Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore the view that some ontological disputes are “metalinguistic negotiations” (to employ a recent term coined by David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell), and to make sense of the significance of these controversies in a way that is still compatible with a broadly deflationist approach. I start by considering the view advocated by Eli Hirsch to the effect that some ontological disputes are verbal. I take the Endurantism–Perdurantusm dispute as a case-study and argue that, while it can be conceded that the dispute is verbal at the object-level, this does not rule out the possibility of a non-verbal disagreement at the metalinguistic level. I then explore the metalinguistic dispute hypothesis by seeing how it can be defended from a first objection playing on the idea of inter-translatability, as well as a second objection raising the question of equal theoretical virtues.
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Notes
I take this position to be stated, with slight variations in the phrasing and terminology used, in the main articles Hirsch devotes to these topics (see 2005, pp. 70, 72, 80, 82; 2008a, p. 376; 2008b, p. 509; 2009, pp. 238–239). For other definitions of verbal dispute, which I will not discuss here, see Jenkins (2014) and Chalmers (2011).
By “language” let us here mean a (finite) set of well-formed sentences (composed of terms from a certain lexicon and according to a specific set of syntactic rules) together with the character assigned to each sentence by a certain semantics. I will here use “language” in a broad sense, including natural languages, artificial languages, but also natural or artificial “dialects” (or “fragments”) of one and the same natural or artificial language. The English jargon of certain philosophical theories (e.g. Perdurantism or mereology) therefore already qualifies as a language in this broad sense.
My arguments will only tackle the perdurantist doctrine to the effect that there are temporal parts. For other ways of understanding the perdurantist thesis, see Effingham (2012). Also, I will not discuss issues that pertain to the combination of Perdurantism with either eternalism or presentism (but see Haslanger 2003) and just assume eternalism. Authors that have argued in favour of Perdurantism or declare themselves perdurantists include, inter alia, Lewis (1986), Armstrong (1980), Heller (1990), Sider (2001).
I will consider Endurantism as the negation of the doctrine that there are temporal parts (for other ways of understanding it, see again Effingham 2012). Following orthodoxy, I shall equate Endurantism with the idea that persistence is for an object to be wholly present at each moment of its existence, where one and the same object continues to exist throughout time (Van Inwagen 1990; Merricks 1994; Fine 2006). I shall not enter into a discussion about the relationship between Endurantism and presentism or eternalism (but see Zimmermann 2006; Haslanger 2003) and straightforwardly assume eternalism.
Why is the existential quantifier responsible for the verbalness of the dispute? The idea here is that variation in meaning concerns the conceptual or linguistic tools recruited to do ontology. In the present example, the existential quantifier is the only suitable candidate to act as an “ontological expression”; yet Hirsch's view also allows that the meaning of terms like “object” or “existence” varies. Hirsch relies here on his doctrine of Quantifier Variance, according to which there are many possible and equivalent ontological languages (Hirsch 2002).
I will follow Plunkett and Sundell (2013, p. 15, fn. 42) and speak of the metalinguistic disagreement as being pragmatically conveyed. I will also follow mainstream philosophy of language and assume the semantics-pragmatics distinction.
I tend to favour an account of metalinguistic negotiations as conversationally implicating normative claims as to which linguistic options should be favoured, but I should note that there is no consensus about the issue in the current debate about ontological disputes. Thomasson (2016), for example, portrays the participants to the metalinguistic negotiation in metaphysics as being engaged in what she calls “metaconventional uses”, which display instances of competing linguistic norms and do not strictly speaking communicate any further propositional content. An interesting discussion, which I cannot pursue here, would therefore concern the pros and cons of a traditional Gricean account as opposed to Thomasson's proposal.
