This Column Is for You, Mom

If you’re anything like my mother, you’re suspicious of philosophy (you’re also worried that I don’t call you often enough). It’s the only field in which reification (that is, ‘thing-ification’) is a genuine problem­—where the breakthrough discovery of early modern logic was that “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white, and where “this statement is false” is true. As an academic field, it is, for you and for my mom, a major of pseudo-problems. (In case you were worried, I love my mom a lot and will call her this afternoon.)

This column is about why some (though not all) of philosophy’s extravagances are worthwhile, and why ‘common sense’ cannot and ought not solve the problems philosophers play with.

So tell me something: is the present king of France bald? Suppose you say no. Does that mean the present king of France has a full head of hair? Well that wasn’t what you were trying to get at, now was it? Suppose you say yes—now you’re admitting that the present king of France is bald, and that seems even worse. How do we wriggle out of this?

Maybe there actually is a present king of France in some sense. He might not exist in the real world like you or me (though as any amateur philosopher will say, I’m not sure you’re real either), but he’s out there, maybe the way ‘32’ is out there, or the way ‘courage’ is out there.

There are two problems with this response. First, if we admit that the present king of France exists in some sense then we’re going to have big trouble with a sentence like ‘The present king of France does not exist.’ Given our current interpretation, it seems like what we’re saying is ‘the present king of France, who exists, does not exist,’ and plainly that is a contradiction.

But there’s another problem—the present king of France just doesn’t exist, and it’s stupid to say he does. If this thought occurred to you, you’re taking a common sense approach to the problem, and in the first half of the last century, a good number of philosophers would have agreed with you.

In 1909, Bertrand Russell wrote arguably the most famous article in the history of analytic philosophy that took exactly your attitude. Russell put it this way: this problem and others like it are pseudo-problems, and lots of philosophers tie themselves up in metaphysical knots postulating about present kings floating out in space, existing in some sense. The solution to these problems lies not in the nature of existence or king-ness or baldness, but in the nature of language, and if we look at the deep logical structure of these questions, we reveal that there is nothing troublesome about them.

So here’s what we say: ‘The present king of France is bald’ doesn’t tell us something about a king, namely that he’s bald. It actually tells us two things. First, that there exists something, let’s call it x, and that if x is the present king of France. Second, x has the predicate ‘is bald’.

So let’s ask the question yet again: is the present king of France bald? Now we don’t respond with a simple yes or no. Instead we say: there exists no x such that x is the present king of France, and since no x exists, the predicate ‘is bald’ cannot apply. A little long-winded, sure, but it seems to solve the problem, and solves it without resorting to fancy philosophical metaphysics.

Now I think that’s a fine solution to a difficult problem. But I want to make the case that if we accept Russell’s analysis, we’re going to have to abandon common sense to some degree, and we’re going to have to embrace some of those troublesome metaphysical concepts that we were so wary of.

The trouble is with names. If I ask you, ‘Who was Louis XVI?’ you might very reasonably say to me, ‘Louis XVI was the French king executed in 1793,” or to use Russell’s clunky framework, there exists some x such that x was the king of France executed in 1793, and Louis XVI was that x.

Now I ask you, ‘Is it possible that Louis XVI could not have been king? I don’t know much about French history, but what if he abdicated the throne, became a poet, or devoted his life to charity? Isn’t that possible?’ And surely you’d say to me, ‘yes, it is.’
But let’s apply Russell’s framework one last time. When you say it is possible that ‘Louis XVI was not the king,’ what you’re saying is it’s possible that ‘there exists some x such that x was the king, and x was not king,’ and that sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it?

The solution seems to be something like this: our logical analysis of statements works just fine when we’re talking about descriptions: the present king of France, the present president of Columbia, etc. But when we’re talking about names—Louis XVI, Lee Bollinger etc.—well then we’re talking about something special. Names don’t just pick out descriptions—they pick out essences, ideas, or abstract metaphysical objects. But it seems then we’re pretty far away from the common-sense intuition that drove us from the beginning.

Mom, nothing in philosophy is gained easily.

Brendan Ballou is a Columbia College junior majoring in philosophy. Philosophical Explanations runs alternate Tuesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com