Abstract
Existentialism about propositions is the view that a proposition expressed in a sentence containing a nonempty name or indexical depends ontologically on the referent of the name or indexical: the proposition could not exist if the referent did not. The paper focuses on names. It discusses some arguments for existentialism and then presents a novel one. That argument does not presuppose that propositions have constituents, and it could be accepted by those who hold broadly Fregean views about names. It shows that, for example, if Aristotle had not existed, no sentence could have meant that Aristotle is a philosopher. The paper also touches on the consequences of existentialism.
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Notes
The identification with the proposition that she is a philosopher would be disputed by M. Richard (1993) and others. See fn. 12 below for an explanation of why the argument of this paper does not apply to propositions expressed in sentences in which a nonempty name occurs within a complex demonstrative.
For a more extended criticism of that argument for existentialism, see (Plantinga 1983, pp. 7–9).
Such philosophers need not espouse Frege’s view that propositions have senses as constituents.
I ignore the fact that people other than the philosopher were called “Aristotle”.
Could it be that the proposition that Julius is an American is simply the proposition that the particular person is an American and so does not refer to Julius by way of his relation to the zip? It does not seem so. Let us stipulate that “Augustus” will be a name of the person who first ran the mile in less than four and a half minutes, whoever that person may have been. Assume that, without our knowing it, the inventor of the zip was the first to run the mile in less than four and a half minutes. It is hard to believe that the proposition that Julius is an American is the same as the proposition that Augustus is an American. We here seem to have two distinct pieces of information.
Adams’s and Williamson’s arguments are also criticized in (Merricks 2015, pp. 185–189).
Later on, in (Stalnaker 2012, p. 43), Stalnaker argues for existentialism in a way reminiscent of Adams. His argument there is that propositions are truth-conditions, but the truth-condition for a singular proposition essentially involves the individual that the proposition is about, and it is reasonable to believe that such a condition requires, for its existence, the existence of the individual.
It may be objected that this discussion of Stalnaker presupposes that we can single out a possible world in which Kripke has seven sons or there are particles of kind k, but we cannot do that, since the relevant objects are missing. In fact, I do not presuppose that we can single out such a possible world. The letter “w” is here a variable, and the whole discussion is to be understood as prefixed by a universal quantifier “for any world w”.
It may be protested that propositions do not have content; they are contents. In fact, a proposition has content in the sense that it represents things as being a certain way; it is the proposition that such-and-such is the case.
B. Hellie (2004) argues that we grasp some inexpressible concepts and propositions about our experiences. The concepts denote the phenomenal qualities of the experiences, and we form them by reflecting on those qualities. I think that the term “inexpressible” may be misleading: Hellie takes it that there are no words for those reflective concepts, but does not imply that we cannot introduce such words if we want to.
J. Shaw (2013) argues that certain propositions, involved in a semantic paradox, are inexpressible. The argument is that any utterance that seems to express such a proposition fails to do so; for the utterance cannot be true, on pain of contradiction, but if it says what it seems to be saying, then there obtains a condition necessary and sufficient for its truth. However, as is usual with the semantic paradoxes, various other accounts of what is going on are possible. Perhaps, the utterance expresses the relevant proposition: perhaps, it says that p, and indeed p, yet it is not the case that (the utterance is true iff p).
On the other hand, I think it is not necessarily the case that if a sentence means that that friend of Aristotle’s is a philosopher, then it contains an expression that has a meaning which either is the same as the meaning that “Aristotle” has in fact or includes, as one of its aspects, the meaning that “Aristotle” has in fact. (Suppose that I am pointing to a female friend of Aristotle’s.) What is it for a speaker to say that that friend of Aristotle’s is a philosopher? I think it is to say that she is a philosopher; the speaker need not refer to her in any way involving Aristotle. But then, by analogy, a sentence may mean that that friend of Aristotle’s is a philosopher, but contain no expression having or including the meaning of “Aristotle”.
I argued for serious actualism and its variant about relations in (Stephanou 2007).
It is sometimes thought that verbs creating that kind of context express relations to concepts. According to that view, in the sentence “John is talking about a dragon” a certain relation is said to connect John with the concept of a dragon. A. Church (1956, p. 8, fn. 20) argues along those lines about “seek”. But that cannot be right unless the phrase “a dragon” in the sentence “John is talking about a dragon” is a singular term referring to a concept. It does not seem so.
Likewise, it is necessarily the case that if an expression has the same meaning as “Julius” has in fact, then Julius exists. One may here object that “Julius” may well mean “the inventor of the zip in A”, where “A” is a name of the actual world, and that an expression could have that meaning without Julius existing. I would take the last point as a reason for denying that “Julius” means “the inventor of the zip in A”. Here is another reason. If we lived in a different possible world, but Julius had existed and uniquely invented the zip, we could introduce the name just as we did in fact and use it to say that Julius is clever. But we could not say that the inventor of the zip in A is clever, since we would not be able to single out A among the many possible worlds that differed in various respects from ours.
J. McDowell’s de re senses for singular terms (McDowell 1984) are similar. They are Fregean senses, and each of them is specific to its res and would not be available to be grasped or expressed if the res did not exist. Indeed, McDowell (p. 104) implies that the de re sense would not exist if the res did not. According to the conception which Evans believes that Frege advocated or at least could have advocated, “the sense of a singular term is a way of thinking about a particular object: something that obviously could not exist if that object did not exist to be thought about” (Evans 1985b, pp. 295–296).
On the other hand, Fregeans who wish to distinguish between the customary and the indirect meaning or sense of a name should read “meaning” in the argument of this paper as short for “customary meaning” and, at least initially, restrict the conclusion to propositions that are expressed in sentences containing a nonempty name in an extensional context. Extending the conclusion to sentences in which a nonempty name has its indirect sense requires additional assumptions. One of them may be the assumption that, necessarily, if there is an expression whose meaning, or one of whose meanings, is the indirect sense that “Aristotle” has in fact, then there is an expression (the same or a different one) whose meaning, or one of whose meanings, is the customary sense that “Aristotle” has in fact.
As I use the present tense of “exist”, it has no reference to the present time. The simple “exist” is equivalent to “exist at some point in time or even outside time”.
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Acknowledgments
The paper benefited from written comments by Dr M. Filippou and from some referee reports, particularly those of a referee for Acta Analytica.
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Stephanou, Y. An Argument for Existentialism. Acta Anal 35, 507–520 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00417-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00417-w