The Atlas of Reality

by Robert C. Koons,Timothy Pickavance

  Some skeptics, including Georg Lichtenberg and George Santayana (1955), have challenged premise 5. Lichtenberg argued that all we can conclude is something like ‘Thinking is occurring.’ Descartes has not established the necessity of an existing thinker as the subject of that thought.

  What could it mean to embrace Nihilism? There are two ways of being a Nihilist, one radical and one more moderate. On the radical interpretation, Nihilists endorse a claim that entails that almost everything we ordinarily believe is simply false. There are no people (not even oneself), and no things, places, properties, facts, processes, and so on. The only truths there are are (a) the truth that nothing exists and (b) anything that follows logically from this (e.g., that no giraffes exist).

  Nihilism can seem incredible. It invites the answer that G.E. Moore (1939) gave to those who denied the existence of the external world. His response was simply to point out the obviousness of (1):

  (1) Here is a hand.

  Moore argued that any philosophical reason we might have for denying (1) is obviously less credible to each of us than the fact that one's own hand exists. Likewise, we firmly believe that many things exist, and these beliefs seem to be obviously true. Any philosophical argument attempting to establish Nihilism will include at least one premise that is less obviously true than the obvious fact that things exist. Therefore, we could never be in a position to rationally deny Aliquidism.

  However, we might interpret Nihilism in a less radical way, as the claim that no things exist. Such Nihilists could agree that most of what we ordinarily believe is true or could be counted as true if properly interpreted. So, it's okay to believe that there are human hands, so long as we don't infer that hands are things or objects.

  However, for Nihilism to be a serious position, we have to take ‘thing’ and ‘object’ in the broadest possible sense. Anything of any kind, whether universal or particular, physical or mental, concrete or abstract, must count as a thing, in the relevant sense. If so, how can it make sense to say that is true that there are hands, if no thing of any kind exists? The only possible answer to this question would be one that makes use of some kind of paraphrase. That is, Nihilists must argue that a statement like ‘Hands exist’ is true but misleading in form. It should be taken as asserting something that can be better and more perspicuously expressed in some form other than ‘Something exists and is a hand.’

  This move is sometimes put this way: the ontologist “speaks with the vulgar but thinks with the wise”. Nihilists can take many of the things we ordinarily say, like ‘Here is a hand’, as true, so long as they are understood in the proper way. In the context of expressing one's real ontological commitments, one must paraphrase such loose expressions of the facts into a form that perspicuously reveals what one really takes to be the case. Nihilists would then have to offer a paraphrase of statements like ‘Here is a hand’ that does not give the misleading appearance of entailing the existence of anything whatsoever.

  This method of paraphrase could itself be understood in a number of ways. Nihilists might claim that we don't really mean what we seem to be saying when we assert that some things exist. In this case, that's an implausible account of our intended meanings. We really do believe in the existence of at least one thing. It would be more reasonable for moderate Nihilists to claim that our ordinary beliefs are approximately true, or close to being true, or “quasi-true” (in the terminology of Sider 2001). Nothing really exists, but our ordinary statements of belief in the existence of things correspond to genuine truths in a systematic way, a way that explains the practical usefulness of those ordinary beliefs.

  Some, including process theorists like Alfred North Whitehead, have suggested that our belief in the existence of things is merely a product of the subject/predicate structure of our language, including the prominence that that natural language gives to nouns, both proper (e.g., ‘Socrates’, ‘Paris’) and common (‘rock’, ‘cow’, ‘field’). If our natural language were quite different, as it seems it might have been, we might have made much greater use, perhaps even exclusive use, of verbs and adverbs. If so, we might have been less inclined to believe in a world that consists of things (the correlates of nouns).

