referring to what does not exist

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Referring to What Does Not ExistAuthor(s): Gerald VisionSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jun., 1974), pp. 619-634Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40230473 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume III, Number 4, June 1974

Referring to What Does Not Exist

GERALD VISION, Temple University

Under the title of 'the axiom of existence', hereafter (AE), John R. Searle1 has reduced to compact dictum a view to which many philosophers subscribe:

(AE) 'Whatever is referred to must exist'.

(A less equivocal, though inelegant formulation would be: It is

necessary that whatever is referred to exist at some time or other'.) In this paper I shall offer two major arguments against adopting (AE), at least on certain assumptions. There have been a number of defenses of (AE), among them those arguing that it is fundamental to any systematic philosophy of language or logic. With the exception of

discussing some of Searle's remarks in part III of this paper I shall not comment on any of these defenses.

As readers may know, the issues are a good deal more complicated than a bald presentation of Searle's dictum may make them seem. This puts limits on what can be covered in a single paper. Thus, my arguments will proceed on assumptions which some philosophers have

rejected. The argument of part I proceeds on, at least, the following two assumptions, the first of which also underlies the argument of Part II.

(ai) Fictional characters, and other entities in fiction- e.g. Mr. Pickwick, Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus - do not exist.

(a2) The sense in which it is persons that are said to refer is not

only relevant, but central, to a satisfactory account of

reference, and must be at least accommodated by any results achieved.

Some philosophers who accept (AE) would reject (ai), maintaining that there are 'modes of being (or existence)', 'universes of discourse', 'departments of language', and so on, of which one is fictional existence, and fictional characters do exist in that mode, universe or

department.2 Those philosophers will be untouched by the criticisms

1 Speech Acts (Cambridge), 1969, p. 77. 2 E.g. D. S. Shwayder, Modes of Referring and the Problem of Universals (Berkeley,

1963), ch. 1; William P. Alston, "The Ontological Argument Revisited/' The Philos-

ophical Review, vol. LXIX (1960).

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C. Vision Referring to What Does Not Exist

of parts I and II. But a number of others who hold (AE)- including Searle, though some doubts emerge in Part III- accept (a1), and the

assumption will not effect them. But, supposing my first objection sound, it will be worth knowing that if one is to avoid the criticism one will have to take refuge in the denial of either (a1), (a2), or both, since some philosophers otherwise uncommitted on (AE), would, I suspect, want to shun one or both denials even at the cost of rejecting (AE). (The restriction to or inclusion of fiction in the assumption is unnecessary. It is chosen only to provide a plausible example of a source of 'things' readers might agree do not exist, but which nevertheless regularly enter discourse.)

The grammatical subject of forms of the verb 'to refer' is sometimes a name, pronoun or description of a language-user, at other times a phrase symbolizing an expression, a phrase or other linguistic entity. (a2) implicitly acknowledges this distinction and adds the proviso that

phenomena involving its former term are not to be neglected in our results. Once again, this assumption is accepted by many who hold (AE), including Searle. Yet others who adopt (AE), but do not explicitly subscribe to (a2), freely employ the idiom of persons referring when they discuss reference. Certain philosophers who accept (AE) would reject (a2),3 others avoid the consequence by framing their views not in terms of reference, but in terms of such related notions as denota- tion, designation or naming.4 These latter notions, though they largely coincide with reference in what they are used to account for, are more amenable to having their conditions stipulated if only because the way in which they have been regarded by philosophers since their introduction makes them more overtly technical notions, less tied to re- strictions of pre-philosophical practice than reference.

The significance of (a2) for the criticism of Part I merits some explanation. If it is borne in mind that referring as an act performed by speakers is indispensable to our analysis- where 'speakers' is our inaccurate shorthand for language-users' - there arises the prospect of

treating reference along the by-now-familiar lines of speech act theories. Indeed, for a proponent of such theories this will appear more like a demand. In particular, there seems to be no obstacle to, and much to gain from, regarding reference as a type of speech act ab- stracted from and/or performed in the course of producing or

purporting to produce a longer speech act commonly called an illo-

cutionary act. (Relevant examples include stating, affirming, reporting and hypothesizing.) The promised gain is that this yields a vantage point from which to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable proposed rules and conditions under which reference occurs. For the touchstone for the rules given for illocutionary and other types of

speech act is generally the standard communication situation in which

3 Peter Thomas Geach, Reference and Generality (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 7-9. 4 Bertrand Russell's work is largely confined to 'denoting.' See for example "On Denot-

ing" and "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" lecture VI, both in Logic and Knowl- edge, ed. by Robert C. Marsh (London, 1956); Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London, 1919), ch. 16.

