This past week I continued to revise my projected book on God and abstract objects. I added a section to my chapter on neo-Meinongianism on Timothy Williamson’s so-called necessitism. Williamson defends the seemingly absurd thesis that everything that exists exists necessarily. On Williamson’s view, I, as a necessary being, am only contingently a concrete object. I could have been an abstract object, and, indeed, prior to my conception I was an abstract object which then became a concrete person. It seems to me that necessitism serves as a nice illustration of the metaphysical absurdities people fall into by taking the quantifiers of first-order logic to be “existentially loaded,” that is, devices of ontological commitment. If we have a neutral logic devoid of ontological commitments, then we shall not grind down into such ridiculous impasses. A neutral logic will enable us to quantify over mathematical and other abstract objects without qualms, since such quantification carries no commitment to the reality of the values of the variables bound by our quantifiers. In short, the truth of “There are prime numbers greater than 100” does not commit you to the existence of prime numbers.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 09:30:32 +0000
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