  More recently, John Hawthorne and Andrew Cortens have suggested three different versions of such moderate Nihilism (O'Leary-Hawthorne and Cortens 1995):

  Nihilists might reject discrete objects in favor of a plurality of stuffs like water, blood, steel, and so on. There are no objects, in the sense of discrete, countable things. We should never assert that there are N F's, for any number N and count noun F. Instead, there is just so much water, blood, steel, and so on. This approach appeals to the linguistic distinction between count nouns, nouns that can take the plural form and can be enumerated (like ‘people’, ‘cars’, ‘pieces of metal’, ‘rocks’), and mass nouns, nouns that never take the plural form, cannot be combined with numerals, but which can instead be combined with phrases of quantity (e.g., ‘so many gallons of milk’, ‘so many yards of fabric’, ‘so many tons of steel’). Nihilists could renounce all count nouns (in the context of perspicuous statements of ontology), replacing ‘Here is a cat’ with ‘There is some cat-stuff here.’

  As a further step, Nihilists might posit only one stuff, the “world stuff”. Instead of saying ‘Here is a cat’, Nihilists could say, ‘The world-stuff is feline here.’

  Finally, Nihilists could make use exclusively of P.F. Strawson's (1959) “feature-placing sentences”, sentences of the form ‘It is G-ing F-ishly.’ ‘Here is a hungry cat’ becomes ‘It is felinizing hungrily here.’

  Strawson's proposal is the most comprehensive and radical, since we might think that a stuff (like water or gold) is a kind of thing, which would result in, at most, a form of Monism (11.2A below), the belief in only one thing. The Strawsonian approach suggests that the subject-predicate (noun-verb) structure of ordinary sentences is misleading, since it suggests that the noun phrases refer to things. Nihilists who prefer the Strawsonian language will replace all nouns with verbs and adverbs in something like the following way:

  (2) ‘Socrates exists’ becomes ‘Socratizing happens.’

  (3) ‘Socrates is pale’ becomes ‘Being-pale happens Socrates-wise’ or ‘Socratizing happens palely.’

  What about transitive verbs?

  (4) ‘Socrates teaches Plato’ becomes ‘Teaching happens Socratically and to-Plato-wise.’

  On this view, things don't exist. Instead, processes happen or progress or unfold. But, don't processes then exist? No, they happen. Is this merely a verbal dispute? Is ‘happening’ just what we call existence when processes are involved? Aren't Nihilists merely proposing an odd reform of language without really changing our beliefs about what exists?

  Perhaps not. In a way, the form ‘Socratizing happens’ is still misleading, since it suggests that something (a certain process of Socratizing) exists. The clearest form is purely verbal: ‘It Socratizes’, with the ‘it’ as a dummy subject. Compare (5) to our ordinary sentence (6):

  (5) It Socratizes.

  (6) It is raining.

  It makes no sense to ask, what is raining? The ‘it’ in this sentence is not supposed to refer to anything at all. One might reply that the ‘it’ in (6) refers to the atmosphere (or some part of the atmosphere near a point of reference). However, we could imagine it raining meteorites on some planet with no atmosphere at all. One could then perhaps take ‘it’ to refer to some region of empty space, but surely such a sentence would not commit us to asserting the real existence of empty space.

  Aliquidists could respond that shifting from nouns to verbs doesn't really help Nihilists, since ‘exists’ is simply the most generic of all verbs. If something runs or eats or is pale, then something exists. Similarly, if something Socratizes, then something exists. Thus, from ‘It Socratizes’, we should be able to infer ‘It exists.’

  Nihilists can agree with this. They can admit that ‘It exists’ is true, but still deny that so
mething exists. It can be true that it is raining without its being true that something is raining. So, from ‘It exists’, it doesn't follow that something exists.

  But won't Nihilists have to admit that something, namely Nihilism itself, is true? If so, then there must exist at least one proposition (or claim or thought or belief), and so Nihilism would be self-defeating. This is a difficult problem for Nihilists, but they might be able to claim something of the form ‘It thinks truthfully-and-nihilistically’, while denying that there are such things as propositions, truths, and so on, to say nothing of thinkers or believers.

  There seems to be a Nihilist position that isn't completely crazy (with emphasis on ‘completely’). However, why should we tempted to think that this view is true? What do we gain by denying that anything exists?

