Montreal & Kingston,
Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. Pp. xv + 348.
(cloth: ISBN 0-7735-2463-0); (paper: ISBN 0-7735-2464-9).
Jacquette aims to tell it like it is: being qua being first, the results then applied to a scientifically acceptable vision of our world. He thinks we cannot afford to ignore the preliminary and basic enquiry many have considered too obscure or unintelligible. How can we argue whether sets or quarks or universals exist without a clear grasp of what it means for anything to exist?
Claiming that an analysis of being would be fruitless if it appealed to notions of reality or actuality, equally in need of explanation, question-begging if it merely catalogued kinds or categories of beings, and hopeless if it sought more familiar notions, Jacquette suggests that we may yet make progress by seeing how the questions of why anything exists and why only one contingent world does so exist can be answered; the notions required to solve these problems will elucidate being itself. The solution resides in ‘the only place where it could possibly be found — in logic, the only philosophical study more basic than ontology’ (2).
Chapter 1 distinguishes being in the existence sense (extensional) from being in the predication sense (intensional): this rose is/is red. To avoid circularity, we must explain the existence sense in terms of the predicational. The predication sense is intensional since he allows that we need not assume an object actually exists in order for a predicate to apply to it.
Having set the stage, and as befits a work belonging to a series that surveys debates ‘across all approaches to the discipline’, Jacquette turns to consider Heidegger. The burden of these twenty-odd pages is that there is a fatal circularity in Heidegger’s account of being — far from being the promised pure ontology, it is an exercise in applied ontology, the deliverances of ‘a particular conscious animal’s experience of being in the world’ (22). Jacquette examines and rejects Heidegger’s own reflections on the ‘hermeneutic circle’ and its harmlessness for his project.
Rather than phenomenology, Jacquette turns to ‘logic, and the formal methods and philosophical interpretation of pure classical logic’ (41) as a guide to pure ontology. Predication is fundamental to logic; nothing true or false can be thought without predicating something of something. Jacquette eventually tells us that existence is a matter of being maximally predicationally complete and consistent. If any putative entity lacks just one logically possible property or property complement then it does not exist. It is striking, however, that in giving an example (62) of a non-existent incomplete object, the golden city of Eldorado, Jacquette’s argument appeals only to our ignorance of whether a monkey was ever its king. His position requires that there be no answer.
Jacquette requires that maximal consistency is not merely necessary but sufficient for actual existence. But why hold that objects in non-actual logically possible worlds must be incomplete? I think Jacquettte’s reply is that this gives us neat answers to the fundamental questions of ontology; I cannot find a positive argument for the thesis, other than the irrelevant appeal to our ignorance (apparently repeated in note 18, p. 289, where we are told we cannot ‘comprehend’ all the ramifications of supposing just one extra particle in the universe, even if it is causally isolated).
Since logic guarantees that there is a maximally consistent combination of properties with objects then there must be something rather than nothing. By page 70 Jacquette recognizes that he is breaking with the standard equation of ‘possible worlds’ with maximally consistent sets of propositions. His justification for rejecting the conventional wisdom is that this equation is philosophically disastrous: a Platonist account of proposition sets implies the actual existence of all possible worlds. If we substitute the idea of worlds being described by sets of propositions for their being constituted, how do we characterise the difference between the one actual world and all the rest? On Jacquette’s view, ‘modal logic does not care about the question of being’ (74); it simply helps itself to some conventions and unexplained stipulations that one world is specially ‘designated’ as the actual one.
Jacquette tells us modal logic ought to accept that its possible worlds are sub-maximal because: (1) Kripkean stipulation of trans-world identities is a human process that cannot capture a maximal property set (but why should this incapacity hurt only for non-actual worlds?). (2) It doesn’t need maximal sets but can get by with sub-maximal sets construed as ‘world-like structures’ (I leave it to the modal logicians to determine whether this is true). (3) A maximal account of one world must include claims about other worlds, in particular the actual world. Whatever the rules by which modal logicians wish to play, it seems to me that Jacquette’s argument here can only conclude that one world is significantly different from the rest if it has surreptitiously assumed that from the start — one suspicious move is the claim in the second horn of his trilemma that a statement ‘X does not exist (in w@)’ makes a description of wi false if the set contains ‘X exists (in wi)’. ‘The Eiffel Tower does not exist in Washington’ hardly impugns a description of Paris that includes ‘The Eiffel Tower exists in Paris’ (82-3). A little later (87) he admits that his own existence is not endangered by the incompleteness of his description relative to Pegasus, since predicational completeness must be defined relative to a world.
Jacquette’s reflections on the fictional status of possible worlds are attractive for one of his actualist persuasion. But it seems that actualism drives the definition of being, rather than pure logic. His third chapter proves that there is at least one actual world. Chapter four shows that there is only one (if there were more than one, their maximal completeness would require them to include the rest) and that it is contingent, reflecting the fact that whatever makes up the world could have been differently arranged. Chapter five reconsiders the moves in the context of formal logic.
The second half of the book applies the approach: there are chapters on Quine and ontological commitment; appearance, reality, substance and transcendence; physical entities, causation, and natural laws; abstract entities; mind; god; and finally the ontology of culture. Unlike the combinatorial account of being, these enquiries are seen as a continuing work in progress. Each of these short discussions, and the long-winded earlier chapters, are accompanied by extensive references to the literature.
E.P. Brandon
(Office of the Board for Non-Campus Countries and Distance Education)
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados