Absence and Nothing: the Philosophy of What There is Not
Forthcoming monograph with Oxford University Press, in production
Nothing is not. Yet it seems that we invoke absences and nothings often in our philosophical explanations. Negative metaphysics is on the rise. It has been claimed that absences can be causes, there are negative properties, absences can be perceived, there are negative facts and that we can refer to and speak about nothing. Parmenides long ago ruled against such things. Here we consider how much of Parmenides’ view can survive. A soft Parmenidean methodology is adopted in which we aim to reject all supposed negative entities but are prepared to accept them, reluctantly, if they are indispensable and irreducible in our best theories. We then see whether there are any negative entities this survive this test. Some can be dismissed on metaphysical grounds but other problems are explained only once we reject another strand in Parmenides and show how we can think and talk about nothing. Accounts of perception of absence, empty reference and denial are gathered. With these, we can show how no truthmakers are required for negative truths since we can have negative beliefs, concerning what-is-not, without what-is-not being part of what is. This supports a soft ontological Parmenideanism, which accepts much though not all of Parmenides’ original position.
Contents
1. Soft Parmenideanism
What is not sometimes seems to matter just as much as what is. But Parmenides, in the oldest surviving argument in the West, said that nothing is not anything. He also argued that nothing comes from nothing, we cannot know nothing, nor think or speak about it. Soft Parmenideanism would be an acceptance of some but not all of what Parmenides claimed. It also suggests a methodology. We should avoid negative entities if we can but admit that we might have to accept them under some circumstances, namely where they are irreducibly negative and an indispensable part of our best scientific or philosophical theory. We will proceed by looking whether anything meets these conditions or whether some form of soft Parmenideanism survives such a test.
2. Negative Properties
Some believe that there are negative properties, such as being non-red or non-circular. Armstrong had attempted a detailed refutation of negative properties since he did not want negativity to be a part of what there is. His arguments were unsuccessful. He thought that sharing a property meant having something in common but two things could both be non-red because one was all blue and the other was all yellow. But this begs the question since only if we have already ruled out non-red as a real property can we say that those two things do not share something. There seems no conclusive argument against negative properties but nor are there conclusive arguments in their favour either. The question of their reality can only be settled after we have looked at other matters.
3. Nonentities
A diverse range of ‘things’ can be viewed as nonentities; that is, negative particulars. Some of the main candidates are considered to see whether anything about them threatens the soft Parmenidean project. Some think of holes as absences, for instance, since they are where something else isn’t. We can think of a hole instead as immaterial and dependent on their hosts, drawing a distinction between real holes and negative, non-existent holes. Similarly, negative facts, limits and boundaries, privations, shadows, omissions, negative norms, negative epistemic states, and logico-mathematical entities such as zero and the empty set are considered. None of them appears to pose a serious threat to soft Parmenideanism.
4. Causation by Absence
Absences sometimes appear to be causes, such as when a houseplant dies due to lack of water. This would be problematic, however, because if absences can be causes it would follow, by the Eleatic principle, that they exist. The reality of causation by absence can be challenged, however. It is not clear that something ever comes from nothing, in the sense of being caused by it. Further, if absences are causes, it seems that there is nothing to stop a vast escalation of causes for every effect that occurs since among its causes would be the absence of everything that could have prevented it. We should say instead that absences can be invoked in the explanation of events but in non-causal explanations. The absence of F can be an explanation of G where had F occurred, G would not have. This contains no commitment to any absence being causally powerful.
5. Mere Possibilities
The mere possibilities are the possibilities that are not also actual. It would seem that they have no being but some attempts to account for them effectively give being to them: to say that they are actual at some other world or that they reside within the causal powers of things. This seems to grant mere possibilities both non-being and being, against Parmenideanism. Instead, a fictionalist stance is advanced wherein mere possibilities are fictional recombinations of already existing elements. Such recombinations have no being themselves but they can still be grounded in what there is. The Parmenidean preference is for a grounding in nature rather than other possible worlds since our knowledge of other worlds is largely informed by our knowledge of this world.
7. Perception of Absence
We are able to see what is not there, such as when a car has been stolen and is not where the owner expected it to be. There is some kind of phenomenological feel to such discoveries but it is uncertain and elusive. There is a distinction between seeing the absence of something and merely inferring its absence from what is seen. Two theories of how it is possible to see what is not there are considered: perceptual theories, which claim absences can be experienced, and cognitive theories that appeal to an inference. Both have problems. Perceptual theories struggle to say how something that is not there can be an object of perception while cognitive theories cannot say how the required inference is drawn. As an alternative, an evolved mechanism is invoked that allows a non-deductive inference to an absence that is then presented in the mind as experiential.
8. Empty Reference
We seem able to talk about things that do not exist, such as centaurs, Oliver Twist and the highest prime. But the axiom of existence tells us that we can refer to something only if it exists, since reference is a relation. What, then, is it to which we refer in the case of non-existents? Various proxy referents are dismissed since they will either trivialise statements about non-existents or give implausible theories of meaning. Instead, we should think of our statements as being about non-existents instead of referring to them where this involves only a pretended referring. We can distinguish pretended reference from unintentional reference failure by the factive component required for genuine reference. Aboutness can be a substitute for reference and, if based on a public theory of meaning, it allows us to talk about what does not exist.
9. Negative Truth
Truths are supposed to be made true by something that exists, such as a fact, according to truthmaker theory. What, though, of apparent truths concerning what is not the case? How can they be made true by something that is? This paradox of negative judgement has been re-articulated by Molnar. We must either meet his challenge, of identifying the positive truthmakers for the negative truths, or we must reject at least one of the premises that jointly entailed that there were such truthmakers. Attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Candidate positive truthmakers usually rely on smuggling in some negative component. It also looks difficult to reject any of Molnar’s premises since doing so comes at a seemingly high price. At present, this problem remains unresolved.
10. Negation and Denial
It is assumed that we can assert that something is not the case. A simple alternative would be to deny that thing instead. The equivalence thesis, however, says that denial is simply equivalent to asserting the negation, hence we do not need a separate act of denial in addition to assertion. We have seen, however, that such a move leads directly to an insoluble problem of finding truthmakers for negative truths. Instead, the equivalence thesis could be rejected and there are some reasonable grounds to do so. Denial has distinct functions from the functions of assertion. Assertion requires a truthmaker and is relative determinate. Denial, in contrast, is conventionally responsive and directly registers incompatibility. This suggests that denial is prior to negation though the latter has become the standard way of marking the former. The account tells us that rather than assert not-P, we are better simply denying P.
11. Negative Belief
We are in a position to assess the fortunes of the soft Parmenidean project. A number of putative negative existents were dismissed as no threat to the project but there remained a number of outstanding metaphysical problems, such as whether there were really negative properties and how negative truths were made true. To solve these, we needed to consider how we are able to talk about nothing without existential commitment to it. This required an account of perception of absence, showing how we gain an idea of absence, and then an account of empty terms, showing how we can talk about what is not. Finally we gave an account of denial as an alternative to asserting a negative. When we put these together, it explains how we can have negative beliefs concerning what is not the case without having to treat any absence or nothing as if it is something.