Does God have more existence than a worm?

I guess you'd have to have a sense of some things about whom existence statements have more truth. The Russell-Quine-van Inwagen traditon of the existential quantifier as all-or-nothing will say that once you're able to quantify over something to put it into a sentence, then it all-out exists. I imagine you don't mean to do this with worms vs. God, so I'm curious what sort of things exist less (so to speak) through having existence claims that are less true. Do you mean something like when something is coming into existence it gradually becomes more true that it exists? If so, what part of the sentence is vague? Does it matter if you use names or definite descriptions? I'm just throwing out some ideas here because I like the idea but don't know where to go with it. I think it may well solve some of my own problems in the area I my dissertation is going to have something to do with (but got stalled because of obstacles with this sort of thing).

Since you're floating for responses, I'll offer mine. I can't really makes sense out of the claim that one thing "has more existence" than another. I understand what it means for one thing to have a qualitatively better existence than another thing (I think I have a qualitatively better existence than a worm, for instance). But do I have more "existence" than a worm? Only if "existence" is assigned some irregular meaning. Metaphysically, it doesn't seem that a being with a lower quality existence is any closer to non-existence than one with a higher quality existence. If one of my arms is severed off in a car accident, then I suffer an evil, and have an imperfection that I did not have before. Yet, am I thereby moved closer to non-existence? Perhaps I move closer to inactivity, and perhaps inactivity is similar to non-existence.

I would also strongly oppose the view on theological grounds...but that would take us into all sorts of rabbit trails.

I'd be interested in seeing someone really try to cash this out.

Thanks for the responses thus far; here are some further thoughts.

Take the propositional function �x has p� where p denotes a property that has borderline cases (or a property that comes in degrees). Now take a borderline case�call it borderline. The sentence �Borderline has p� has a degree of truth less than 1, but not 0. Now suppose p is a property such that Borderline exists iff Borderline has p. It seems to me that this will be a case in which Borderline has degree of existence less than 1 but not 0 (by the symmetry between truth and existence). (I�ll note here that I think a supervaluationalist will deny this last move�but right now I�m not interested in that issue; I�m just interested in whether a degree of truth apparatus can be used to unpack the notion of degrees of existence.)

As I read Edwards he has something stronger in mind. I take Edwards to claim that there are three existence-constituting properties: power, knowledge, and moral perfection. On Edwards� view since God has all three properties with no finite limit he has complete existence. Since the null set completely lacks these properties it has complete non-existence. All other things have a degree of existence proportionate to the extent they have the three existence-constituting properties.

Ted,

A good place for you to look would be Barry Miller's _The Fullness of Being_ (Notre Dame, 2002). I'm not completely sold on Miller's views on existence, but the book is very much worth reading. Miller accepts the Fregean second-order property view of existence as a plausible account of many uses of the term "exists," but he also thinks there is a first-order property of existence. I think it is pretty clear that on his account of this first order property, it does indeed make a great deal of sense to speak about having more or less existence.

You might also find Gilson's classic _Being and Some Philosophers_ to be helpful.

Best,

Patrick Toner

I have been thinking along these lines, off and on, stimulated by reflection on Plato. The Platonic view of existence, so far as I can tell, is predicative; to be is to be F, for some F. But F, of course, is going to be a Form, and ordinary particulars participate in Forms to varying degrees and in various ways. It's key that we treat Forms not just as universals but as exemplars or paradigms. So some people are going to be "real men" in roughly the sense we use that phrase--closer approximations to a paradigm--and others will be somewhat less real men.

My educated guess is that Russell's key move in establishing the no-degrees view of existence as the dogma it is today is precisely the insistence on excluded middle, i.e. the denial of vagueness. From the point of view of logic as an approximation and formalization of ordinary language, this is a travesty; we use vague terms all the time. It is, rather, a stipulation that makes formalization easier. But once you establish that propositions are either true or false, and that every object either has a property or it doesn't, then the way is closed for at least the Platonic kind of predicative degrees of being.

Patrick,
Thanks for the references! I was not aware of the Miller book. BTW, if you have the time could you remind me what a Fregean first order and second order property is? I�d like to have a better grasp of how Miller�s account is supposed to go.

