Plantinga believes that possible worlds exist. Indeed, I am inclined to agree. They exist in as much as the lines, planes, cubes, primes, sets, ordered pairs, real numbers, and a whole host of other mathematical notions exist for the mathematician: formally--i.e. on paper, and nowhere else. To dispel confusion Plantinga distinguishes between existence and actuality: possible worlds exist because, he says, states of affairs exist and possible worlds are nothing other than states of affairs, but the world in which we live is
actual. We are actual, but there are other possible selves which
exist in possible worlds. I do not, therefore, merely criticise necessity because I think it absurd to say that propositions and states of affairs exist (or possible worlds). Indeed they do. However, I think that the
sorts of existence at issue are different. Propositions exist in a way far different than the way a human being exists, for example, but yet we use propositions to study the world in which humans live, breathe, eat, and generally muddle through existence.
This is my criticism of propositions and states of affairs (and consequently necessity, although this becomes of less significance as the analysis goes forward). The nature of the existence of propositions is so different from the nature of the existence of the world of real people and real issues that it is a fraud (whatever that means) to use such notions to analyze the "real" world in terms of those entities.
Hence my goal is social rather than logical: the world in which we live cannot be adequately characterized by propositions or states of affairs. Indeed, contra the
early Wittgenstien, the world is not all that is the case (
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). This too is my goal in criticizing the conventional conception of truth as concieved in the West (we will get to this eventually).
I should say to the reader who is wary of my suspicions of propositions and truth that I am not just trying to make trouble--stir up the masses, so to speak. Rather, my ultimate aim is to achieve positive results--i.e. I wish to be edifying and not merely destructive. Speaking metaphorically I want to remove the factory (the mechanical notion of proposition) in order to plant a garden. Whether I will be successful, I do not know. That is for the reader to judge.
At the moment, I am far from reaching my goal: I have only begun to raise some suspicions about propositions. This will be a gradual process, perhaps not even to be completed in the space of this blog but in the real world of everyday life.
Let us continue to consider propositions. These things are spaceless, timeless entities which are either true or false (and never any other value). Yet somehow we
humans are able to grasp these entities in order to express them in language. The German who says "Der Schnee ist weiss" grasps the same entity as the Englishman who says "Snow is white." These entities are curious phenomena indeed. It would seem that to believe in them requires as much faith (if not more) as to believe in God (or gods if one prefers). Perhaps an overstatement, but surely some of the same problems arise. For example, how does an entity which exists in a realm "beyond" that of the physical world interact, or "know" about the physical world? In the case of God (or gods), of course, we may say that this is by virtue of the entity having some sort of property of omniscience or omnipresence. However, how are we to solve the issue with propositions, assuming they are not like gods or some such silly thing? How does a proposition, e.g., as the one expressed by "snow is white" know about snow, or whiteness, or the the one who utters it?
Now, it might be possible to modify the conception of proposition to give it more respect and to avoid the above problem. We might consider propositions to be not entities in some timeless, spaceless, ethereal realm, but as being like mathematical objects--i.e. they are merely the construct of a theory. (We have already indicated this idea.) In this case, for example, a proposition is defined (naively) as what is common between "snow is white" and "der Schnee ist weiss." Hence we have the following objection against my claims.
Objection. It works quite well for science (which indeed talks about the real world albeit a small part) to use mathematics to study the world of atoms, electrons, quarks, and all other things, so why is it not proper to use the notion of proposition to study the rest of the world?
Reply. The quick answer is that propositions are not adequate to discuss certain aspects of life crucial to the philosopher or generally anyone
genuinely trying to muddle through life, and not just some academic who wants to cronstruct an elegant systematic philosophy or theology in order to live comfortably as a slightly eccentric profesor. These things are inadequate to muddle through life. I have already indicated this reply before.
In particular the category of human experience is one such area of the world untouched by the theory of propositions. Why so? Consider our thought processes. For the most part our actions and beliefs are the results of internal deliberation about our experiences, past and present, not the result of "if
p, then
q;
p, therefore
q" or some such pattern of logic. This
may occur but by and large it does not in our every day deliberation.
Objection. Upon reflection, however, it may be possible to put our experience into the pattern of
modus ponens or
reductio ad absurdum or some other logical pattern. And in this way we are dealing with the propositional content of our thoughts. Hence, propositions do give us insight into our everyday experiences. For example, a person might be in a room getting ready to go out. The person looks out the window and sees that it is raining and thinks "I should bring my umbrella." Even though this does not contain the use of
modus ponens (MP) explicitly, we can, with justification model the person's thought processes thusly. When the person looked out the window, she saw that "It is raining" is a true proposition, and she knows that "If it is raining, then it is good to bring an umbrella." So by MP she concludes that "It is good to bring an umbrella."
Reply. Indeed this is how we are taught to evaluate arguments in an introductory course in philosophy or logic. However, while such a procedure is intuitively correct, it is an artificial process. The person looking out the window does not even think about any logical deduction rule such as MP when deciding to take an umbrella. It must be admitted that this is an artificial process. Of course the effects of using this artificial process are not manifest in the above simple example. The situation is very simple and we are ready to conceede that such an analysis is correct, but consider a more complex case in which a person suddenly says to himself "I believe in God" or "It is wrong for me to waste money on myself as I do." These cases surely might be analyzed in a similar fashion to the story about the umbrella, but here I think that there are virtually unlimited number of analyses and I would be hard pressed to decide which one is correct. In this case, propositions (and all their associated logic) give us no help in deciding whether or not the persons "conclusion" is "correct."
I am still unsatisfied with my responses to these objections. I shall consider it again, in my next entry, I'm tired of typing.