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G. Vision Referring to What Does Not Exist

the utterance 'comes off without a hitch. If we set out to list the rules

underlying the illocutionary act of <£-ing, it is natural to use as our

gauge the situation where what is said contains no errors and where the speaker does all that is normally expected to convey what he intends to say to his audience without the audience having to com- pensate for the misuse of a word, without their being puzzled and so on. From there one can move to the more prominent situations where

(a) something is amiss, (b) the fault is not wholly traceable either to

grammar or to thwarted expectations about the speakers non-

linguistic knowledge or conversational manners, and (c) the fault can be laid to the speaker rather than the audience. In determining what would rectify such situations one has the materials for determining the list of rules underlying the situation of <£-ing (though the information may need further winnowing).

Were referring treated as a speech act occurring within a larger one, there would be a similar standard for testing proposed conditions for successful reference, the conditions being justified by at least the

standing threat of conversational anomaly where not observed. Con- ditions not contributing to standard communication success in this way will appear singularly unmotivated or, a bit more bluntly, gratuitous. If not justifiable by the procedures with which we test other conditions for performance of the act of referring, how can they be justified at all? I shall argue shortly that (AE) is in this untenable position. This accounts for the present significance of treating reference as something persons do.

I

To facilitate the exposition of my first criticism I introduce the notion of a fictional context. The notion is only roughly adumbrated below, but hopefully this will be sufficient to find clear cases to which to apply it. Some of the sentences we utter have singular subjects which are, grammatically speaking, names or other would-be designations of fictional characters. The context in which such an utterance is

produced will be called 'fictional' if and only if both speaker and audience realize that it is a fictional character that is the subject of discussion. What is said of the character need not be true. The

purpose of the introducing this notion is obviously to rule out situations where fictional characters as subjects may be conversationally mis-

leading. The first premiss of the argument of this part is (AE). To this is

added the additional premiss (1) In producing an (assertive) utterance in a fictional context, the

speaker purports to refer to a fictional character. Now fictional characters do not exist, (a1), and so (AE), what is referred to must exist, entails in conjunction with (1),

(2) Every time a speaker produces an (assertive) utterance in a fictional context, he fails to refer (that is, he fails to do what in (1) it was said he purported to do).

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Given a speech act vantage point (2) is a patently unacceptable consequence. It was maintained above that when a condition for the success of a speech act is not met, the act is defective in some way- if not wholly voided, it is at least an unhappy instance of its kind. But in hosts of cases we could describe as occurring in fictional contexts the communication is normal, nothing goes wrong in the most straightforward way. Suppose neither I not my audience are under any illusion

concerning Mr. Pickwick or Sherlock Holmes, what is defective in my uttering 'Mr. Pickwick was a confirmed bachelor' or 'Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker cap'? This is an obvious reason for rejecting a view that calls these utterances defective,5 but there is another just as powerful: namely, that there are defective utterances of a similar nature, and we want to mark them off from the examples I gave. A

theory which accepts (2) as a consequence has to say of the utterance

(in a comparable setting) 'Mrs. Sherlock Holmes was brilliant' some-

thing that, regardless of the euphemisms at one's command, is tantamount to saying that it is defectively defective. The latter utterance deviates, not from any norm but from what is itself only a deviation. We need not string out the absurdities any longer, for it should be

perfectly clear that the first two utterances are standard and straightforward ways of conveying the information they do convey; and there seems nothing extraordinary about this particular use of language (that is not extraordinary about language generally). Conditions for the

performance of a certain speech act are designed to mark off cases in which one or more of the above is not the case. So we cannot accept (2) as a consequence.

The consequence can be laid to one of the two premisses, and it

might be replied that we can give up (1) thereby averting the criticism of (AE). But, in addition to the fact that it is on its face simply plausible to suppose that we do sometimes purport to refer to fictional characters, (1) seems to be a valuable if not an indispensable proposition for a rather common variety of (AE)-ist. For nonfictional situations that may lead a philosopher to adopt (AE) have their counterparts in fiction. And if the situations in fiction cannot be described in terms of purporting but failing to refer, this endangers the propriety of that sort of description in situations outside fiction as well.

To illustrate, compare utterances of the following two sentences: (i) Kant died in poverty, (ii) Kant's wife died in poverty.

Assuming that in both cases the Kant in question is the one and only author of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft bearing that name, past philosophical behavior warrants ascribing a tendency to say that (i), though false, is not referentially amiss, while something is referentially amiss with (ii). One suspects that an inclination such as this was a consider-

5 Compare the following from H. P. Grice: ". . . it will be very unplausible to hold both that there exists a particular interpretation or sense of an expression E, and to use E in this sense or interpretation is always to do something which is conversationally objectionable." "Vacuous Names/' in Words and Objections, ed. by Donald Davidson and Jakko Hintikka (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 131.