  Nihilists can appeal to Ockham's Razor (PMeth 1). Nihilists could argue that their position is the most satisfactory from the point of view of Ockham's Razor, since Nihilists do not posit the existence of any entities at all. No theory could be less encumbered with the supposed existence of things than Nihilism.

  We must ask, however, why we should think that Ockham's Razor is a good principle. A typical answer involves an appeal to simplicity: we should always prefer the simplest theory that explains all the facts. This is only rational, though, if simpler theories are more likely to be true, if simplicity by itself is an indicator of truth. But why should that be so? Couldn't reality be complex rather than simple?

  These are difficult questions. What's required for a theory to be attractive is more than just its simplicity. What attracts us is the combination of great simplicity with a close fit to a large and diverse set of phenomena. The combination of these three (simplicity, closeness of fit, and breadth of explanatory success) does seem to be a reliable indicator of the truth in many cases. We certainly find such a combination convincing in science. Newton's theory is a classic case of a very simple theory that perfectly fits the data in a wide diversity of applications, from planetary orbits to traffic collisions. In the law and in practical affairs, a simple explanation that is confirmed by a rich diversity of evidence can attain certainty beyond any reasonable doubt. Where reality is very complex, or where reality is simple but a large body of precise data is inaccessible, we may simply be unable to find the truth with any confidence. However, we can always hope for the best. We can hope that we find simple metaphysical theories that fit closely to a wide range of facts drawn from many disparate domains. If we can find such combinations of theoretical virtues, we would have good reason to embrace the metaphysical theory possessing them.

  Is Nihilism a simple theory? Simplicity involves much more than simply minimizing the number of entities in one's theory. By that standard, Nihilism is surely the simplest. However, a much more important measure of simplicity looks at the number of fundamental truths contained in a theory. In addition, we are keenly interested in qualitative economy (PMeth 1.4 and 1.4.1), and so the number of fundamental or primitive words and phrases in the standard formulation of the theory is even more important. Since Nihilists eschew the use of nouns, this means that we must look at the number of primitive verbs and adverbs required to express a moderate Nihilist view of the world.

  By these new standards, Nihilism doesn't seem to be any simpler than our ordinary, common sense view of the world, since every true statement in ordinary English corresponds to a true statement in Nihilism's funny, Strawsonian language: ‘Socrates teaches Plato’ corresponds to ‘It Socratizes teachingly to-Plato-ly.’ At first glance, moderate Nihilists' account of the facts doesn't seem to be any simpler than Aliquidists' account.

  Nihilists might argue that their account is simpler on the grounds that Nihilist accounts of the world need not address questions of identity and distinctness that Aliquidist approaches must settle. We might suppose that whenever Aliquidists posit some things, Aliquidism (if complete) must include propositions concerning the identity and distinctness of those things, both at a time and across a span of time. If, for example, Aliquidists suppose that the world contains things called ‘electrons’, it seems that we can always ask how many electrons exist at this or that time. Do any electrons that exist at one point of time persist until a later time? Nihilists, on the other hand, need not suppose that there are any propositions of this kind, since there are no things to stand in a relation of distinctness to one another.

  However, when we describe the world by means of relational language, we need to know whether one relatum is identical or distinct from another, as in the following cases:

  (7) Socrates teaches Plato.

  (8) John likes Mary.

  (9) Boston is north of New York City.

  Take love for example: if A loves B and B loves C, it makes all the difference whether C is or is not identical to A. If A and C are identical, then we have the happy condition of requited love: A loves B and B loves C (=A) back. If instead A and C are distinct, then we have the reality of the dreaded love triangle where A loves B, but B loves some third person, C. If Nihilists are committed to being moderates, then, in order to avoid the burden of overturning all or most of our common sense opinions, they will want to treat such claims about the relational structure of the world as true, when properly interpreted.

