1. A contingent being is one the nonexistence of which is possible, whereas a necessary being is one the nonexistence of which is impossible. (At play in these definitions is broadly logical possibility which is between narrowly logical and nomological possibility.)
2. Framing a definition is one thing, showing that something answers to it is another. Are there any necessary beings? Since a necessary being could be either abstract or concrete, I can show that there are necessary beings by showing that there is at least one abstract necessary being. To convey the senses of 'concrete' and 'abstract' by example one could say that God and Socrates are concrete while the proposition
7 is prime and Socrates' singleton -- {Socrates} -- are abstract. Concreta are causally active/passive whereas abstracta are not.
3. Some truths are necessary, others are contingent. 'I am now blogging' is contingently true: it is true, but it might not have been true. I might have been doing something inconsistent with blogging now, sleeping for instance. By contrast, 'If I am blogging, then I am writing' is necessarily true. To see this, negate the sentence in question. The result is a sentence expressing a broadly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and it is not the case that I am writing.' Consider also, 'If I am blogging, then it is not the case that I am not blogging.' This too is necessarily true, except that the negation expresses a narrowly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and I am not blogging.'
I don't see how any reasonable person can deny that there are necessary truths. Another example: '7 is a prime number' expresses a necessary truth. This doesn't just happen to be true in the way that it just happens to be true that there are seven cans of Dr. Pepper left in the reefer. It is necessarily true: true in all (BL)-possible worlds.
4. A truth is a true truth-bearer. Now I don't understand how ink on paper, or chalk on a blackboard, or any physical modification of any physical medium, no matter how complex the modification and how complex the medium, could be true or false. I don't understand how anything physical could, qua physical, be a truth-bearer or truth-vehicle, i.e., an item capable of being either true or false. Marks on paper cannot be either true or false. They just exist. But suppose you think they -- or complex modifications of the stuff between your ears -- can be either true or false. Still, the marked-up paper exists contingently. Consequently, the sentence-token '7 is prime' scratched onto the paper exists contingently. Similarly for anything inscribed in your brain.
Your brain and its 'inscriptions' are contingent.
5. But then how could any truth be necessarily true? There is no possible world in which 7 is not prime, but there are worlds in which there are no material things. How could the proposition in question be true in those worlds if there is nothing in those worlds to serve as truth-bearer? Let's spell this out.
If an item has a property, then, pace Meinong, the item exists. So if an item such as a truth-bearer has the property of being necessarily true, then that truth-bearer necessarily exists. Therefore, if there are necessary truths, then there are necessary beings. Now there are necessary truths. Therefore, there are necessary beings.
Given that everything physical is contingent, these necessary beings are nonphysical. So they are either mental (accusatives of mental acts) or abstract. For present purposes, it doesn't matter which of these they are. The present point is that there is good reason to believe in (i.e., believe that there are) necessary beings.
6. But I hear an objection coming:
An item can have a property essentially without having it necessarily. Thus Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human. He is human in every world in which he exists, but he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially but not necessarily human. Why can't the proposition expressed by '7 is prime' be like that? Why can't it be essentially (as opposed to accidentally) true, true in every world in which it exists, but neither true nor false in the worlds in which it does not exist? If this is the way it is, then your argument from necessary truths to necessary beings collapses.
The objector is suggesting that truth-bearers are contingent beings. But this is problematic as Alvin Plantinga argues (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford UP, 1993, p. 119.) Suppose that truth-bearers are brain inscriptions, and consider the proposition
1. There are brain inscriptions.
(1) is such that it could not have been false. For in a possible world in which there are no brain inscriptions, there are no truth-bearers, which implies that (1) in those words is neither true nor false, hence not false. And in every world in which there are brain inscriptions, (1) is of course true. So (1) is true in every world in which it exists, and not false in every world in which it does not exist. So (1) could not have been false.