622




able factor in adopting (AE) for those of its adherents who started from reasons of natural language rather than considerations of elegant system. For (AE) would explain the difference between (i) and (ii) were it correct. It might even be in order to speculate that it is cases such as these that originally gave point to philosophical concerns with referring as reflected in natural languages.

But if invoking the notion of a referential mishap makes good sense in explaining the difference between (i) and (ii), why shouldn't it make equally good sense in explaining what seems to be the parallel difference in the following pair of sentences considered as uttered?

(iii) Sherlock Holmes smoked opium, (iv) Sherlock Holmes' wife smoked opium.

What ground could there be for not applying whatever explanation was employed for the defectiveness of (ii) to the defectiveness of (iv)? In any case, we are owed an explanation of the clear difference between (iii) and (iv) in terms of the 'untowardness' of the latter, and it would be quite exceptional if the difference was not parallel to that between (i) and (ii). Since it also seems obvious that the difference in the first set has something to do with referential mishap, it seems only reasonable to extend this explanation to the difference in the second set. In sum, this makes a strong case against denying that people purport to refer in fictional contexts; a case which, on the assumptions of this discussion, seems uncontested by countervailing considerations. For if referring, even in purport, has no part in fictional cases, it cannot enter the explanation of successes or failures such as instanced in (iii) and (iv) respectively.

Thus, we are left with (AE) as the only remaining source of the unacceptable consequence. If one chooses to hold (AE) and avoid the consequence, one will either have to hold some doctrine of universes of discourse or will have to restrict (AE) to a notion of referring different from the rather commonplace one that yields to speech act analysis. Those philosophers such as Strawson6 and Searle who have done neither appear open to the foregoing criticism.

II

Russell held that otherwise troublesome occurrences of words bearing the conventional marks of names (in referring positions) of non-existents could be replaced by definite descriptions.7 Thus, if confronted with an utterance of 'Pegasus flies', an apparent counterexample to (AE), we first note that Pegasus is a disguised description -

say, 'the winged horse captured by Bellerophon' - and then treat its equivalent and canonically formulated proposition 'The winged horse captured by Bellerophon flies', by means of Russell's theory of definite descriptions, as analysable into the following:

6 P. P. Strawson, "On -Referring/' Mind (1950), and frequently reprinted. 7 In "On Denoting/' op. cit, p. 54; "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism/' op. cit,

p. 253; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, pp. 178-79.

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There is something that is winged, equine and captured by Belle- rophon,

not more than one thing is winged, equine and captured by Belle-

rophon, whatever is winged, equine and captured by Bellerophon flies.

The name has long since been excluded from the proposition, and the definite description, on the analysis, has its job performed by the as- cription of an attribute, nothing now taking the place of an expression purportedly referring to Pegasus. In fact, Russell sometimes attempts to display its obviousness by making all such statements with bound variables metalinguistic, further eliminating the appearance of any reference. For example, our first clause would be merely a proposition that certain attributes are instanced, and on a more telling rendering of Russell's analysis into English would read,

'Something is winged, equine, and captured by Bellerophon' is sometimes true.

It is not my present aim to criticize this programme, but to point out how it is a way of putting to rest the bedevilling question 'To what could "Pegasus" refer?' or 'What could "Pegasus" stand for?' And because one who adopts this method has an analysis that sidesteps the question, (AE) is surely made a more plausible position to hold for those who shun doctrines of 'modes of being'.8 What I shall argue in the present section, however, is that when we look at examples more complicated than the one above, the bedevilling questions or relevantly similar ones persist. More specifically, we cannot avoid having to answer a question of the type 'When do two occurrences of an apparent name or description of a fictional creature refer, name, stand for, designate (or so on) the same thing?' by the employment of Russellian wiles. And this, it seems, undermines what was once, and perhaps still is, thought to be a major advantage for adopting (AE): namely, the

avoidability of ontological puzzles about referring to what is, strictly, nothing. Once undermined hopefully we will see a need to attack the so-called Parmenidean puzzles head-on without the need for (AE), which will in any case be ineffective.

The more complicated propositions I have in mind are those em-

bedding other propositions by a process called relativization. We could also consider the case of reflexive pronouns, but the former will suffice to illustrate the point.

Consider the following, (P) King Arthur, who devised the idea of The Round Table, was

a wise monarch. Now whatever differences there are among linguists concerning the

8 Russell seems to concur in the following: "For want of the apparatus of proposi- tional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g. by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain/' "the round square/' and so on: we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless." Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 169.

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proper analysis of this proposition or string, there is something of a consensus that it is a telescoping of the following two propositions:

(Pi) King Arthur was a wise monarch. (Pii) King Arthur devised the idea of The Round Table.

