One More Reason Why Russellian Descriptivism is False

Russellian descriptivism about proper names can be summarized rather roughly in terms of the following four theses. For any object O, where 'O' is a proper name of O:

(1) There is a unique definite description D associated with the term 'O'.
(2) The speaker believes that D is uniquely true of O.
(3) D uniquely picks out O.
(4) The proposition expressed by "If O exists, then O is D" is knowable by the speaker a priori.

So, very roughly, in the case of Barack Obama one might associate with this name the definite description 'the president of the United States from 2008 to 2016' and believe that this picks out Barack Obama uniquely; this is how one refers to Barack Obama, by means of the associated description.

There are many excellent reasons to believe a theory like this is false. Kripke, Donnellan, and others have pretty much put it to rest. But one more reason is that it entails another false thesis known as the identity of indiscernibles (or at least a somewhat modified and equally false version of this thesis). The identity of indiscernibles basically states that if two things share all the same features then they are the same object. [On the falsity of this thesis, check out Max Black's famous paper.]

The basic line of reasoning which leads me to say descriptivism of the described sort entails this principle is, informally, as follows (taking Barack Obama again as our example): By clause (3), 'the president of the United States from 2008 to 2016' uniquely picks out Obama; and by Russell's analysis of definite descriptions it follows from this that anything having the feature *being the president of the United States from 2008 to 2016* will be Barack Obama. Now, suppose two things x and y both have all the same features, and x has this feature. Then so does y. But since anything which has this feature is Obama, y is Obama. We can apply similar reasoning in any other case, since by (3) everything will have a feature P which uniquely picks it out, so if two things x and y have the same features then both of them will have P, and thus both will be identical to x.

There are two qualifications to be made. First, there is a sense in which the identity of indiscernibles can be trivially true. If we include among the features of a thing x the property *being identical to x* then it is obviously and trivially true that two things having all the same features will be identical. Even excluding features such as these the argument still goes through though, since presumably on a descriptivist theory the relevant description for, say, Barack Obama is not going to be 'the thing which has the feature of being Barack Obama'. Descriptivist theories aim to not be blatantly circular.

Second, the descriptivist might say that his thesis only applies to those referents which are nameable, whereas the identity of indiscernibles applies to all things regardless as to whether they can have names applied to them. However, the identity of indiscernibles is still false even when restricted to nameable things. You can give names to Max Black's two spheres and this provides a counter-example to the restricted form of the identity of indiscernibles.

For those not satisfied with my rather informal "proof" I've made a more formalized proof (with cheap symbols and lines, since OpenOffice does not appear to have any quantifiers). It should be pretty easy to interpret but if not please tell me. The first premise says for all x, if x is nameable, then there is a feature P such that for all y, if y is P then y = x, and x is P. The conclusion states that for any two nameable objects x and y, the identity of indiscernibles holds. Hence, if I have made no mistakes, descriptivism entails a restricted but still false identity of indiscernibles.

Reply to William Lane Craig on Divine Simplicity

Dr. William Lane Craig has made a response to my previous post where I argued that his own view of divine sovereignty entails the truth of divine simplicity. Now, Craig is actually correct about one thing: My argument does not by itself entail that God is identical to all his parts. This only follows from the conclusion of my argument if you grant that God really has a will, intellect, etc. Craig does not grant this, since he doesn't think talk about things having parts is metaphysically substantive.

There are a lot of things to say about Craig's response here. Maybe the first is to simply note that he is denying that anything really, in the metaphysically deepest sense, has any parts. This is surely an unacceptable conclusion. Personally I would think it's better to simply deny God has any parts rather than to deny anything has parts. Absent this option, if I didn't believe in divine simplicity I would even modify my account of divine sovereignty just to save parthood. For otherwise I honestly don't know how Craig explains kidneys, brains, legs and their relations to the people who have them. This is just a datum of experience, that there are at least some parts.

Craig tries to use an argument by Peter van Inwagen to back up his thesis. However, the problem is that Van Inwagen's argument only demonstrates the falsity of the doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts, which is the idea that any region of a body can be taken to be a proper part. His argument can only go through if we are dealing with 'parts' like Dottie* which are constituted by enough matter in such a form that a person can survive by becoming identical to them. It's not obvious though that I could ever become identical to, say, my heart. So his argument would not go through with those sorts of proper parts.