But this bizarre. Surely there might have been no brains and no brain-inscriptions. It is not necessarily true that there are brains. If it is not necessarily true that there are brains, then it is possibly true that there are no brains.
Now what is this possibility of there being no brains? It is plausibly identified with the possibly being true of the proposition, There are no brains. But then this proposition must exist in those possible worlds in which it is not true.
First of all, thanks for the friendly dedication... "My blushes!"
I'm still having trouble getting down all this Platonist Kool-Ade, though, I'm sorry to say. Referring to some of the points you made:
In 3) you say: To weigh the truth of "7 is prime" requires that we have defined "7", "is" and "prime". What about "# is dunkly"? Why isn't that one true? Because no mind has staked out, yet, what it means. I maintain that it is our own instantiated minds that do this defining, this partitioning, of the seamless and continuous plenum of the world into objects and propositions.
In 5) you sayWhy so? What about a world in which the concepts of "7" and "prime" do not even exist?How do you know that, other than by defining them into existence in the form of placeholders for reified abstractions, abstractions that I contend are simply concepts in your own (instantiated) mind? I dispute that such worlds can be claimed to have any meaningful existence.I am picturing a bright-red, eleven-headed dragon. Are you saying it exists? Or are you saying instead that does it not have those properties? Now I am imagining the prime number "seven". I would say that neither of these exists except as a construct in my mind.
Finally, in 6) you make the argument that proposition 1) must exist even in worlds in which there are no brains (I would generalize that to "no minds"; I am not sure what things can and cannot host a mind). But I am suggesting that in such worlds, the proposition, incapable of instantiation, simply does not exist at all.
You suggested in an earlier comment that there are "plenty of philosophers who will agree with you that this Platonic extravagance need not be countenanced." I'm glad to hear that; as so often happens to me in here, I'm feeling lonesome. Can you point me toward any supportive reading?
Anyway, I do sincerely appreciate the trouble you have gone to here. It is kind of you to bother, when by all rights I should be paying some philosophy professor somewhere to put up with such mulishness instead of expecting you to do so gratis. Again, I don't mind being wrong, if I am wrong; all I want is to get to the bottom of it all.
Maybe there's no bottom.
(Comment only half in jest.)
Kevin
If it helps you feel a bit less lonesome (even if its from a supernaturalistic theist {g}--though that might actually count more in some ways), your criticism is roughly the same as I would have made. I have trouble treating abstract concepts as existing independent of concrete realities. (And if they're dependent on concrete realities, then shouldn't the argument be focusing on the concretes?--even if making secondary usage of the abstract concepts _about_ the concretes?)
I will say, however, that Bill's attempt is more sophisticated (and far more respectable) than the much cruder attempts exemplified by Tom Wanchick recently over in the Carrier-Wanchick debate at the Secular Web. See Victor's site for link references; bless his heart, he has to help judge that thing. {shudder}
Bill's argument could possibly be reparsed (minus a dependency on treating abstracts as being independencies, so to speak {g}), into something resembling an upgraded version of the Argument from Truth. (cf Gordon H. Clark: 1.) Truth is real. 2.) Truth is immutable. 3.) Truth is eternal. 4.) Truth is mental. 5.) Truth is superior to the human mind. 6.) Something is real which is immutable, eternal, mental and superior to the human mind.) Keeping in mind, of course, that Bill's argument, so far, doesn't involve reaching a theistic conclusion. (It's nice to see the restraint, actually. {g})
Actually I was just looking at that SEP entry last night, and the entry on "Existence". It was late, though, and fatigue overtook me. I'll resume today. I'm curious to know whom I should be reading; I realize my brief for this position is amateurish, and I need to see what the philosophers who share my intuition (Bill says there are "plenty" of them) have to say.
I am also interested in Putnam's idea (which you directed me to) of conceptual relativity - it seems very much like what I have been trying (with poor results) to articulate, although I can find precious little about it, other than oblique mentions of its being "perplexing".
Thanks for the birthday wishes.