Very roughly, (P) would be describable as a transform of (Pi) and (Pii), derived by embedding (Pii) in (Pi) through a (series of) relativization

transformation(s), whereby the noun phrase subject of (Pii) gets packed into 'who'. What is required for any account of this sort, demanding as it does the interchangeability of '(P)' and '(Pi) and (Pii)', to be correct? It is not enough that the inscription (or similarly pro- nounced vocable) 'King Arthur' appear in both (Pi) and (Pii), for the transformation is only applicable if, in some vague sense, it is the same

King Arthur in both instances. This is evident from the fact that

although (P'i) Cambridge is fifty miles from London,

and (P'ii) Cambridge is a suburb of Boston,

are both true, we are not thereby permitted to derive, (Pf) Cambridge, which is a suburb of Boston, is fifty miles from

London. And the obvious explanation is that the Cambridge of (P'i) is not the same as the Cambridge of (P'ii).

Were we not embroiled in an issue where the propriety of this notion is part of what is being debated, a perfectly natural way to describe the conditions for the possible transformation of (P'i) and (P'ii) into

(P') would be to say that it must be supposed that the same Cam-

bridge is being referred to (at least purportly) on both occasions. But then we should need this description for case (P) although, ex

hypothesi, King Arthur does not exist* However, the naturalness of this

description is not what is at issue. With respect to the transformations in (P) as well as those in (Pf) there is a way to 'get it right' and a way to 'get it wrong'. And in both cases what determines this will not be found just by examining the inscriptions of any of the above listed

propositions, but only by adding information that provides the alleged non-linguistic correlates for the nouns 'King Arthur' and 'Cambridge' respectively. Noam Chomsky suggests attaching what he calls 'structure indices' to the abstract representations of the referring phrases.9 This is offered as the only way of avoiding quantifiers while making the noun in question capable of undergoing the relevant transformations. Chomsky clearly relies on determining the referent or 'intended

9 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, 1965), p. 123. On the relevance of quantifiers see note 13 on pp. 225-26, and on their potential unavoidability see p. 144. For an application to our specific issue see pp. 144-46. Chomsky does not give a detailed account of (structural) indices. Their role in the cited discussion is simply to give a name to whatever information one needs, in addition to a certain orthographic/phonetic similarity, to allow for various transformations. Since this r6le fits the claims I am presently making, and does not go on to specify features for unrelated functions, I shall also call whatever it is that incorporates the additional information I have claimed is necessary an index.

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referent' of the noun (in context) for ascribing an index. He, at least, suggests that this is unavoidable, and it seems to me that it is unavoidable.10 For some indirect support note the following passage from

McCawley on how the transformed sentence 'Everyone wants to get rich' cannot have for its source a proposition such as 'Everyone wants

everyone to get rich':

The absence of a subject of the embedded sentence is determined not by whether the embedded sentence has as its subject a noun phrase identical to that which is the subject of want; it rather depends on a property of the semantic representation of the sentence, namely whether in that representation the index corresponding to the subject of the embedded sentence is the same as the index corresponding to the subject of want . . .

(Op. cit., p. 524)

Although the case differs from the ones we have considered, the point reinforces ours. The identity of 'noun phrase' on some standard of

similarity of vocable or inscription is not enough to determine the

subject of the embedded sentence, and, thus, it is not enough to determine how a sentence is to be embedded originally. Although it is difficult to state in unpresumptive terms just what more is needed, it is surely something that is naively describable as 'the sameness of what is being talked about'.

On the Russellian analysis with which this section began (P), (Pi), and (Pii) are all false, and on a popular alternative they lack a truth value, the existence of a referent on the latter being a precondition for truth-or-falsity. But these views do not touch the need for indices for the subject terms in our propositions. Truth value is not directly an issue, since however that is decided the practice of discourse about characters in fiction (as well as other non-existents) remains, and it cannot be denied that relative clauses occur here as frequently as with less problematic subject-matters. But then we must admit rules for such constructions, and it would be implausible to maintain that the rules differ only here from those for the constructions generally. The alternatives to the procedure of attaching indices as noted are not

promising. One might refuse to allow a legitimate practice of discourse about fictional characters; or one might prohibit here alone the construction of relative clauses, certain pronominalizations and reflexive

pronouns; or one might adopt a set of merely perfunctory require- ments as a compromise, such as allowing certain similarities of the in-

scriptions themselves to be the only index for fictional subjects. But these maneuvers really amount to no more than admissions of unvar- nished failure to account for fictional discourse with even the slightest

10 Chomsky envisages the indices as integers. He says ". . . by the recoverability condition on deletion [note 1, p. 222], the reflexivization rule (similarly, the pro- nominalization rule) will apply only when the integers assigned to the two items are the same. The semantic component will then interpret two referential items as having the same referent just in case they are strictly identical- in particular, in case they have been assigned the same integer in the deep structure." (Ibid., p. 146.) See also James McCawley, "Meaning and the Description of Languages," Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. by J. F. Rosenberg and Charles Travis (Engle- wood Cliffs, 1971), p. 522.