Now, I'm inclined to reject the doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts anyway so I'm happy to accept the soundness of the argument. But it just doesn't demonstrate that there are no proper parts. And if it did entail that, then--like Peter Geach did with Tibbles the Cat--I would just take the argument to establish the relativity of identity rather than the complete lack of proper parthood. More importantly, it's not even obviously sound. We might just deny the premise that Dottie becomes identical to Dottie*, since Dottie seems to be an animal (or a soul) and Dottie* seems to be a 'lump'. In virtue of their falling under different sortals these two objects have different identity conditions associated with them, and thus by Leibniz's law they are non-identical. They are merely constituted by the same matter.

There's also something to be said about Craig's underlying Carnapian sympathies. There is intense debate about taking this sort of view about language and metaphysical methodology (cf. the Chalmers volume on metametaphysics), and suffice it to say for now that I'm not too sympathetic. I will criticize this neo-Carnapian line of thought later, but this post should be enough to see why Craig's response is inadequate.

William Lane Craig Responds

...to my post on divine simplicity, here.

Minimal Divine Simplicity and the Trinity

Just a note: I will probably be laying kind of low for a while, since I am now moved in at my new school and taking summer courses. I will be kind of busy for the next two months, so please do not be offended if I don't reply to comments quickly on this blog. I will get back to you eventually. Anyway, enjoy the post!

For Catholics, belief in the doctrine of God's simplicity is dogmatically defined to be held by all the faithful just as much as the doctrine of the Trinity (see the Fourth Lateran Council as well as Vatican I). Does the official dogma of divine simplicity contradict the revealed truth about the Holy Trinity? Not necessarily, at least on a certain construal of divine simplicity. Call this the "minimal doctrine of divine simplicity":

(MDS) God has no proper parts, either metaphysical or physical.

This means that God possesses of course no physical parts, but also no properties, ontological constituents, tropes, accidents, immanent universals, distinct intellectual parts (e.g. distinct will and intellect), etc.

Is this what the Church intends to define when it says God is simple? Arguably so. The definition of simplicity must be strong enough to rule out theistic personalist views of God, for this is not found in the teaching of the Fathers and is arguably inconsistent with the other divine attributes which are mentioned in connection with simplicity in these Councils (e.g. God's being immutable, incomprehensible, infinite in will). Hence, it must mean more than that God is simply non-physical; God isn't just simple in the sense that an angel is. On the other hand it must be weaker than simply identifying God's essence with his existence. For if the Church meant to endorse dogmatically the Thomistic teaching on simplicity, this would make anyone who did not hold to this view in substance to be heretical; hence, the teachings of the Cappadocian Fathers as well as St. Maximus the Confessor, and likely even Bl. Duns Scotus, would be heresy. This is why MDS seems to be a likely candidate for the minimal required belief in divine simplicity for orthodoxy.

But given MDS, this is a truth about the Trinity:

(TR) It is not the case that the persons of the Trinity are proper parts, either metaphysical or physical.

For the persons of the Trinity all share fully in the divine essence; the Father is fully God, just as the Son is fully God, just as the Holy Spirit is fully God. To suppose the persons are proper parts of God would mean there is something G which is fully God, and that each person of the Trinity does not fully share in the essence of G (since, after all, G essentially has as proper parts each of the persons of the Trinity, whereas the same does not hold for each of the individual persons). Hence, the persons of the Trinity cannot be understood to be proper parts of God in any sense; hence, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity cannot contradict the minimal doctrine of divine simplicity.

This seems to show that the Church's teaching here is consistent; it is a separate matter whether Aquinas's teaching which includes the doctrine that God's essence = his existence, as well as that God is pure actuality, can be made consistent with the Trinity.

Is Promise-Breaking Lying?

