symposium on thought and reference || reference, intentionality, and nonexistent entities

Reference, Intentionality, and Nonexistent EntitiesAuthor(s): Gary RosenkrantzSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 58, No. 1/2, Symposium on Thought and Reference (Jan. - Feb., 1990), pp. 165-171Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4320096 .

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GARY ROSENKRANTZ

REFERENCE, INTENTIONALITY, AND

NONEXISTENT ENTITIES

I shall begin with a brief summary of the central thesis of Chisholm's paper (with which I am in sympathy), and then discuss certain passages which I found ambiguous and raise some questions about Chisholm's account of our thoughts about things that do not exist.

I .

In his thought provoking paper, Roderick Chisholm defends the tradi- tional thesis that the reference of language is to be accounted for in terms of the reference of thought, and criticizes those recent and contemporary philosophers who have argued for the influential idea that the reference of thought is to be accounted for in terms of the reference of language. Chisholm calls the former thesis "the primacy of the intentional," and the latter thesis "the primacy of the linguistic or semantical." The disagreement between advocates of the primacy of the intentional and proponents of the primacy of the linguistic or semantical seems to be one which is both deep-seated and far-reaching. If Chisholm's thesis of the primacy of the intentional is correct, then this obviously has important implications in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.

Chisholm's defense of the primacy of the intentional involves an examination of the problem of how it is that a person manages to refer to a specific thing outside himself. This is the problem that Chisholm calls the problem of objective reference. With deep insight and admir- able clarity, Chisholm argues that any account of such reference in terms of linguistic phenomena (including inner speech acts), inner systems of representation, or causal relations is bound to be inadequate if it doesn't mention any intentional phenomena, e.g., phenomena such as a person's thoughts, beliefs, memories, or perceptions, and that an adequate account of objective reference must mention intentional phenomena. It seems to me that the reasons Chisholm gives for drawing

Philosophical Studies 58:165-171, 1990. ? 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed iti the Netherlands.



166 GARY ROSENKRANTZ

the foregoing conclusions are extremely good ones, and I am strongly inclined to accept his conclusions about these matters.

II

In his intriguing discussion of essential features of intentional properties, Chisholm maintains that it is logically possible for an intentional property, e.g., the property of thinking about playing the piano, to be exemplified by a thinker without there being another individual or proper part of that thinker. By "logical possibility" Chisholm seems to mean what some philosophers call metaphysical possibility. Chisholm's argument implies that it is possible for there to be no individual things except for a single conscious monad or unextended thinking substance. Chisholm further states:

You could think about playing the piano even if you were a monad or simple substance. That is to say, it is logically possible that the things that have mental properties are things that do not themselves have any proper parts.'

However, these statements are ambiguous. According to one natural reading of them, they entail that you could be a monad. However, we might read these statements in such a way that they don't have the foregoing entailment, but only entail that a mental property could be exemplified by someone who is a monad. If the first reading is correct, then what Chisholm says about the essential features of intentional properties commits him to the view that you and I are monads or unextended thinking things. That this is so, is a consequence of the following two very plausible metaphysical principles. First, if a thing has proper parts, then it is essential to that thing that it has proper parts. Secondly, with respect to any x and any y, if it is possible for x to exist without y existing, then x $ y. Given the first principle, if it is possible for you to be a monad, then you are such that for anything which is spatially extended or has proper parts, you could exist even though it did not exist. Given these possibilities, the second principle implies that you are a monad, viz., a conscious individual who is not identical with a spatially extended object.

Of course, the claim that you are a monad is far from evident. This claim entails, but is not entailed by, the claim that there could be



REFERENCE, INTENTIONALITY, NONEXISTENCE 167

monads, and this latter claim is more plausible than the former one. Moreover, this more plausible claim seems sufficient for there being a distinction of the sort that Chisholm wants to draw between the essential features of mental properties and most familiar physical properties. Furthermore, Chisholm remarks that although philosophers used to call the things which have intentional properties "souls" or i"minds," it is safer to call them "persons." This suggests that Chisholm has doubts about monadism. In light of the foregoing observations, if we apply a principle of charity, then we should conclude that Chisholm intended the ambiguous passage in question to be read in the second way I mentioned, i.e., as only stating that it is possible that a mental property be had by someone who is a monad.