626




approach toward reflecting what we do and do not prohibit without conscious theory. Whatever else may be said for them, they leave the present difficulty untouched.

The central point here is that the determination of reference is

indispensable to a complete account of utterances with fictional or otherwise non-existent conversational subjects. If such discourse is al- lowed there seems no strong grounds for restricting it to a level of simplicity that would exclude relative clauses and reflexive pronouns. This point could have been made without our brief excursus into the

theory of descriptions. The latter topic was broached only because it is important to see that application of the theory of descriptions does not blunt the force of the present argument. For it is sometimes maintained that given the theory we can allow utterances in fictional contexts, but analyze them in such a way that referring plays no role in their understanding. I have attempted to show that, even on a most sympathetic appraisal, this is so only if we do not consider utterances

containing the sorts of complications just examined. For after the proposed definition has been applied to 'King Arthur', there are still alternative quantifications of the conjunction of (Pi) and (Pii), between which one cannot decide without determining the sameness or difference of King Arthur of (Pi) with King Arthur of (Pii). Only one of the alternatives permits the construction of (P). As they specifically concern the theory of descriptions the results of this section can be sum- marized by saying that even in the quantification of certain propositions whose (conversational) subjects are fictional characters, there remains the question of whether to bind two occurrences of a variable

by a single quantifier (viz. whether to regard two inscriptions as occurrences of a single variable).

The last point is clearly illustrated with Quine's device for converting names to descriptions by construing a name, e.g. 'Pegasus', as an attribute, e.g. pegasizing, true of only one thing.11 Suppose we have a

proposition (3) TPegasus <j>s and Pegasus *s.!

Now Quine's doctrine is not meant to imply that no two things can have similar inscriptions for names, a claim that is falsified by the commonest experience (e.g. 'Cambridge' in our [P7] series). Thus we cannot decide by similarity of inscription alone in the first and second

conjunct of (3) that we have one rather than two attributes of pegasizing. (3) can be rendered, with the assumption of identity as

(4) r('^x) {[x pegasizes & (y)(y pegasizes if and only ifx=y)J &(x<f>s8cx^s))?

or, without the assumption as

(5) r(3x) {[x pegasizesi & (y)(y pegasizes! if and only if y=x)] (xtf>s)P& r(gw)J[w pegasizes2 & (z)(z pegasizes2 if and only if z=w)] & (w V s)}i

11 Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 7-8; Word and Object (New York, 1960), §37.

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(5) is compatible with (4), but tells us less. In particular, it does not tell enough - as (4) does - to justify uttering

(6) Pegasus, who 0s, ^s. So if (6) is a possible construction we need resources to permit symbolizations as in (4). But for such symbolizations more than just the theory of descriptions is required. In addition we must be able to appeal to indices attached to 'Pegasus' originally that will settle whether one or two variables is (are) needed on a given occasion. (A propos of Quine's version, the indices will settle how many attributes

correspond to n similar grammatical names.) The theory of descriptions was introduced at the beginning of this

section as a device for avoiding a straightforward answer to the

question 'To what does "Pegasus" refer?' Some philosophers have seen as a source of perplexity the apparent consequence that if Pegasus does not exist, then there could, quite literally, be nothing for the 'name' to refer to. This puzzle cannot be explored in detail here. But we may note that if indexing is a precondition for the full use of a

grammatical name or description, and is not obviated by the reductions

provided by Russell and Quine, then whatever puzzles are generated by reference to non-existents are not avoided in any event. For even if in the attaching of indices explicit use of referring is suppressed, indices cannot be attached without making use of notions such as

talking about (or talking of), denoting, designating and so on. Insofar as there is a puzzle or difficulty of the above nature with referring, it arises with the available substitute notions as well: e.g. 'How can one talk about what does not exist, since there is nothing to be talked about in that event?' In fact, as the difficulty is expounded in certain prominent places,12 the English verb 'to refer' and its foreign equivalents have more frequently than not been omitted. So we might say that even if by adhering to (AE) the puzzle is dissolved for refer-

ring, this would be no progress in its ridding us of the puzzle itself if the other notions were not thereby considered covered by this device.

Ill

John Searle, from whom our version of (AE) is borrowed, osten-

sibly accepts both the assumptions on which my objections operate. Then on what basis does he hold (AE)?