Re the argument from truth, my suspicion is that it is the world that is real, and that partitioning it into objects and truths requires the involvement of minds (not because the world does not preexist minds, but because the preexisting world is a seamless plenum, and all the partitioning and categorization, conceptualizing and proposition-making are mind-dependent).
If, "7 is prime" is created when a mind instantiates it, why then couldn't "7 is prime" be instantiated as true in some worlds, but false in others? Or for that matter, why couldn't it be instantiated as true for you, but false for me?
It seems that if we are not to slip into post-modernist relativism, we must accept that there is some rule, or fact, or constraint, or principle, that "7 is prime" is always true, regardless of who instantiates it. But whatever you call this thing (a rule/principle/fact/constraint/etc), it will itself be an abstracta, and it will be real. Now, you could try to counter that the abstracta "'7 is prime' is always true when instantiated by our minds" itself only exists when instantiated by our minds, but now we have the beginnings of a vicious infinite regress, do we not?
As I can see it, there is simply no way to hold that any abstracta is necessarily true (thus avoiding extreme post-modernism), without also holding that at least some abstracta necessarily exist. Now, one could counter here that abstracta don't really "exist" after all, even when instantiated. If one means by this that abstracta really don't exist at all (ie "7 is prime" doesn't exist at all, and hence is not true for false) then we have slipped into eliminativism, and radical deconstructionism. If one simply means that they don't exist in the same way that concrete things exist, then that would be an affirmation of your original point: they are abstracta, not concreta.
Mightn't one argue that the constraint, or regularity, that you are suggesting has an independent existence depends, rather, on:
1) A mind to define the concept of "seven";
2) A mind to limn the rules of arithmetic, and the logical rules and operations upon which it depends;
3) A mind to define, within the structure created in 2), the concept of "primeness".
Once we have all that structure in place, then yes, I'd agree that anyone who duplicates it in his own mind will always find that "seven" is "prime". But it seems defensible to me that minds are required to parse the relevant concepts in the first place; it seems rather anthropocentrically hubristic, I think, to imagine that such concepts, as preexisting constructs, inhere somehow in the fabric of reality itself.
Did "rock" always defeat "scissors" before anyone played the game?
I'll try to respond tomorrow.
Now, you say that if a person instantiates the same concept of 7, and the same concepts of math, and the same concept of primeness, "7 is prime" will be true for them too. But why is that? Why can't two people, after instantiating the same prerequisite concepts, both instantiate "7 is prime", one instantiating it as true, and the other as false? And how do we know that they can't? Well, because given the same premises, it is logically impossible for "7 is prime" to be false, of course (and on the flipside, it's logically necessary that it's true). But this is an appeal to knowledge of an objective standard (rule/norm/constraint/principle/whatever) of logic that applies to both people, and that is yet another abstracta.
When you say "anyone who duplicates it in his own mind will always find that 'seven' is 'prime'", this is, I believe, the beginning of the vicious infinite regress I alluded to in my last post. For if you're not invoking a necessary logical truth, then this proposition itself must be a mental construct of yours, in which case, why couldn't it be true for you, but false for the next guy? If you say simply that if the next guy duplicates the same content in his mind, it will be true for him too, you just take another step in the vicious regress, without ever bridging the gap between subjective, relative truth and objective, necessary truth. This regress is kind of like that Holodeck episode of Star Trek:TNG, where they think they've left the subjective world of the Holodeck, but really they're still in it, and they've just been fooled into thinking it's the objective real world, or when you think you've woken up from a dream, but you really only dreamed that you woke up.
I think there's a problem here, in that you want to say that we construct all abstracta, but without constructing their truth values. This latter part is necessary for us to stake any claims to objective truth, rather than truth being relative and subjective. However, it seems to me that in the end, there's no way to appeal to non-relative truth without appealing to necessary abstracta.
