Abstract
This paper wants to know whether it would exist, or could exist, in worlds in which I didn't write it. Before we can answer this question, we first of all have to inquire as to what, exactly, this paper is. After exploring two forms of Platonism (pure and impure), and a theory that defines literary works in terms of events, I shall argue that the term ‘this paper’ is actually infected with ambiguity. Does this paper need me? It depends upon what you mean by ‘this paper’. I lay out the options for what you might mean, and answer the question for each of the options.
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Notes
Or, later by an ignoramus.
Thomasson’s actual example concerns Arthur Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes stories.
To be fair to her, she is doing more than merely appealing to intuition. She argues at length that fictional entities and cultural artifacts are the sort of things about which common-sense everyday talk is particularly authoritative (Thomasson 2003, 2004, 2008). She is appealing to common-sense intuitions against the backdrop of a theory that gives those intuitions particular authority in this area of discourse.
It was, in actual fact, my friend Dustin Crummett who came up with the second stage of this thought-experiment.
Imagine that the two papers were visually indistinguishable. Even the most visually discriminating memory would fail to distinguish the ‘two’ papers.
Thanks to Jeff Speaks for posing this question to me.
Kivy (1983) has defended such a Platonism regarding musical works.
Davies (2004, pp. 43–44) observes that Platonists about music and literature tend to eschew Platonism about the visual arts, although the logical space for such a Platonism certainly exists, as does the space for what Davies calls a ‘global structuralism’—the adoption of Platonist analyses of all types of work.
As cited and developed by Davies (2004, pp. 47–48).
Wolterstorff (1980, p. 89) bites this bullet. It has been suggested to me, by an anonymous reviewer, that the Platonist can do a better job than Wolterstorff’s bullet biting, when talking about the creation of works of art. The artist really does create something, in that she creates a token (or a token of a blueprint for use, such as a score or mold) and, via this creation, she gives the rest of us access to the hitherto undiscovered Platonic object. In the words of the reviewer, she ‘puts the platonic object (if the work is repeatable) on our ontological map.’ But I’m not sure that this really achieves the goal of placing a wedge between artistic creativity and scientific discovery. The scientist also produces a token (or a token of a blueprint for use) when she writes down her discoveries; as does the explorer who draws a map of the lands they discovered, and the route to those lands. The token that the scientist, or explorer, produces, and in fact, the creation of the very experiment, or voyage, as an historical event, or performance, gives the rest of us epistemic access to the hitherto undiscovered law or land; it is the creation of a token that places the law or the land onto our map (in the second case, quite literally). It seems to me that the Platonist still fails to place a wedge between artistic creation, and mere discovery.
Of course, I would have had to exchange my name for his name in this paragraph, but the Platonist might be able to accommodate that—it all depends upon how finely grained a literary-structure we’re talking about.
Of course, this makes a mockery of anti-Platonism. As an anonymous reviewer put it: ‘Nobody would be tempted to identify the painting with the bare canvas, instead of with the canvas with the paint on it arranged just so.’ But, in a sense, that illustrates my point: anti-Platonism simply can’t be so crude as to identify an artwork with a canvas; a canvas with paint arranged on it thus and so is a more complicated type of entity. The painting isn’t just the canvas. It’s the canvas with the paints arranged just so. This is the sort of (more complex) entity to which anti-Platonism might need to appeal.
Cf, Lewis (1986, §1.7).
This paragraph benefited greatly from my being present at a reading-group at Rutgers, in which Caplan and Matheson’s paper was discussed. I found Jonathan Schaffer and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini’s contributions particularly helpful for this paragraph.
Irvin (2014) understands Mag Uidhir merely to be rehashing Dodd-style arguments. But, as we shall see, Mag Uidhir’s argument goes further.
It’s tempting to think that this concern only gets going if you presuppose certain philosophies of time; this concern was pressed upon me by an anonymous reviewer. Only if you’re a presentist would you worry that when Beethoven dies, he ceases to exist in an absolute sense and therefore has to take the set down with him. But, I think the worry has purchase whatever your view of time: even if you’re an eternalist, and you think that the past and the future, and everything in them, timelessly exist, you still have to make sense of our regular talk of existing and ceasing to exist. The fear is that once Beethoven ceases to exist, in the sense in which even an eternalist and growing block theorist accept that things cease to exist, then any impure set in which they belong will also cease to exist, in the sense in which the eternalist and the growing block theorist think that things can cease to exist. And thus, we can worry, whatever our ontology of time, that works will die as soon as their creators do—again, I’m grateful to the metaphysics reading group at Rutgers for helping me to see that the concern is neutral to one’s philosophy of time.
Goodman (2004, footnote 26) concedes that regarding fictional characters there will be some vagueness around the timing of a fictional being’s coming into existence. The same will be true for works. We needn’t be too worried by this. It’s an example of a larger philosophical problem—vagueness—that needs to be discussed elsewhere.
We could attempt to save Levinson’s indicated type theory by construing acts of indication as happenings or doings, not tied too tightly to a particular time, but then Levinson’s theory just collapses into Davies’—an art work isn’t an indicated type but an act of indicating a type.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing this concern.
See, for example, Ziff (1972), who demonstrates the multiple meanings latent in almost any word.
Perhaps deconstructionists identify the literary work with the impure abstractum as received by a culture at a time. These culturally received entities might be an important element of a full ontology of literature. But, they lie beyond the scope of this paper.
Williams (1970) notes how, in the different tellings of mind–body thought-experiments, contrary intuitions can be elicited from the same audience.
This was the intuition of an anonymous reviewer.
He would claim that the social phenomenon was actually a generative performance. It looks more like a simple impure abstractum to me—a posit of the social sciences. But this is beside the point.
Although, in actual fact, the idiomatic way of saying it would be, ‘vous marchez sur mon pied’.
Interestingly, Bertrand Russell, though a Platonist about universals (such as pictorial-form and sonic-structures), was (for a while) a constructivist about propositional content (while he held on to his Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement). On that view, a view which I have defended at length in my PhD thesis (Lebens 2010), literary structures are going to have to be exceptions. Pictorial-structures and sonic-structures generally exist timelessly. Literary works, on the other hand, because their structure is cashed out in terms of propositional content, and because propositions are constructed by minds, might be different. I relegate this, my actual view, to a footnote because I don’t want my eccentric views about propositional content to distract people from my eccentric views about the ontology of works!
Rohrbaugh (2005) accepts that his argument admits of a small number of exceptions, beyond the scope of this paper. Either way, this simple abstractum is no exception to his argument!
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Carl Mosser, Phil Swenson, Evan Fales, Ross Inman, Natalja Deng, Dustin Crummett, Robin Dembroff, Jeff Speaks, Tzvi Novick, Curtis Franks, and Gaby Lebens for very helpful conversations about these topics, and to all of the other people I’ve harangued about the nature of literary works. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who have helped me to improve this paper immeasurably. Any remaining faults in this paper, are mine alone—More accurately, I take responsibility for the possible referents of ‘this paper’ that anybody actually authored!
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Lebens, S. Would this paper exist if I hadn’t written it?. Philos Stud 172, 3059–3080 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0457-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0457-6