Elementary
Tom Graham considers a theory of why some things do not exist
That some things – unicorns, the largest number, Sherlock Holmes – do not exist seems so obvious, and is so frequently taken for granted in our everyday discourse, that denying it would be ridiculous in any ordinary context. And so it may come as some surprise that since the beginning of the twentieth century this view has been among the least popular and most berated in anglophone philosophy. Many even claim that the position, so widely held by non-philosophers, is unintelligible, and the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle even went so far as to say that if it were not a dead view in philosophy, nothing was. To revive the view that some things don’t exist (known these days as “noneism”) and situate it as a plausible contender in current debates on existence is the aim of Graham Priest’s formidable 2005 book Towards Non-Being, which has now appeared in a significantly expanded second edition.
A fundamental motivation for the dominant view is that to lack existence, it seems, is to be nothing at all. Things, by contrast, are not “nothing” – they are things! If so, then “being a thing” and “existing” go hand in hand, and there cannot be “things” that do not exist. Adherents of this view thus read the noneist’s claim “some things don’t exist” as entailing the self-refuting “some things are not things” and therefore to be self-contradictory. The dominant “Quinean” approach to existence (named after the influential American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine) holds this position. For Quineans, all things exist – that’s what it is to be a thing. But this does not mean that, for example, Sherlock Holmes exists. Rather, they believe that since Sherlock isn’t any kind of thing at all, the phrase “all things” in “all things exist” does not cover him. There is simply no “him” for it to cover.
Matters are complicated for Quineans, however, by at least two aspects of our everyday discourse. Firstly, consider that many things appear to be true of supposed non-existents. It is apparently true, for example, that Sherlock Holmes is a popular fictional detective. And yet how can this be true of Sherlock, if there is in reality no Sherlock for it to be true of? Secondly, many philosophers (beginning with Plato) have supposed that that we can – among other things – think, talk, dream, argue and make television series about supposed nonexistents (philosophers use the word “intentionality” for this mysterious quality of “aboutness”). They have argued that for this reason non-existents must exist in some sense – otherwise how could we do all these different things to them? Quineans maintain that any features of our discourse that appear to commit us to the existence of non-existent things can be reconstructed in such a way as to make that commitment disappear. Unfortunately, however, no satisfactory general account along these lines has so far been delivered, despite the fact that the Quinean orthodoxy has now been in place for over fifty years.
The principal achievement of Towards Non-Being is that it provides a detailed, rigorous and thoroughgoing theory of non-existent objects capable of neatly accounting for a wide (and possibly exhaustive) range of phenomena concerning the non-existent. Truths about all kinds of non-existent things, from fictional ones such as Sherlock to impossible ones such as round squares, are elegantly covered by the theory’s powerful logical framework in a manner that supersedes the Quinean approach in both its scope and uniformity. The theory also affords a compelling and seemingly quite general account of the puzzling notion of intentionality, which is more than can be said for its Quinean counterpart. Far from merely rescuing noneism from the grave, then, the versatility and apparent completeness of Priest’s theory render it one of the most fully worked out accounts of the non-existent there is, and a force to be reckoned with by the Quinean orthodoxy.
The noneism of Towards Non-Being builds on the idea that though many things do not exist, some of them could have existed. Thus, though Conan Doyle’s stories are fiction, if the world had been different they might have been true and Sherlock would have existed. According to the theory, non-existent things such as Sherlock are therefore best thought of as unactualized possible objects. Priest uses the now-standard logical framework of “possible world semantics”, which posits a distinct possible world for each way the world could have been, to explain his view. In some of these worlds Sherlock exists, whereas in others (like this one) he does not. Since Sherlock does not exist in this world, Priest’s theory does not allow that he has any existence-entailing properties (like “being a detective”) here. But the theory does allow us to explain why it seems truer to say that Sherlock is a detective than to say that he is a fishmonger, for example. According to noneism this is because, in those possible worlds that realize the way that Conan Doyle’s stories represent the world as being, Sherlock is a detective (and not a fishmonger). Furthermore, though non-existents cannot have any properties in this world that entail existence, Priest’s noneism does allow that they can have certain “non-existence entailing” properties here, among which are intentional ones like “being thought about”. According to the theory, what we are doing when we think about Sherlock, for instance, is thinking about an object that exists in other possible worlds.
That Priest achieved his initial goal for Towards Non-Being, to reposition noneism as a key player within the philosophy of existence, is borne out by the extensive discussion that has followed its original publication thirteen years ago. This second edition is principally concerned with addressing these recent criticisms. In almost every case, Priest’s artful discussion leaves one with the clear sense that noneism is capable of overcoming the problem at hand, and during the course of the book many such problems are seemingly conclusively, and often ingeniously, laid to rest.