On the question of anthropocentric hubris, I realize that there is some aesthetics involved here, but unsurprisingly, I see things differently :-). From my perspective, the existence of necessary truths is actually somewhat humbling in a certain sense. It means that there are hard truths out there, some small number of which we can hope to discover, but we didn't invent them, and we can't change them or make them go away, no matter how much we wish we could. It's ours only to find which of them we can with our limited abilities and deal with them.
As for rock, paper, scissors, I'd say that "rock beats scissors" is not a necessary truth, but a contingent one. I could make up a game where scissors beats rock. However, I'd say that the proposition "In any game where rock beats scissors, rock will beat scissors" is a necessary truth, and is true prior to and regardless of the instantiation of any such games.
Malcolm,
It depends a bit on how one defines 'truth'; but (keeping in mind no begging of the question in favor of the evident natural world _only_ existing) I don't necessarily have a problem with that.
Or, to put it in Clarke's terms, "Truth is mental." {g}
His argument is rather more Platonistic than I would care to go--don't use it myself. Still, I do find it intriguing. And I can see some connections between it and what Bill is doing here. If one can help in refining the other, I'd be interested to see the progression.
Jason
Good point about the hubris not necessarily being hubris. {s!}
Looking back at the comment you are responding to, I suggested that in order for two minds to agree on the primeness of seven, first we needed to establish in our minds corresponding definitions of what "seven" is, what the rules of arithmetic and logic are, and what "primeness" means. Having done that, we will agree, because such agreement is implicit - arguably, tautologically so - in those rules and definitions.
Now we can work as hard as we need to in order to set up those mental structures, defining each term in terms of known terms, etc., until we reach some bottom level, in which we have to appeal to some bedrock fact or inutition. At this point I can say that we rely on innate mental structures that we both have in our heads as the result of our evolutionary interaction with the physical environment, which in turn bottoms out, ultimately, as a set of irreducible facts about the physical world. In my model there are no abstracta anywhere in sight, just the natural world.
You, in turn, suggest the the regress bottoms out one level lower, at a different sort of irreducible fact, which you are calling an abstractum, a brute "truth".
I see no additional explanatory power in your model, nor any compelling reason to believe in the existence of such "objects".
(1) '7 is a prime number' expresses a necessary truth
don't seem relevant to me. The situation is the same if I were to say
(3) 'The president of the United States' expresses a very powerful job.
You could quibble with this sentence by saying, "First we have to define 'president' and 'United States'" With such complaints, you could doubt the truth and even the coherence of my statement. But although these points might be interesting in a discussion about language and meaning, they are not relevant to a discussion about jobs and power. It is a fundamental requirement of communication that the speakers be able to express references. If you are going to refuse to allow Bill that power, then you two may as well stop talking.
I completely agree! I think you've misunderstood me.
Seven is prime, and the president has a powerful job. No problem there at all. I know just what you mean, and I'm perfectly fine with all of it.
All that business about "defining" was just an attempt to unpack and expose the implicit assumptions we all share, as human beings with human minds.
The only thing I'm expressing skepticism about is the platonist's insistence on the existence of abstract objects. I'm not even insisting that they don't exist (although I think they don't). I'm just not convinced, that's all.
Brief reply: I just thought I'd point out, you still haven't managed to eliminate abstracta. You justify your knowledge that "7 is prime" and that "7 is prime for me and the next guy" by appealing to "a set of irreducible facts about the physical world". But a "fact about" the world is still another abstracta! It could be interchanged with "principle of", "norm of", "rule of", "truth about", and so forth, but the point is that it's an abstractum. To try and escape the relativist trap, you're being forced to justify the truth of your own abstracta by appealing to less contingent (and hence closer to necessary and ultimate) truths or logical principles.
No, you've missed the whole point. A "brute fact", in the sense I am using it (which is, I believe, the conventional philosophical sense), is explicitly not an abstract object. The phrase is merely a convention of language, another way of saying "when you look at the world, this is what you find, and there is no explanatory level beneath."
