[lit-ideas] Meinong's Jungle
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2011 16:37:10 EDT
As we discuss the sound Popper's Penguins make, and stuff (vide McEvoy,
"Re: Philosophy of Music") we may want to connect it with the great Meinong
and his junge. This excerpted from wiki:
"Meinong's jungle is the name given to the repository of non-existent
entities in the ontology of Alexius Meinong."
"Meinong ... believed that since non-existent things could apparently be
referred to, they must have some sort of being, which he termed sosein
("being so"). Thus, in Meinong's schema, entities such as unicorns, square
circles and golden mountains all have being."
Or 'propositions', or 'irreal numbers', or quite a few items of stuff that
Popper would have as World III, and I, in my imaginative moments, as World
IV and beyond. (As St Augustine said, "Don't ask me what the World IV is; I
know what it is, but if you ask me, I won't").
"The strangeness of such entities lead to this ontological realm being
referred to as "Meinong's jungle"".
"The jungle is described in Meinong's work Über Annahmen (1902)."
"The name, "Meinong's jungle" is credited to William C. Kneale, whose
Probability and Induction (1949) includes the passage
"after wandering in Meinong's jungle of subsistence … philosophers are now
agreed that propositions cannot be regarded as ultimate entities".
----- Grice would cite often from this book, which he found as
ontologically very crucial. Kneale could never have attended Austin's meetings
because
Kneale was Austin's senior, though.
:The Meinongian theory of objects (Gegenstandstheorie) was influential in
the debate over sense and reference between Gottlob Frege and Bertrand
Russell which led to the establishment of analytic philosophy and contemporary
philosophy of language. Russell's theory of descriptions, in the words of
P.M.S. Hacker, enables him to "thin out the luxuriant Meinongian jungle of
entities (such as the round square), which, it had appeared, must in some
sense subsist in order to be talked about"".
Hacker was until recently the depository of the job that Grice practiced
for DECADES at Oxford: Tutorial fellow in Philosophy at St. John's, St. Giles
Street, Oxford -- the little room to the left of the second building,
overlooking the backyard.
----
"According to the theory of descriptions, speakers are not committed to
asserting the existence of referents for the names they use.
Meinong's jungle is cited as an objection to Meinong's semantics, as the
latter commits one to ontically undesirable objects; it is desirable to be
able to speak meaningfully about unicorns, the objection goes, but not to
have to believe in them. Nominalists (who believe that general or abstract
terms and predicates exist but that either universals or abstract objects do
not) find Meinong's jungle particularly unpalatable."
--- and mutatis mutandis, items of World III which have no World I
counterparts, I allege.
"As Colin McGinn puts it, "[g]oing naively by the linguistic appearances
leads not only to logical impasse but also to metaphysical extravagance - as
with Meinong's jungle, infested with shadowy Being." An uneasiness with the
ontological commitments of Meinong's theory is commonly expressed in the
bon mot "we should cut back Meinong's jungle with Occam's razor".
---
McGinn never met Grice, but he dedicated a few pages to him in his
"Memoir". "He had only one tooth", he hyperbolises.
---
"Meingong's jungle was defended by modal realists, whose possible world
semantics offered a more palatable variation of Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie,
as Jaakko Hintikka explains: If you ask "Where are the non-existent
objects?" the answer is, "Each in its own possible world." The only trouble
with
that notorious thicket, Meinong's jungle, is that it has not been zoned,
plotted and divided into manageable lots, better known as possible worlds. —
Hintikka, Jaakko, The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic, p.
40[7]".
Hintikka, a Finn, contributed, to PGRICE, ed. Grandy/Warner, the festchrift
for Grice.
Related topics
Empty name, a name without a referent
Fictionalism, a theory which holds that one can talk about fictional
objects without being committed to their existence
Noneism, the philosophical belief that there are things that do not exist
References
Jacquette, Dale (1996).
On Defoliating Meinong's Jungle.
Axiomathes 1
Kneale, William C. (1949).
Probability and Induction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. p. 12.
Hacker, P. M. S. (1986). Insight and Illusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp.
p. 8.
Klima, Gyula (2001). "Existence and Reference in Medieval Logic". In Karel
Lambert. New Essays in Free Logic. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp.
p. 211.
McGinn, Colin (1993). The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Blackwell. pp.
p. 105. ISBN 0631188037.
-- Memoirs of a philosopher (for a reference to Grice).
-- In Woodfield, "Thought and object" for a defense of Grice's
telementationalism as non solipsistic. Avramides's theory is related.
Smith, A. D. (2002). The Problem of Perception. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. pp. p. 240.
Hintikka, Jaakko (1989). The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of
Logic. Kluwer Academic. pp. p. 40.
Further reading
Routley, Richard (1982).
Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond. Ridgeview Pub Co.
Crittenden, Charles (1991). Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional
Objects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801425204.
Jacquette, Dale (1997). Meinongian Logic: the Semantics of Existence and
Nonexistence. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 311014865X.
External links
Nonexistent Objects entry by Maria Reicher in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 2006-09-07
Grice, Vacuous Names -- citing "Meinong" and "jungle".
Grice, "Life and opinions", citing Kneale, "Probability and induction".
Cheers,
Speranza
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