosaur).
See footnote 10.
Given my arguments against metametaphysical verbalism, you might think that mere-verbalists could respond by defining a third kind of verbalism, distinct from metametaphysical verbalism and actual-literature verbalism. You might try to define such a view as follows:
There are non-verbal debates to be had about temporal ontology (and, indeed, it may be that some debates in the actual literature are non-verbal), but the ones that are non-verbal are factually empty in the sense that there’s no fact of the matter what the answers to the given questions are.
I wouldn’t want to argue against this view—indeed, as I just pointed out, I find it at least initially plausible—but I don’t think there’s any interesting sense in which this view is a mere-verbalist view; what it is is a non-factualist view. (Likewise, if you said that there are non-verbal debates to be had about temporal ontology but that we humans could never make any progress on settling these debates, that wouldn’t be a mere-verbalist view either; it might be called an epistemicist view.).
However, I have argued that some of these sentences are indeterminate. In my (1998), I argue that sentences asserting the existence of abstract objects are indeterminate; in my (forthcoming-b), I argue that sentences asserting the existence of composite objects are indeterminate; and in my (2016a), I say a few words about how we might argue that sentences asserting the existence of past and future objects are indeterminate.
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I would like to thank the following people for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper: Talia Bettcher, Ross Cameron, Matti Eklund, Eli Hirsch, Robert Jones, Uriah Kriegel, Michaela McSweeney, David Pitt, Shel Smith, Wai-hung Wong, and Steve Yablo. Also, an early version of this paper was read at the Central European University in Budapest, and I’d like to thank the members of that audience.
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Balaguer, M. Why metaphysical debates are not merely verbal (or how to have a non-verbal metaphysical debate). Synthese 197, 1181–1201 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1375-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1375-2