Heath (and all)

Interesting thoughts. I had the similar thought that Russell�s remarks on the existential quantifier developed out of his commitments to classical logic and classical semantics. As you probably know there has been a lot of recent work on vagueness that has resulted in non-classical systems�e.g. degrees of truth. The logic of degrees of truth can be tricky (I like modeling degrees of truth along the lines of probabilities), but it has the huge advantage (I think) of dealing with the facts of vague language.
My thoughts on degrees of existence developed from thinking about degrees of truth and a truth-maker principle. Take a sentence with degree of truth less than 1 but not 0, where it predicates an essential property of an individual, say human being of Tom. If this is true to degree .7 then by the truth maker principle Tom must have human-personhood to .7 (or something like that), in which case I can get myself in the frame of mind in which I�m comfortable with saying that Tom has less than full existence.

I remember reading the collection NeoPlatonism and Contemporary Thought. One of the papers was on science and neoPlatonism. The idea, as I dimly recall it, is that degrees of reality might correspond to the illusions inherent in our descriptions. Thus descriptions of "regular world" items like a chair are less real than say a description in terms of atoms and electrical forces. Those in turn are less real than a description in terms of quarks and mesons and basic forces. As one moves up the descriptive tree, one also finds that the entities one talks about are less and less material in the traditional sense. (Well David Bohm might disagree -- but in most discussions of QM that's a good assertion)

I'm not sure how that would apply to God or reconciling the neoPlatonic aspects of theology with modern science. But there were several essays that were quite convincing. There is also an interesting paper on C. S. Peirce as a neoPlatonist that is quite interesting. It's by the very respected Peirce scholar Kelly Peirce and some might find it interesting:

http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/

There are also the discussions of Derrida or Heidegger in terms of neoPlatonism in numerous books that might offer a way of thinking about this. I'm not sure they fit the "degrees of being" discussion well. (At least I can't think offhand how to read that part of neoPlatonism in them) With Peirce it is a little easier due to the move from chance and indeterminism to pure determinism or substance.

One quick followup, to second Jeremy, I think considerations of vagueness might be an interesting way of critiquing Russell on this matter. Allow me to link to an excerpt from Peirce on vagueness. He doesn't discuss all the meanings of vagueness that have become topics of investigation the last few years in philosophy. So it is far more limited than some might expect. But it seems relevant to this discussion.

http://www.libertypages.com/clark/peirce1.html

Ted,

Frege believed that existence was a property of concepts, not of objects. On Frege's view (and please let me give the important disclaimer that I am speaking very roughly here) If I say "elephants exist" I am *not* predicating a property (existence) to certain objects (elephants). I am, instead, saying that the concept (or property) _elephant_ has instances. Since existence is a property that applies only to concepts, and never to objects, it is a second-order property.

A first-order property, on the other hand, is a property that can properly be predicated of objects. And according to Frege (as well as Russell, who couched all this stuff somewhat differently [and not as well, I think], but was getting at pretty much the same idea) existence can never be such a property. The reasons for their insistence that existence is not a first order property are pretty obvious--think Meinong's jungle. (For instance, one might insist that if existence is a first order property, then non-existence must be as well: but what the heck can that be predicated of? Etc.)

Barry Miller, however, has some very interesting things to say by way of defusing the alleged absurdities that arise from claiming that existence a first order property. I'm afraid I can't quite see how to put his thoughts on that matter into capsule form in order to give you the flavor here. However, I believe there was a review of his book awhile ago at NDPR that you could take a look at if you're interested.

Patrick

First-order properties are the properties of first-order logic. You attribute properties to things. When you move up to second-order logic, you can take the simple formulas of first order logic and then apply a predicate to them. That's what the existential quantifier was for Frege, and that's why Patrick refers to it as a second-order property. It's a property that can be applied to sentences in first-order logic. This isn't any more than Patrick already said, but sometimes it helps to see a different way of putting it.

Just a further comment on two different notions of "degrees of existence".

I was advocating a predicative sense of this term: Tom could be a man to degree .7 if "man" was a vague term, or a term with a paradigm built in, and Tom was seven-tenths of the way to full-blown manhood. This is, I think, the sense in which Plato and Aristotle would have viewed degrees of reality. If we put this in terms of formal logic, the sentence Mt is true to degree .7 because the predicate applies to the object to degree .7 . That is, it is the predicate that carries "degrees".

But in the original post on this thread, I think Edwards must have had a different view. On the predicative view, it would be possible for God to be a full-blown genuine deity, and a worm to be a full-blown genuine worm, and both have degree of reality 1.0. Edwards evidently doesn't believe this: he locates the "degrees" in the subject term. The worm, as it were, sort of fades out of existence compared to God.