Perhaps the most recurrent criticism of the first edition is its treatment of fictional objects. As we saw, noneism evaluates certain claims about fictional objects by considering the ways those objects are in the possible worlds that realize the stories that characterize them. Thus, in evaluating certain claims about Sherlock, we look to the worlds that realize Conan Doyle’s stories, and assess whether those claims are true of Sherlock in those worlds. However, consider that there are seemingly possible worlds that realize the Holmes stories in which e.g. Benjamin Disraeli was the one to fill the shoes of Sherlock (that is, in which Disraeli became a detective, lived at 221b Baker Street, etc.), and yet others in which, say, William Gladstone did. Indeed, there would even seem to be possible worlds that realize the Holmes stories in which I play the role of Holmes, and still others in which you do. And yet we cannot all be Sherlock Holmes.
Priest’s response to this problem is to say that when Doyle first imagined the character of Sherlock his mind pinpointed a specific non-existent object, which he then named “Sherlock Holmes”. For this reason, possible worlds in which Disraeli, Gladstone, you or I play the role of Sherlock are not in fact worlds that realize the Holmes stories, precisely because theSherlock (the object that Doyle thought of when he first imagined the character) is not the one doing the detective work in those worlds. Though one may take further issue with how exactly this mental pinpointing is supposed to work, the initial familiar objection is satisfactorily overcome by Priest’s response.
Priest’s responses to this and a range of other recent objections to noneism make this new edition of Towards Non-Beingessential reading for any philosopher concerned with the philosophy of existence. Though parts of the book are necessarily quite technical, non-specialists will also gain a clear understanding of the central themes via Priest’s informal exposition of each chapter’s key ideas. In addition, Towards Non-Being provides a fascinating account of the historical roots of noneism and a reappraisal of the arguments that led to its decline during the twentieth century. Of par-ticular importance is Priest’s re-examination of Quine’s seminal paper “On What There Is” (1948), which is widely considered to contain the most devastating attack on early forms of noneism. Priest persuasively argues that Quine’s accomplishments here are largely rhetorical and that whatever substantial arguments the paper contains are very thin. Overall, Towards Non-Being’s breadth, scope and detail undoubtedly make it a key text in the contemporary philosophy of existence.
This said, there is one central, lingering concern that I suspect will continue to keep noneism from toppling the Quinean orthodoxy. Early noneist theories were criticized on the basis that in addition to “existence”, they posited some lesser, spurious existential category of “being” or “subsistence” which non-existent objects possess, in order to account for the facts that they can be the objects of intentional activities, and that there can be truths about them. On such views, Sherlock does not exist, but there is some lesser sense in which he “is”, in virtue of being characterized as existing in certain ways. This puzzling feature of early noneism is part of what led to its original demise.
Priest’s modern version, by contrast, is adamant that non-existent things do not exist, and “are” not, in any way – they are simply nothing at all. Nonetheless, though Sherlock is “nothing” on Priest’s view, he is still an “object”, distinct from other non-existent objects – such as, for example, Zeus – which are also just “nothing”. As we have seen, these objects, which are supposed to be absolutely nothing, exist in other possible worlds, and are capable of doing a plenitude of interesting things in those worlds. That a thing can both be “absolutely nothing” and yet also be a distinct “object” capable of having all these properties is difficult to understand. The thought recurs that surely these things must have some kind of existential status, otherwise how could they, for example, be distinct from one another? If legitimate, this concern would appear to show that Priest’s theory does not yet adequately solve one of the central problems of non-existence. At the very least, it is fair to say that the noneist uses the phrase “absolutely nothing” in a very unusual way.
To Priest’s credit, important new sections of this edition do attempt to deal with the difficulty of understanding proposed “objects” that are “nothing at all”. In one section, he attempts to trace the history of the idea that the phrase “some things” carries any implication of existence, showing quite compellingly that this is a fairly recent development. But he is ultimately unsympathetic to those who say they cannot understand his idea, suggesting that such commentators are simply too steeped in Quinean dogma and need to “get their understander re-wired”. To my mind, however, the worry is an obvious one not reserved for those brought up on Quineanism. It seems plausible that our usual, everyday understanding of the terms “thing” and “nothing” is that they are contrasting and incompatible, such that a “thing that is nothing” is likely to be confusing even to a non-philosopher. For all its brilliance, then, it seems that more needs to be said on this front if Graham Priest’s theory is ever to take centre stage.
• On 23/2/18 this article was amended to correct “pivotal” to “key”
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