But, are we justified in assuming that there could be monads or spirits? Many philosophers have argued that it is impossible for there to be things of this kind. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to agree with Chisholm that there could be such unextended things. My reasons for being so inclined are that the notion of an unextended subject of consciousness seems to be free of formal inconsistency, and that I am unaware of a good argument for the conclusion that it is metaphysically impossible that there be an unextended subject of consciousness.

III.

In his discussion of intentional phenomena, Chisholm begins by men- tioning Brentano's thesis that such phenomena are characterized by their direction upon an object. Later, Chisholm seems to maintain that a person can think of, direct his thoughts upon, or refer to both things which exist and things which do not exist. Chisholm emphasizes this latter idea in his treatment of the problem of objective reference, i.e., the problem of accounting for a person's reference to a specific thing outside himself. About this problem, he writes:

An account of objective reference should be adequate to two different facts, One of these is the fact that intentional phenomena may be directed upon things that do exist. I can think about you, for example, or about the president of the United States.... And the second fact, as noted, is that mental phenomena may be directed upon things that do not exist. I can think about unicorns, for example, or about the Holy Grail or about the abominable snowman. And so we have two questions: How is it possible for us to think about things that do exist? And how is it possible for us to think about things that do not exist? 2




Chisholm's remarks about the problem of objective reference, espe- cially in the passage quoted above, seem to imply that a person's reference to a thing that exists outside himself and a person's reference to a thing that does not exist are essentially similar in the following key respect. Both kinds of reference are singular reference, the sort of reference which consists in a specific item being picked out. Chisholm also leaves the impression that a person's reference to a thing that exists outside himself and a person's reference to a thing that does not exist are both forms of objective reference, i.e., they both get a person outside the circle of his own ideas. Finally, when Chisholm speaks of a person referring to a thing, whether existent or nonexistent, what does he mean by the term 'thing'? Chisholm implies that you and I are things, and he also equates a person's getting outside the circle of his own ideas and a person's referring to a thing outside himself. This strongly suggests that on Chisholm's use of the term 'thing', an ens rationis, e.g., an idea or an abstract entity, is not a thing. So it seems that both in his discussion of thoughts about existent things and in his treatment of thoughts about nonexistent things Chisholm is using the term 'thing' in the sense of an individual substance, i.e., a physical object or person, and not in the sense of any entity or object of thought whatsoever. This understanding is also supported by a footnote in which Chisholm quotes the following passage from Brentano in which Brentano distinguishes between things and other sorts of objects of intentional states.

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, thought not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood as meaning a thing)....

Henceforth, I will use the term thing in the way I've suggested Chisholm does, viz. in the sense of an individual substance.

The upshot of the foregoing observations is this. In Chisholm's presentation of the data to which an account of objective reference should be adequate, he appears to imply that if a person thinks of an existing thing outside himself, and that person thinks of a thing that does not exist, then these two thoughts are similar in that both of them involve a singular reference to a thing other than himself. However, as I will argue below, Chisholm's final account of a person's thought about a thing that does not exist is not adequate if two such thoughts are similar




in that respect. In particular, I will argue that this final account of Chisholm's can be satisfied without anyone either referring to a specific nonexistent thing or getting outside the circle of his own ideas.