(AE) is a tautology as well as an axiom for Searle. It is not a covert tautology requiring special interpretation, but an 'obvious

tautology'. He supports this last claim by a restatement of (AE) that shows it to say no more than "that one cannot refer to a thing if there is no such thing to be referred to." (Speech Acts, p. 77, my emphasis.)

Searle's use of the term 'tautology' here is not sufficiently clear.

12 E.G. Plato, Sophist, 237c- e; Russell, Principles of Mathematics (New York, 1964), 427 and "On Denoting," op. cit, p. 48; W. V. Quine, "Designation and Existence,"

Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. by Herbert Feigl and Wilfred Sellars (New York, 1949), p. 45.

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There is more to my dissatisfaction than the jejune observation that neither (AE) nor its restatement are truth-table tautologies. For even if we broaden the notion to a sympathetically intuitive logical truth, it is still difficult to see how (AE) or its restatement are logical truths that could serve Searle's purposes. To see this several alternatives need be considered. First, the occurrence of expressions such as 'axiom' and 'tautology' conjure scenes of stipulating basic propositions in mathematics and the exact sciences. These are conditions philosophers are sometimes prone to call 'conventional' - useful for purposes at hand, but not as a rule indispensable. If Searle intends to be so

stipulating (AE), his defense is weak. We could allow him the notion he desires: let us subscript it as references. If it is consistent and coherent - and there seems no reason to suppose it could not be made so- then Searle cannot be faulted in the most straightforward way about references, for he is only legislating (AE) as true with references. But it is open to us to adopt a new notion, say referencev, identical in every respect to references save that nothing like (AE) obtains for it. This situation is not a mere stand-off, for if referencev does not have theoretical inconveniences other than subscripts, or if the inconveniences are outweighed or even balanced by relative advantages, we will have shown Searle's position defective from a philosophical standpoint because gratuitous or worse, even construed as a stipula- tion. So it seems Searle must have more than this in mind when he

says (AE) is a tautology.

Second, the qualification 'obvious' may be intended to suggest that

(AE) is a self-evident truth, requiring no argument. Perhaps it is to be known intuitively from our mere understanding of the concept of reference, as is sometimes alleged to be the case with analytic truths. But what could be a more direct proof that it is not self-evident than the linguistic intuition that we can refer to non-existents such as Sher- lock Holmes? (We will see shortly that Searle accepts reference to

Holmes, but nothing he says in this regard seems to effect the point I am now making.) From the vantage point of linguistic intuition there is nothing wrong with an utterance of 'He was just referring to Sherlock

Holmes', and there is no need to assume ignorance of Holmes' fiction-

ality on the part of the speaker. This is not to say that it will appear just as plausible after investigating the matter to hold that we can refer to non-existents; but the prima facie case for describing what some- one does in this way refutes the view that (AE) is proved by intuition.

If it is not satisfactory to stipulate (AE) nor to hold it proved by intuition, we must advert to a third alternative: perhaps (AE) is the sort of 'tautology' one accepts because of conceptual considerations on its behalf. But here the claim to have a tautology is ineffective as an argument, for it is on the strength of the conceptual considerations that one accepts (AE). That one also regards it as a tautology adds

nothing to its defense. But this interpretation is idle because Searle offers no further considerations to support his claim of tautology. So, if we are to assume that we have his complete argument before us

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G. Vis/on Referring to What Does Not Exist

it would seem we have only the two rejected defenses to choose from. There does not appear to be a further alternative.

It should also be noted that whatever strength is drawn from Searle's restatement of (AE) relies on the assumption of the general interchangeability of the sentential contexts '. . . exists' and 'there is . . .'; for the restatement would be of no value unless the clause 'there is no such thing to be referred to' was tantamount to a clause on the order of 'the thing to be referred to does not exist'. This is why Searle's words were emphasized on p. 628. The view that these contexts are roughly interchangeable, with only grammatical modifications

required, is not uncommon, but there seems to be ground for doubt, and the doubts incline toward the view that 'there is . . .' has occurrences not tantamount to '. . . exists'. (Searle himself indicates that 'there is' sometimes occurs where 'exists' is not an adequate substitute. In a passage we shall have further occasion to comment on shortly, he

says

. . . the fact that there is such a fictional character as Sherlock Holmes does not commit us to the view that he exists in some supra-sensible world or that he has a special mode of existence. Sherlock Holmes does not exist at all. . . ." [Speech Acts, p. 79, my emphasis])

Although it falls beyond the scope of this paper to discuss sys- tematically the relation between 'there is' and 'exists', it is worthwhile

briefly attending to the assumption. For Searle offers no other means of

seeing the obviousness of (AE), and it must be conceded that the restatement can be construed so as to seem only a piece of patent commonsense. For example, the sentence in the restatement might be construed as saying no more than that when one uses what appears to be a referring expression, but there is no further answer to the