There is no need to assume some underlying abstractum that somehow embodies the "fact"; it's all right there in the spacetime world itself.
"Re the argument from truth, my suspicion is that it is the world that is real, and that partitioning it into objects and truths requires the involvement of minds (not because the world does not preexist minds, but because the preexisting world is a seamless plenum, and all the partitioning and categorization, conceptualizing and proposition-making are mind-dependent)."
"A truth is a true truth-bearer"
Maybe a good definition of truth is the totality of what is true. Instead of looking at totality as a sum of individual things (such as the totality of books in Dr. V's study) the totality of the universe should be seen as the totality of a painting. If reality is an indivisible unity then to say that some 'thing'-abstract object, propostion etc. is a truth as if it could exist independently is false. there would be no such thing as a truth only Truth.
The way I understand it, Reality is existence in the way that it exists. To say that "seven is a prime number" is to recognize a particular aspect of the structure of existence, the way existence is.
To say that this structure exists as abstract objects seems foreign. I cannot grasp abstracta existing as objects, only as form. Even more confusing to me, what are propositions apart from what we understand of the structure of reality? ie how can propostitions exist outside of the context of human thought?
Is it even meaningful to talk about truth existing outside the human context? Outside of the human ability to interpret reality there is only reality itself, and to talk about truth existing apart from this ability seems contradictory. A tree is the way it is. There is no truth or falsehood in a tree. Only when we attempt to understand the tree and it's structure does truth come into the picture, because we can understand truly or not.
As an example, take the phenomenal experience of redness. Try to explain to a guy who has been completely blind all his life what redness is like. You'll find that it's impossible to define it for him. It's a concept that we all know, but none can define. That's because defining something is to tell what it is in terms of other things, and the phenomenal experience of sight is basic, and can't be captured that way. Instead, it provides us with some of the basic concepts we use to define other things.
The same is true, I think, about truth. We all know what it is, and we appeal to it all the time, but we can't define it. In fact, since defining something is to tell what it is in terms of other things, trying to define truth results in a relativistic definition of truth, which results in incoherence.
Deuce, when I talked about facts being "embodied" by abstracta, I was only trying to find the right word to express that platonist's belief that such things have an independent existence of their own. Of course I realized that they are alleged to exist as "asbstracta", not "concreta", but the existence of such abstracta is then used to justify the necessity of "worlds" to serve as placeholders for them, &c. (as in "even in an otherwise empty world, proposition P exists", and so forth), and it is that sort of ontological toehold I am trying to knock loose.
Henry, I agree with you about brute facts, and that "fact" is a tricky word. It is just that trickiness that I've been trying to zero in on. In particular what I have been arguing is that it takes minds to do that sort of abstraction of facts from the plenum of the world. Once we have partitioned the world into objects and concepts, then we can start talking about facts. This is why "conceptual relativity of truth" seems such an important point to me - though there seems to be very little literature about it. My suspicion is that our thinking is so deeply influenced by our human mental framework that we assume that it is somehow fundamental (the degree to which that framework is contingent is an important question, too).
Deuce, if we can't define truth, we are not going to have an easy time using the term in productive philosophical discussion. I'm leery of "we all know what it means". Maybe we need to talk about this a bit. Bill?
To give a counterexample, say you wanted to define shadenfreude for someone who had never experienced the feeling themselves. You could say "Shadenfreude is the feeling of happiness at another's suffering". Even though they may never have felt shadenfreude, let's say that they do understand the concepts behind the words "feeling", "happiness", "at another's", and "suffering". They can put these concepts together to arrive at the concept of shadenfreude. Not so with truth. To understand a proposition in the first place, they must already understand what is it for something to be the case, to be true.
Note that I *don't* mean by this that you can't try to link the word "truth" in a person's mind with the concept that they already understand (if that were the case, translating the word "truth" from another language would be impossible), just that the concept can't be captured by way of other concepts.