According to Chisholm's final account, if I judge that the present King of France is a King, and there does not exist only one thing which is a present King of France, then I am thinking about a thing that does not exist, viz., the present King of France. However, this is not singular reference to a specific thing that does not exist. This is because the totality of possible persons contains many possible persons, each of which could have the property of being the only persent King of France, and therefore my grasping an unexemplified property of this kind does not enable me either to distinguish one possible person from another or to single out a specific nonexistent person from among the totality of all possible persons. It appears that my thinking that the present King of France is a King involves a singular reference to what does not exist only if some version of Meinong's theory of objects is true. In his paper, Chisholm does not explicitly accept or reject such a theory. According to theories of this type, if I judge that the present King of France is a King, then I directly refer to an object that does not exist, viz., the object, the present King of France. And given a theory of this kind, it seems that my reference to this object is singular reference. However, note that such a Meinongian object is certainly not a thing. In the first place, a Meinongian object is incomplete or indeterminate. This is, for certain quite definite properties the object includes neither these properties nor their complements. For example, whereas the object, the present King of France, is a King (and hence this object includes Kingship), this object is neither 6 feet tall nor not six feet tall (and therefore this object includes neither being six feet tall nor not being six feet tall). Furthermore, a Meinongian object may include logically incompatible properties, for example, the object, the round square, is both round and square, and thus includes the incompatible properties of roundness and squareness. Since a thing cannot be incomplete or include logically incompatible properties, Meinongian objects like the present King of France are not things. Moreover, a Meinongian object is surely a sort of ens rationis, an entity with which a person can have direct intellectual acquaintance. Thus, to refer to such an object is not to get outside the circle of one's own ideas.




It follows from the foregoing arguments that if a person's thinking about a thing that does not exist is a kind of singular reference to such a thing (as Chisholm appears to imply), then Chisholm's final account of a person's thoughts about things that do not exist is not adequate. However, suppose for the sake of argument that a person's thinking about a thing that does not exist is not a kind of singular reference to a nonexistent thing, and nothing like Meinong's theory of objects is true. In that case, it appears that if a person thinks about what does not exist, then his thought is totally devoid of any element of singular reference to what does not exist. Such a conclusion at least seems to be at odds with what Chisholm says in his paper.

So, we are faced with at least two questions. The first question involves something of a dilemma. If you think that the present King of France is a King, then do you think of (in the sense of make a singular reference to) what does not exist, i.e., the present King of France? If the answer is yes, then this appears to lead to Meinongianism. But suppose the answer is no. In that event, it is unclear in what sense you are thinking of what does not exist. This seems to call into question the claim that you are thinking of what does not exist. The view that a person cannot think about or refer to what does not exist has been held by numerous philosophers down through the ages, apparently beginning with Parmenides, and many contemporary philosophers have argued for this view. Our second question is this. Can a person make an objective and singular reference to a specific nonexistent thing? I will conclude my remarks with a brief argument which implies that the answer to this question is yes, and hence that those in the Parmenidean tradition are mistaken. In particular, it seems that a person can refer to a definite nonexistent possible thing if he can produce a definite description which specifies a condition C such that: (i) in some possible world there exists an individual i which doesn't exist in the actual world and which satisfies C in every possible world in which it exists, and (ii) for any possible worlds W,, and W2, if in WE there exists an object O, satisfyingC, and in W2 there exists an object 02 satisfying C, then 0, =

02. Given some very plausible forms of mereological essentialism, there are examples of descriptions that specify such a condition C For instance, there is type of material thing which may be called a strict mereological assembly. A material thing of this kind is composed of the




same parts joined together in every possible world in which it exists, and in no possible world is there a material object of the same type which is both diverse from it and composed of the same parts joined together as it. Consequently, a description of the form 'the strict mereological assembly composed of a and b joined in way R' specifies a condition C of the aforementioned sort, if we replace 'a' and 'b' with names of existing strict mereological assemblies which are never attached to one another in the way specified, but could be. Hence, it seems that a person can utilize such a description to refer to a specific nonexistent possible material thing. There are similar cases, based on another parallel form of mereological essentialism having to do with a thing's original composition. For example, you can apparently think of or refer to a specific nonexistent possible table by judging that the table whose original composition consists in that slab and that block joined in such and such a spatial configuration would be very heavy provided that the slab and block in question exist, are never attached to one another, but could be attached to one another in the indicated spatial configuration to create a table. Hence, in conclusion, if Chisholm's claim that a person can direct his thought upon a thing that does not exist is understood in terms of a person's making a singular reference to such a thing, then this claim seems to be correct.

NOTES

I Roderick Chisholm, "Intentionality: How We Refer To Things", Symposium on Thought and Reference, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, April 11, 1987. 2 Ibid.

I Ibid.

Department of Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412, U.S.A.



symposium on thought and reference || reference, intentionality, and nonexistent entities

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