Eric brought this question up to me. I tend to think promise-breaking is lying. Here's the form a promise to someone takes: "I promise that I will do x." In effect, this is a guarantee that you will do x. And since 'I will do x' is equivalent to 'it is true I will do x', it follows 'I promise that I will do x' is equivalent to 'I promise that it is true I will do x'. To intentionally break a promise then is a form of lying; for you are guaranteeing something is true when you know it is not. In fact it may be an even worse form of lying, since you are not only saying intentionally what is false, but by promising it to the other person you are guaranteeing to someone that it is true. This is probably why people are even more disappointed when someone breaks a promise than when they tell a lie without a guarantee of its truth.

Of course, unintentionally, something may hinder you from fulfilling your promise. But then you are not morally culpable for failing to fulfill the promise. This is just a more specific case of telling someone something you believe to be true but, through no fault of your own, you don't know the details and it actually turns out to be false. When you promise something to someone you don't know that, while you are on your way to fulfill your promise, a large set of goons determined to stop people from fulfilling promises will pop up out of the corner. So it's not your fault for not being able to fulfill the promise.

These sorts of cases show that lying should be construed more subtly as intentionally telling a false-hood. And promise-breaking should be construed as intentionally failing to fulfill a promise. With this in mind it is plausible to think of promise-breaking as a more specific form of lying.

William Lane Craig on God and Analogy

William Lane Craig, as with most contemporary analytic philosophers of religion, objects to the classical Thomistic idea that God cannot be said to be a being in the sense that we can. I aim to argue that at least some of his claims here are unreasonable.

Craig objects: "One of the aspects of Thomas Aquinas’ thought that I find most disturbing is his claim that we can speak of God only in analogical terms. Without univocity of meaning, we are left with agnosticism about the nature of God, able to say only what God is not, not what He is."

This does not follow in the slightest; in fact, I wonder if Craig actually understands what analogy is, since it is one of the main points of Aquinas's theory of analogy to avoid this problem. Aquinas sought to show, in contrast to Maimonides, that though we can't predicate attributes of God in the same sense as us we can still speak meaningfully and make positive predications about him. Craig fails utterly to show how from the semantic analogy of the term 'being' we are left only with negative theology.

Next, Craig says: "When in discussions with atheists I affirm, 'God exists' and they reply, 'God does not exist,' we may need to be sure that we mean the same thing by 'God,' but there is no equivocation on the meaning of 'exists.'"

I guess what Craig is trying to say here is something like this: If the word 'exists' is analogical, then when I affirm God exists and when atheists affirm God does not exist, we are both equivocating past each other. But this is a genuine ontological dispute and so there is no equivocation; hence, 'exists' is not analogical. The problem is that the main premise is simply not true; if analogy is true, then we affirm that God exists in one sense, and the atheist simply denies that God exists in any sense, including the one I am predicating of God.

In the next paragraph, Craig says this: "The problem you pose brings us to the heart of my current work on divine aseity. What makes God more than just one being among many is precisely His aseity: God alone is self-existent; everything else exists contingently. Only God exists of Himself (a se); everything else exists through another (ab alio). That makes God the source of being for everything apart from Himself."

Now, I really like this, and I agree with this completely. The only problem is that Craig himself doesn't; for if what Craig says is literally true then divine simplicity is true, from which it is a small step to the doctrine that talk about God is analogous. Here's why:

(1) Whatever is non-identical to God is created by God. [conceded by Craig]
(2) If God has metaphysical proper parts ('parts' hereafter), then at least one of these parts is not created by God. [prem]
(3) Either God has parts or he doesn't. [LEM]
(4) Suppose he does have parts. [assp]
Then
(5) All of God's parts are created by God. [by 1]
But
(6) One of God's parts is not created by God [by 2,4]
This is a contradiction. Hence, we must reject our assumption. Hence:
(7) God has no parts.

So by 'metaphysical proper parts' here I mean things like ontological constituents, such as a property-instance (or trope or accident or whatever). (1) is just Craig's own thoughts on the matter, and (2) is true because clearly God doesn't create his essential properties; he depends on those for his existence, since if they didn't exist then neither would he. The rest follows by the meanings of the terms and the rules of logic.

Craig says that he considers God to be a substance, presumably in the same manner we are: "Not a physical substance, of course, but a spiritual substance like a mind."

