October 21, 2009Sellars Week 8 PSIM PlanPreliminaries:1. From last week, on nominalism:a) Nominalization is the genus within which I suggested we think about nominalism.b) Abstraction is a way of nominalizing noun phrases: introducing new termson the basis of old ones.c) So is set theory, which uses the epsilon operator to do so.d) Universals are the result of nominalizing adjectival predicates.e) Kinds are the result of nominalizing sortal predicates (=common nouns).f) Events are the result of nominalizing verbal predicates.g) Alongside abstraction and set theory, forming mereological sums is another way of nominalizing noun phrases. 2.a) The expressive point of nominalization, I claim, is to make available the whole complex apparatus of anaphora and (so) quantificational generalization. b) This issue ought to be orthogonal to concern about existence—which I claim does not evidently make sense in the cross-categorial cases. Existence claims, I am shaping up to claim, only make sense when we give them sense. We do that by supplying canonical designators for the class. But it is a very different idea that there is some transcategorial sense of ‘exists’. c) If it is not just a homonym with the intracategorial case, then one possibility is that there is a set of overarching canonical designators. Perhaps they are to be supplied by a naturalistic ontological claim. d) Another possibility is that the concept is a patchwork of special cases, each of which has the same structure, but with different content. But this is something that must be made out. We must not assume that we understand these questions transcategorially just because we often do intracategorially. e) So one point here is that we should not assume that there is any direct or general route from i) seeing that the use of one class of expressions is algorithmically elaboratable from the use of another by some process of nominalization to ii) conclusions about the existence of something referredto by the nominalizing locutions. Example: numerals have both adjectival uses (“three apples”) and nominal uses (e.g. the categorizing “the number three”). Presumably, the adjectival use is primary (for instance, in counting) in some Wittgensteinian order of development/acquisition/extension. But we should not conclude from thatfact, supposing it to be a fact, and from the fact (same proviso) that we can1elaborate the ability to use numerals adjectivally into the ability to use their nominalizations, that the number-nominalizations do not refer to numbers, that is, that “numbers don’t exist.” (Here my “The Significance of Complex Numbers for Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics” concludes with some relevant wisdom.) f) I ought to think (as I have not done) about the larger expressive function served by the distinctive kind of substitutional commitments that involve canonical designators. Why do we have this sort of locution at all? What would we lose if we decided that no such claims are to be admitted into our idiom? What do we get for admitting them? How do these considerations (whatever they are) apply to new vocabularies or regions ofdiscourse?g) One piece of the puzzle that needs to be assembled in addressing the question in (f), it seems to me, is that canonical designators in the three paradigmatic cases (corresponding to physical, numerical, fictional existence) define search spaces with systematic addresses, or at least locating procedures. A commitment to the non-existence of what is referred to by some term (tokening) is a commitment to the denial of all (or the conjunction of) the identities with (an anaphoric dependent of) that term on one side and any locally canonical designator (‘locally’ to indicatethe kind of existence in question) on the other. Similarly, an existential commitment w/res to that term is a commitment to the disjunction of thoseidentities. Alternatively, a non-existence claim is the claim that no search through the address space of CDs will yield success, and the existence claim is the claim that some such search will terminate successfully. So a more specific form of the question in (f) is: why is it important that we be able to make claims with these shapes? This question interacts with and depends upon a view about how to characterize canonical designators. What would show that we had either chosen such a set badly (incorrectly?), or that we were wrong to associate any set of CDs with some vocabulary? Possible example: a systematic set of CDs for Christianheresies (perhaps purporting to botanize all the ways belief could go wrong in the area).h) So the problem in (f) is two-fold: simultaneously to specify i) the functional role characteristic of CDs; and ii) the expressive role played by the subsitutionally restricted kind of particular and universal quantificationinvolved in existence and nonexistence claims. 3. [A side point:] Re: mereology. Putnam is right that it is just wrong—indeed, a howler—to identify me with the mereological sum of the particles that compose me (that I comprise). That mereological sum has existed as long as all the particles did. Rearranging them did not change it. This argument is distinct from and independent of the one (which Putnam also makes) that points out that I would still exist if I had not had the second slice of lamb last night, but the constellation (not mereological sum) of particles that now composes me would not.2Treatment of PSIM:It is in four principal parts: I. Surface: a) Two images: MI, SI; b) Two kinds of philosophy: Perennial , Modern; c) Parity of images vs. Primacy of SIII. Parity vs. Primacy: The ProblemIII. Ontology vs. Ideology; Conjectured Response to the Problem of Parity vs. Primacy: SI is primary w/res to ontology, two images are in parity w/res to ideology.IV. Criticism of the Conjectured Response, based on three commitments: a) impossibility of picking out wholly non-modal, non-dispositional vocabulary from vocabulary that implicitly involves an admixture of modality [Compare: result of substituting ‘normative’ for ‘modal’ in this claim.]; b) Absolutism about identity; c) Trans-sortal Modal Separability Argument. Conclusion: No ontology without ideology.4. Surface treatment of PSIM:a) Two images;i. Manifest Image (MI): Two forms of MI: original and eventual, with the transition being a process of depersonalizing, Entzaüberung, disenchantment—but WS’s