Subsequent question 'To what (whom) are you referring?', (directed to the speaker), then one has not referred regardless of the other accom-

paniments of one's utterance. Answering that question may be re-

garded as a way of giving or specifying what has been referred to, and the ability to answer need not be confined to 'verbal' abilities in the narrowest sense of that term. But when interpreted in this way, there is a referent for the term 'Pegasus', since one can give further

specifications in answer to such a question. So on this construal, which would seem to make the restatement a piece of patent commonsense, 'there is' is being used in a way that raises doubts about its inter-

changeability with 'exists'. If Searle insisted on restricting 'there is' so that 'exists' was always in order, it would make the inclination to

accept the restatement dubious to the extent that the doubts about their interchangeability are legitimate. Without probing deeper into the issue we may note that the controversialness of the assumption of interchangeability further weakens Searle's position.

Not only does Searle's position lack justification, but in his defense

against potential counterexamples the original doctrine gets obscured. At one point he writes

Can't one refer to Santa Claus and Sherlock Holmes, though neither of them exists

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or ever did exist? References to fictional (and also legendary, mythological, etc.) entities are not counter-examples. One can refer to them as fictional characters

precisely because they do exist in fiction. (Speech Acts, p. 78, Searle's emphasis.)

and a short while later The axiom of existence holds across the board: in real world talk one can refer

only to what exists; in fictional talk one can refer to what exists in fiction (plus such real world things and events as the fictional story incorporates). (Ibid., p. 79)

Between the quoted passages he remarks that real and fictional talk are different 'modes of discourse', though the latter is a 'parasitic form of discourse', that if I say in the fictional mode 'Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker hat' what I say is true, while if I say 'Mrs. Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker hat' I fail to refer even in the fictional mode.

There is an uncertainty in the doctrine being espoused and it may forebode a larger confusion. An utterance in a fictional mode could be either (a) what real persons, viewed chiefly as non-authors, claim about fictional characters otherwise created, or (b) what we read fictional characters as saying themselves (e.g., not our utterance about Holmes, but what Watson says about Holmes). These are certainly different things, about which we may wish to come to different conclu- sions-for references in (b) are as fictional as the other events re- corded in the story and never genuine, while references in (a) may be

genuine. References in (a) when not genuine may be either 'explained away' as a whole or fall to any of the failings of normal reference in

particular cases, but are not normally what we would call 'fictional'. So it would not be satisfactory simply to allow that both are intended in Searle's remarks. Searle's examples all seem to be cases of (a). But he juxtaposes fictional discourse with 'play acting' (p. 78) and uses a

metaphor in which meaning conventions are represented as (at least in

part) vertical, tying discourse to the world, while those of fiction are

represented as horizontal, lifting discourse away from the world (p. 79). Both the juxtaposition and metaphor seem to suggest that he is

thinking of (b). This could engender confusion since the alleged parasitic cases of referring may, depending on whether viewed as

(a) or (b), both look like and not look like cases of genuine reference. There is no proof positive that Searle confused these, but we shall

shortly be in need of an explanation of how Searle fell into a more serious confusion, and this unclarity may have made some contribu- tion.

Putting that aside, it looks as if Searle is rejecting our first assumption, (a1) that fictional creatures don't exist, in the quoted passages. He appears to be saying that characters in fiction do exist in the same sense of the word 'exist' in which he exists, but in a different

(parasitic) mode. That the alleged counterexamples turn out not to be such is not itself support for (AE). But if one rejects (a1), it begins to look as if (AE) will be unfalsifiable by counterexample. For philosophers willing to go this far are customarily willing to extend the status of mode of discourse to conceiving, imagining or thinking, thereby plac- ing all candidates for counterexample that will ever be conceived, imagined or thought of in a mode of discourse.

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However, despite broad suggestions to the contrary, Searle denies that he intends to reject (a1). For in the next paragraph there appears the following passage from which we partially quoted before:

... the fact that there is such a fictional character as Sherlock Holmes does not commit us to view that he exists in some suprasensible world or that he has a

special mode of existence. Sherlock Holmes does not exist at all, which is not to

deny that he exists-in-fiction. (p. 79)

This certainly seems inconsistent with what has gone before. If Sherlock Holmes 'does not exist at all' there could be no clearer ground, given (AE), for the expression 'Sherlock Holmes' failing to refer; so it is no good saying he 'exists-in-fiction' whatever that comes to. How could Searle have overlooked the incompatibility? Latching onto the phrase 'exists-in-fiction' Searle might have thought it capable of performing both the task of satisfying (AE) and that of cancelling the usual, philosophically important force of 'exists' when it occurs unhyphenated. But this would require incompatible interpretations of the phrase. If the hyphenation is to perform the task of cancellation, then it must cut off the inference from rx exists-in-fiction"1 to rx exists"1. But this seems to require that the occurrence of 'exists' as an isolable unit in the phrase is a mere orthographical mirage; no more isolable, to borrow from Quine, than the occurrence of 'cat' in 'catastrophe'. As such Holmes no more exists because he exists-in-fiction than the American involvement in Vietnam is a cat because it is a catastrophe. On the other hand, if Holmes exists, which is the only way he could satisfy (AE), how can Searle deny him a special mode of existence?