However, the case is even more clear if Craig thinks God's mind and will are distinct; for if he does, granting Craig's doctrine of aseity, then from (1) it follows God's will must be created by God. But it is absurd to suppose God creates his own will; after all, he must have a will to do that! So, either Craig's doctrine of aseity is false (which I agree with Craig it isn't) or God is not distinct from his will (which I think is right, but is really only intelligible given divine simplicity).

Craig thinks getting rid of Platonism will solve the problems concerning God's aseity; but it doesn't, since even if there are no abstract properties in us there are clearly ontological constituents (my brownness, my height, my shape, etc.). Even taking 'parts' in this sense, I think the above argument shows that if he wants to hold on to the strong doctrine of aseity set out in the quote above he needs to get rid of the idea that God has any parts at all. And if God has no parts in the metaphysical sense then it can be shown speech about God is analogical; for in our case, to say I am good is to say the quality of goodness inheres in me as an accident (or is exemplified as a property, or inheres as a trope or whatever). But since God has no parts in any of these senses, to say God is good cannot be to say this about him. And the same with any of the divine attributes. Thus our terms must be said analogically of God.

[Edit: Craig's reply here. My reply here.]

Is 'Existence' Univocal Because 'All' Is Univocal?

In this post, Bill Vallicella presents another argument by Peter van Inwagen for the univocity of existence and questions it (he posted and refuted the first argument here). I think Vallicella has a point. Still, I might grant that the Quinean like Van Inwagen can translate a singular existential statement so as to have the same form as a general existential statement and argue the conclusion still does not follow. Quine, in his famous paper "On What There Is," proposes that we treat for instance the relation '__ = Pegasus' as a single-place predicate '=Pegasus'; one can call this 'pegasizing' or formally 'P'. Then 'Pegasus exists' will just be 'something pegasizes', which will just be translated to, '(Ex)(Px)'. Even ignoring the problematic aspects here I would pose a different objection. I would accuse Van Inwagen's argument of being a 'non sequitur'. Vallicella states the argument thus:

(1) 'Every' is univocal.

(2) 'Exist(s)' and 'every' are interdefinable: 'Fs exist' is equivalent to 'It is not the case that everything is not an F.'

Therefore

(3) 'Exist(s)' is univocal.

Clearly, as is, this argument is not valid. To make it valid we need some further premise. I'm not sure what sort of plausible premise Van Inwagen is using to get to his conclusion, but maybe it is something like

(2.5) If two terms are interdefinable then each of the terms' uses share the same sense relation.

(Just a clarificatory point: Sense relations are things like 'univocity' or 'equivocity', and Van Inwagen thinks that all the uses of 'exists' are univocal.) How are we to understand 'interdefinable' here? Surely not as meaning that for each 'exists' statement there is a semantically identical 'every' statement, i.e. one with the exact same meaning, for that would be utterly question-begging. We must construe it then as something like 'for each 'exists' statement there is a logically equivalent 'every' statement'. The problem is that (2.5) is not obviously true on this interpretation. I'll explain.

I think we can admit that 'some' and 'every' are univocal, that these two are interdefinable in the sense that logically equivalent statements can be expressed in terms of each, but still say that 'some' doesn't fully capture the meaning of 'exists', and thus neither does 'every'. Of course, every 'some' statement is logically equivalent to another 'there exists' statement, but that does not imply they are semantically identical.

On the idea that 'exists' is analogical, the natural language quantifier 'there exists' has many senses, but all beings can be said to exist in one of those senses; thus the range of this quantifier includes all beings (regardless as to which sense of 'being' can be said of them). And since there are no non-existent beings, the range of the quantifier 'some' is over all beings. So the two quantifiers range over the same domain of discourse; and since for any 'some' statement there is a logically equivalent 'there exists' statement, it follows that we can translate logically equivalent statements involving either of them with the same symbol in predicate-logic, '(Ex)'. This is also why they are each logically equivalent to at least one 'all' statement. But it simply doesn't follow that they all share the same sense relation (univocal, equivocal, etc.). It is true that our 'some' quantifier ranges over only and all beings, but it ranges over them regardless as to which of the many analogous senses of 'being' can be said of them. So it's consistent with both 'some' and 'all' being univocal that 'being' or 'exists' are not.