And yes, it would be great if Bill would weigh in on this thread again :-)
You said:
How about this: if proposition P is "This bag holds three coins," and we can come to a conventional agreement on what all the terms in P mean, then we could say that P is "true" if, upon looking, we find that the bag does indeed hold three coins. In this way it seems to me we can make an operational definition of truth, at least.
One other thing is that your operational definition applies only to bags that hold three coins. I think you'll find that if you try to generalize that definition, it loses it's operational status (Generalized, it becomes essentially "If P is X, and X, then P is 'true'", which is just a complicated way of saying "If P, then P is 'true'").
But, here's where I think such operational definitions are useful. Let's say you have a person who understands the concept of truth, but doesn't know what the word "true" means to speakers of the English language (maybe it's a young child, or somebody learning English). By being given several operational examples of things that are true, and having the word "true" associated with each example, they may be able to infer the general concept from the specific examples, and then link the word to the existing concept in their minds.
My suggestion wasn't a proposition or a definition, but rather just an example of how operational ways of establishing what "truth" means could be worked out. And yes, "indeed" could be got rid of. I'm happy to drop it; it adds nothing but amplification.
Of course, any use of language assumes at bottom that we can arrive at reliably shared meanings, which is ultimately unprovable. In fact, I believe that the correspondence of our reason to any aspect of the world is likely a contingent result of how our brains have been wired by evolution. To C.S. Lewis this was the "cardinal difficulty of Naturalism" because it means that Reason cannot be trusted with perfect certainty, and to him that was a fatal flaw (see a post of mine here). But I'm OK with that; I don't feel the same need for absolute certainty. Likewise, I am confident that our inability to be absolutely sure that we have a shared understanding of common terms such as "three", "coins", "in", and "bag" is not a fatal impediment to a practical operational definition of truth.
But this question is an important philosophical topic, and a lot of heavy lifting has already been done, much of which I haven't read. Bill?
You said, "To define something is to communicate a proposition to someone, and the proposition can't be understood without a truth concept."
I am not totally sure what you are trying to say here because I am not sure what you mean by concept.
If our direct connection with reality is intuition of some kind -either sense intuition of the material world(re: the blind man) or metaphysical intuition of such things as love, numbers, truth etc. then maybe you are trying to say that no proposition can be understood without a direct intuition of the reality behind the terms in the proposition?
You make a good point in your second post. Basically, another person cannot give one an understanding of what truth is. Only if one already has truth within themselves, can the other person help one to recognize it.
Just some other random thoughts. What difference does it make if I have a concept of Shadenfreude built from my imagination putting together the other concepts verses a direct intuition of it?
What difference does it make if I have a concept of truth put together from examples residing in my imagination vs a direct intuition of truth?
How much misunderstanding occurs because our language our imagination and our intuition are not integrated?
I mean pretty much the same thing that you gleaned from my second post: "Basically, another person cannot give one an understanding of what truth is. Only if one already has truth within themselves, can the other person help one to recognize it." And since propositions (truth statements) can only be understood by someone who understands truth, and since definitions are propositions, it follows that trying to give someone a definition of truth presupposes that they already understand it.
You're welcome. I think the three of us (You, Henry, and I)tend to see things more intuitively then analytically. Intuition sees things as a whole. To analyze and define one has to break that whole down into pieces. The problem is to then put the pieces back together and reintegrate it not just within our imagination but with our intuition.
A number of the analytic philosophers I have read have, from my point of view, little intuition of reality. They make valid arguments about things they don't understand. I tend to be stuck with the opposite problem- a strong intuition, but no apptitude for logic.
The reason I enjoy reading Dr. V.'s writing so much is that his reasoning and intuition are so well integrated.
The other problem with intuition is properly interpreting it. For instance, you used the word plenum because you interpret things from a materialistic perspective. My intuition of reality as a unity is probably very similar to yours (since you obviously related to what I was saying) but I interpret the unity I intuit not as a material unity, but a transendental unity that exists within God.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.