Kevin and I have been discussing God's relation to necessary truths ad nauseam recently. I advanced a conceptualist argument for the dependence of necessary truths on God. Here I want to query people's intuitions on conceptualism.
Take the standard Plantingian account of modal actualism and replace every occurrence of "property" with "divine concept" and call that Actualist Conceptualism. (In terms of Jaeger's semantics, the universal domain would just be one of divine concepts rather than properties and everything else should be isomorphic.) The question I wan to ask is:
Why would anyone *not* be an Actualist Conceptualist?
It just seem so attractive. You solve all the same puzzles at a fraction of the cost.
I can only think of a few reasons not to go there right now.
1. Technical problems with the semantics.
2. Independent reasons to like Platonic entities.
3. Independent reasons not to like conceptualist account of necessary truths.
4. Existence of necessary truths no accountable for by concepts.
Of course, you could also not like Plantingian actualism (I prefer Adams's account), but my question here is really addressed to those who do. In other worlds, if you accept that system, why not this one which is structurally the same but with half the entities?
So I'm wondering what people's intuitions are here.
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Technorati Tags: ad nauseam, independent reasons, conceptualism, semantics, god, intuitions, platonic, modal, jaeger, occurrence, fraction, wan, entities, puzzles, existence, universal, domain
Trent,
I think the theistic actualist conceptualist view you describe is definitely superior to the Platonist view that takes abstracta to exist independently of God, for the sorts of reasons you give.
I'm not too keen on Plantinga's nonconstituent ontology, however. I prefer an Aristotelian-type realism that has universals existing in rem and also ante rem in the mind of God.
Excellent resource! I was looking for something like this for a while now. I will recommend you guys to my peeps :)
Trent, two things here. First, Plantinga would probably want you to say what a concept is first. And it looks like the answer will appeal to properties: the concept of red is a some relation between an individual mind and a property. In response, I suppose you'll want to clarify things in the other direction. Any ideas how to do that?
Jon, I've been thinking about this while I try to find sources on the subject. Suppose I just say the following two things:
1. I have at least as good a pre-analytic grasp on what concepts are as I do what properties are.
2. Properties *just are* concepts (and the exemplification relation *just is* the "falling under" relation).
I'm not sure how bad a position that puts me in. The move is to say that what makes sentences of the form "a has F" true is the fact that a falls under God's concept [F]. Now, I waited so long to say this because I was plagued by the following question: What is it in virtue of which a falls under [F]? It seems like a really natural answer would the that it has some *property* and there we go again.
Brian Leftow makes a proposal which I explore a bit here (http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/online_papers/2006/09/theistic_metaph.html#more), but that discussion is quite general so maybe this topic should be pursued independently.
Leftow takes some kind of functionalist stance--details not specified--w.r.t. concepts. In some way or other concept-possession facts are facts about God's activities. This requires a Quinian view of events, but that seems natural for someone trying to go nominalist. Many details remain, but the strategy seems like a good one: deflate properties to concepts and concepts to behavior. It's a familiar move (with familiar costs and benefits) and it leaves the theist with some nice results: Rather than there being infinitely many necessary beings independent of God, there is just God's concrete act of being.
That was the wrong link. Here is the right link to the further discussion:
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2006/09/theistic_metaph.html#more