Plunkett (2015, p. 856) provides a list of criteria that, if met, would in turn supply one with defeasible evidence that the philosophical dispute is a metalinguistic negotiation. These criteria are: (A) there being evidence that a dispute (i.e. an exchange that looks like a disagreement) is going on; (B) there being evidence that there indeed is a disagreement; (C) there being evidence that the disputants are using the same key terms in different ways; (D) there being evidence that the disagreement is not descriptive but normative. He also argues that a wide variety of philosophical disputes meet these criteria (p. 858). Importantly, I do not wish to establish anything like this thesis; I am simply arguing that it is possible that, despite the dispute´s being verbal in Hirsch´s sense, it is also associated with a non-verbal, ontologically significant metalinguistic dispute.
The sentential truth-conditional method of translation is arguably also adopted by Miller (2005) and McCall and Lowe (2006). In Miller’s framework (2005, p. 101), we go from sentences in which reference to temporal parts is made, like “Here is a sequence of temporal parts of a tree”, to sentences that are supposedly truth-conditionally equivalent in which only reference to objects composed by “metaphysically basic”, jointly present parts, is made, of the form: “Here is a persisting tree whose metaphysically basic parts are all present at each moment of its existence”. McCall and Lowe (2006, pp. 573–5) also go from sentences in which reference of temporal parts is made, like “Here is a sequence of temporal parts of a rabbit”, to purported truth-conditionally equivalent sentences in which only reference to instantaneous sums of particles is made, like: “Here is a sequence of rabbit-shaped instantaneous particle sums”.
“Referential relation” should be interpreted broadly here, as a way of denoting the complex of semantic relations that hold between sub-sentential components and the world. These relations may include “referring to”, but also “quantifying over”.
The Latin words will be written with an accent (“Hespĕrus” and “Phosphŏrus”) and the English words will be written without an accent (“Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”).
This is because, according to how the example was built up, the Latin sentence “Hespĕrus refulget” determines a function from contexts of utterance to possible worlds such that, in some of these contexts of utterance (and consequently worlds), the names “Hespĕrus” and “Phosphŏrus” are not co-referential. By contrast, the English sentence determines a function from contexts of utterance to possible worlds such that in these contexts of utterance (and consequently worlds) the two names are co-referential. Despite the fact that the functions take different contexts of utterance as their input, they deliver as outputs sets of possible worlds where Venus shines. This is why the translation is ultimately successful, despite this discrepancy at the level of character. Thanks to an anonymous referee for help on this point.
I believe that the idea of lack of referential intertranslatability is also implicitly present in other authors who highlight differences in ontological commitment between Endurantism and Perdurantism. For instance, Hannson Wahlberg (2014) argues that there is a mismatch between the objects envisaged by Endurantism and Perdurantism. This mismatch at the level of ontological commitment may arguably be rendered as a failure of referential translation. Similar remarks hold for Benovsky (2011), who also notes divergences in ontological commitments that may be cast as failures of referential intertranslatability between E-English and P-English.
There is another possible response available to these charges of anti-realism, due to Amie Thomasson (2015, pp. 217–20). I shall mention it for completeness, but I will not pursue it, or discuss it further in this paper. Thomasson argues that in her Easy Ontology framework, language choices and analytic entailments within a language do not create any further objects, but just provide the linguistic means to say that these exist. A further worry may therefore be: are there enough objects for our existence claims to be true? As Thomasson says, the answer here will depend on what we mean by “object”. If our notion of object is too demanding, the entities may not meet the conditions for objecthood, but this will not entail that there are no, e.g., temporal parts; just that they are not objects in that robust sense. On a less demanding conception of object, there indeed are enough objects and, a fortiori, these objects exist.
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Acknowledgments
I was able to complete work on this article thanks to the generous support of the Humboldt Foundation. This paper was presented at the University of Hamburg during the workshop "The Philosophy of Disagreement" (March 2016). I am grateful to all the participants, especially Richard Woodward, Giovanni Merlo and Tim Sundell for their valuable feedback. Many thanks to Martin Kusch, Robin McKenna, David Liggins, Amie Thomasson and John Horden, who read earlier drafts of this article and provided helpful and constructive comments.
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Belleri, D. Verbalism and metalinguistic negotiation in ontological disputes. Philos Stud 174, 2211–2226 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0795-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0795-z