A further speculative thought is that it is a difference between Greek and Christian concepts of existence, first brought to a head by Aquinas, that makes these different views possible. On the Greek view, matter is eternal; something exists, or fails to, because its parts get rearranged in the right way or don't. But Christianity introduces the idea of creation ex nihilo, where it is possible to conceive of something actually popping into existence. The Greek view therefore cannot locate degrees of existence in the subject term, because what something is made of isn't going anywhere. On the Christian view, on the other hand, one can sort of think of something popping into existence to a degree.

Let me emphasize ... the above is *very* speculative!

Heath,

The Gilson book I mentioned earlier has some interesting things to say about Plato on existence. In particular, Gilson argues (and I find this convincing) that for Plato, existence *is* self-identity. Thus, only the Forms really ARE, because only they are really self-identical: that is, eternal and unchanging. Other things, as Plato says so often, both are and are not. The sensibles, then, have less existence (less self-identity) than the Forms.

There is scholarly dispute over whether this self-identity stuff has to do with whether a sensible horse is imperfectly a horse: it sounds like you side with those who read Plato that way. I do not. I think Plato would say that a horse is really (fully) a horse, but that it isn't unchangingly a horse, so it has less existence than the Form horse. Again, sensible horses are not eternally and unchangingly horses: they are only ephemerally horses. So the reason they have less existence than the Form horse is not that they are only .7 of a horse, but, rather, that they won't be horses for very long, and haven't been such for very long.

The main point I'm trying to make here is that when Plato talks about existence, he means unchangingness. It's an entirely different notion than the Quinean one: to be is to be the value of a variable. Plato quantifies over sensibles all the time, so he must admit they exist in Quine's sense--and I expect he'd think it's completely nonsensical to talk about degrees of existence in that sense. But he's got a different (better?) idea of existence than Quine (and most of the rest of us 21st century-types).

I'm sorry if this is terribly unclear--I'm rushing because a thunderstorm is rolling in as I write.

Sincerely,

Patrick Toner

Very helpful comments, Patrick. I have not read Gilson; I thought I was taking my views on Plato from Nehamas' influential paper, "Plato on the Imperfection of the Sensible World" but I may be misconstruing him.

I was also thinking yesterday in an Aristotelian vein about degrees of existence. Aristotle's idea, I think, is that things are more real to the extent that they are actual rather than potential. Since God is pure act, and everything else is to some extent acted upon, God is more real than anything else. I am not sure I understand this (I would have thought that, say, worms could be complete actual worms; so that "being actual" for Aristotle must not equate with "being an actual F") but it might lend itself more to the Edwardsian line.

Best,

Thanks for the comments re first and second-order properties. Here are some further (exploratory) thoughts about whether degrees of truth coupled with the symmetry between truth and existence may provide a way to make sense of whether existence statements may be partially true (and this as a way of making some sense of the notion of degrees of existence). I have to say I'm no longer optimistic about this.

What do you think about a Tarski-schema for degrees of truth?

(TD) �a is F� is true to degree d iff a is F to the degree d.

One way to understand the right-side of the biconditional is that a is F to the degree d just in case a exemplifies F-ness to degree d. It seems to me that vagueness considerations provide ample motivation for the notion of partial property exemplification. The problem (as I see it) is that even if this much is conceded it does not seem to imply that existence statements could be partially true. It seems that at most it�d be the case that there exists an x such that x is F to degree d. And this is something that is either the case or not.

The most obvious example I know of something whose existence takes a truth-value greater than zero but less than one is Schrodinger's cat. Another case might be Pascal's wager - one could say that, for Pascal, God has a truth-value of 0.999 (recurring) or something of the sort.

If these examples seem rather forced, it's because, I would suggest, that there are two possible moves going on here:

(a) Russell's dictum is falsifiable by some move or other;

(b) Russell's dictum can usefully be relaxed in certain cases or areas.

I don't think you'll have much luck with (a) but deriving a set of rules for (b) might be fun.

Also, remember that Spanish has two verbs for 'to be' and (I think) you'd use different ones to say "God exists" and "God is everywhere." This - if I'm right, and even if I'm wrong about Spanish usage it's clearly possible for some language - would tend to support (b).

There is plenty of respectable theology, perhaps more from beyond the Christian tradition than within it, that would say something like "nothing can be said about God that can be said about not-God", which on first glance also looks close to (b).