Searle could avoid the dilemma by supposing that the existence which satisfied (AE) is a different variety than the kind talked of in

philosophical discussions of ontology (if the latter can even be clearly determined). But this sort of maneuver only makes a mystery of (AE). For despite its innocent-sounding formulation, what is now meant by 'exists' in (AE) is not only not an attempt to approximate whatever ordinary intuitions speakers would have, but neither is it even an effort to approximate philosophers' jaded intuitions. This result renders (AE) neither assessable nor applicable as it stands to cases. Such a situation could please no one but Humpty Dumpty.

It may be thought that Searle's qualification parasitic resolves the dilemma. Unfortunately this notion is too vague to be informative, for there are many forms of parasitism varying considerably in interest. In any event, we will want to know whether parasitic references are genuine. If they are, the problem remains. If they are not, it will take more than the use of the term 'parasitic' to show this. Recent employ- ments of claims of parasitism in the philosophical literature indicate the need for such further argument. For, according to a by-now familiar pattern, a claim of parasitism may only come to saying that (in our present case) some references to things that exist tout court are a necessary condition for making (apparent) reference to fictional entities. But this can be construed as showing how genuine reference to fictional entities is possible as much as it can to show that such references are not genuine. Behind the (perhaps illicitly injected) claim

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of parasitism all that has been shown is that there are necessary conditions for the alleged reference to fictional creatures. Who could have doubted that this sort of reference, supposing it to be such, has

necessary conditions? This last spate of unclarities and confusions indicates that over-

and-above Searle's failure to defend (AE) in a convincing manner, the doctrine he proposes is much more puzzling than an isolated reading of (AE) would lead one to believe.

IV

It does not appear that branding (AE) true or false would be very illuminating, even if it were possible. The notion of reference has its boundaries sufficiently unsettled by ordinary discourse to allow the addition of conditions for purposes of system, and if the situation were otherwise there might still be compelling philosophical grounds for adding or omitting a condition. But there are more and less

interesting ways to construe (AE), and we wish to retain a close connection with the pre-philosophical data reference is to account for.

(One of the less interesting ways to hold [AE] would be to set up criteria for existence such that a sufficient condition for something to exist would be that it can be referred to.) Given whatever require- ments can be gathered from that, I think the arguments of parts I and II are in the end strong presumptive reasons for not adopting (AE), and I know of no similarly strong considerations that would, if sound, offset them. But much has been left unsaid here, and any survey of this topic which aspired to completeness would need to discuss a number of other issues in detail. Not only do the assumptions of part I require defending, but there are several related topics which may need

settling, of which the following are prominent examples. (It will be evident that some of the issues listed overlap.)

(1) The relations between the sentential contexts 'there is (are) . . .' and '. . . exist(s)/ lightly touched on in connection with Searle's remarks.

(2) The many defenses offered for (AE), including those that rely on

(a) a certain view of how everyday discourse is translated into quanti- ficational notation and (b) a model-theoretic semantic interpretation of the predicate calculus with quantification and identity.

(3) The relation of (AE) to doctrines about what speakers presup- pose, viz.

'Whatever is referred to must be presupposed to exist by the

speaker'. (The relation of this to [AE] is rather more complex than one is at first likely to suppose.)

(4) The relation of (AE) to doctrines concerning properties and pred- ication; viz.

'Whatever has properties must exist' and

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'Whatever has properties predicated of it must be presupposed to exist'.

(N.B. The phrasing in the 'presupposing' conditions of [3] and [4] was intended to mirror [AE] as closely as possible. It was not intended to encourage a de re as contrasted with a de dicto reading of these

doctrines.) (5) The more exact relations of referring to designating, denoting,

naming, talking about and so on. This may largely resolve itself into the issue broached in assumption (a2): namely, the relation of speakers' referring to expressions' referring.

(6) Whether utterances 'about' non-existent conversational subjects are to be treated uniformly as regards truth-value (all false, all truth- valueness, or - less common, but possible - all true) or whether we can

distinguish true and false among them. Although it is clear that all these issues could not be satisfactorily

aired in an article such as this, I fear that at least some of them may have troubled readers at crucial junctures in my arguments.

October 1972

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referring to what does not exist

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