  In response, Nihilists will have to reverse themselves, admitting that we can, after all, speak truthfully about the identity and distinctness of the relata of relations. Nihilists might introduce peculiar adverbs, like ‘distinctfully’ and ‘identically’. In this case, Nihilism would seem to be a mere verbal variant from Aliquidism. Alternatively, Nihilists could perhaps distinguish Nihilism from Aliquidism by insisting that claims about identity and distinctness are reducible to facts about the adverbial qualification of the corresponding verb phrases. To say that Socrates is distinct from Plato (i.e., that it Socratizes in a distinct-from-Platonizing way) is to say that there is some adverbial qualification (‘wisely’, ‘palely’, ‘humbly’, etc.) that applies to Socrates but not to Plato. For example, it Socratizes palely, but it does not Platonize palely. To say that Twain is identical to Clemens is just to say that there is nothing that distinguishes Twainizing (being Twain) from Clemensizing (being Clemens). This version of Nihilism leads to some version of Bundle Theory (9.1T.1T). Of course, Nihilism is quite an unusual kind of Bundle Theory, since Nihilists deny that there are such things as bundles or properties. In place of reifying properties, Bundle Nihilists will simply use verbs and adverbs, and in place of reifying bundles, they will talk in a bundley way, linking verbs and adverbs together by conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘while’.

  Since we have already looked at the pros and cons of Bundle Theory in Chapter 9, let's assume that moderate Nihilists reject the Identity of Indiscernibles (7.3T.1) and, with it, Bundle Theory.

  In the absence of Bundle Theory, the only alternative to talking about identity and distinctness among things would be to enrich our vocabulary with new, primitive adverbs designed to capture the relevant facts about the relational structure of the world. For example, if we have a case of reciprocal love, we could say that ‘Love happens reciprocally’, while if the love is unrequited, we could say instead that ‘Love happens unrequitedly.’ Similarly, if a relation R holds among three distinct things in the fashion Rab and Rac (with b ≠ c) we would have to have recourse to a special adverb expressing exactly this structure, something like: ‘It Rs in an open-angle-ish way.’ However, at this point, we have good reason to suspect that that Nihilism is not going to turn out to be simpler than Aliquidism. In fact, it seems likely that Nihilism will be considerably more complex in its primitive elements.

  Consider, for example, a world in which there are five objects, A, B, C, D, and E, which bear the following set of relations to one another:

  (10) A loves B, C, and E, but neither A nor D.

  (11) B loves B and D, but not A, C or E.

  (12) C loves A only.

  (13) D loves A, B, C, and D, but not E.

  (14) E loves
A, B, C, D, and E.

  (15) Each of A, B, C, D, and E is distinct from the others.

  Here is a diagram of the network of relations:

  Figure 11.1 The Love Network

  Let's call this network, LoveNetwork. Aliquidists can provide a complete description of LoveNetwork by means of 50 simple statements, each of the form ‘X loves Y’, ‘X does not love Y’, ‘X is identical to Y’, or ‘X is not identical to Y.’ Nihilists will instead require a single adverb, ‘LoveNetwork-ly’. The whole situation can be expressed Nihilistically by saying this:

  (16) It loves LoveNetwork-ly.

  At first glance, this seems to be a much simpler account of the facts than Aliquidists can give. However, appearances are deceiving. Aliquidists can state the facts about LoveNetwork by means of only two transitive verb phrases, ‘loves’ and ‘is identical to’. In fact, Aliquidists can state all of the facts about any love network by means of these two elements. In contrast, Nihilists require a new adverb for every possible network. If we consider networks of just five members, there are a total of 225 (more than 33,000,000) different network structures. Nihilists need distinct adverbs for each of these. As a result, Nihilism requires millions of fundamental laws of nature, each expressed by different adverbs, resulting in a horrendously complex theory.

  In addition, even if Nihilism were the simplest theory of the world, we wouldn't have good reason to embrace it unless it were adequate to our data. We want a theory that accords with the facts as we know them pre-theoretically. Our ethical, moral, and legal practices presuppose the existence of things like persons and pieces of property. In addition, whenever we make choices in light of what we take to be our own self-interest and the interest of the people we care about, we presuppose that we and our loved ones exist. It seems reasonable to take the presuppositions of our established, natural practices as true, at least provisionally: