A (0:00)

I'd like to welcome you all to LSE and to this Forum for European Philosophy Public lecture. I'm Danielle Sands. I'm a fellow at the Forum. I'm delighted to welcome Professor Tim Crane, who's our speaker this evening. Tim taught at UCL for many years, and he founded the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London. Since then, he's moved to Cambridge and he's now Knightbridge professor of Philosophy, and he's a professorial fellow at Peterhouse College. He's published mainly in the field of philosophy of mind. He's published numerous books and articles in this area, and his latest book, the Object of Thought, was published just last week by oup. We're particularly excited to have Tim back because for a long time he was a member of the executive committee at the Forum. So it's great that he's opening our program of events this year, and tonight he's going to speak to us on the nature of existence.

B (1:06)

So I have 45 minutes to talk about the nature of existence, starting now. Which reminds me, this is my question. What is existence? This is what I'm going to tell you about today. Reminds me of something that some of you may be old enough to remember, which is the Monty Python All England Summarize Proust competition, where people were invited to summarize Proust in five minutes. So I'm going to talk about the nature of existence for approximately 45 minutes. And thanks very much to the Forum and to Danielle for the invitation to talk about this. The question, of course, the nature of existence. I gave this title in order to pull in the crowds, which it obviously has done and disappointed most of them. The question is one which has many interpretations. There are many questions that are covered by those words. And I. I'm sorry if I'm going to disappoint you, but I did give an abstract of what exactly I'm going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about the thing that the great explorer, warrior and poet of the 16th century, Sir Walter Raleigh, did in his poem what Is Our Life? I don't know if you know, this beautiful little poem that he wrote with this beautiful line that the graves which hide us from the scorching sun are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Now, the question there he's addressing is, what is our life? What is it for us to exist in the particular way that we do? And this was also a question addressed by Heidegger, whose central question of his work, being in time, is what he called the question of being, which is the question of our being, the nature of our being. And he had a particular answer to that question, which was that the nature of our being is that we are those beings for whom our own being is a question. In other words, we're the only ones who ask these kind of questions. We're the only beings in the world that ask those kinds of questions about the nature of being and the nature of our own being. Now, so those are very important and central philosophical questions which I probably couldn't answer in 45 minutes. There's another question, too, which may, I'm sure, have occurred to you at many times in your life, which is not the question of what is the nature of our being, which assumes that we have being, but it's a question of which things have being or which things exist. Now, in some cases, these questions seem to be abstract questions or theoretical questions. Or in the words of the great English football commentator David Coleman, the question is academic, if not totally irrelevant. If philosophers talk about, for example, the existence of numbers, and this is a very important and central and ancient philosophical question. What is mathematical reality? What is it for claims about numbers to be true? What needs to exist in order for claims about numbers to be true? Many people aren't interested in those kinds of questions. But many people are interested in the question to which an answer is presupposed in this famous picture and the question of the existence of God. Now, that's another question. And I'm starting off this lecture in the way people often do by saying what I'm not going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about the nature of our being, and I'm not going to talk about what exists. So you can leave now if you want. There may be some people outside who could take your place. I'm going to talk about a question which is in some ways more tractable and some ways one which is presupposed by some of these questions. And it's something that I've written about in a little book that I've just published called the Objects of Thought. That's the question of what is it to exist? So I want to distinguish the question of what is the nature of our existence or our being? What exists? Which things exist? And there's another question which is, how do we know which things exist? But I'm distinguishing those from today's question, which is, what is it to exist? And by that I mean the same as what is it to be? So I talked about being, you know, Heidegger talked About the question of being. I talked about the nature of being, the nature of our being, and the nature of, well, which things have being or which things exist. And so I'm just using those words, being in existence, to mean the same thing. Now, of course, many philosophers have distinguished between being and existence, including some of the ones I'm going to talk about tonight. It won't actually be relevant to anything I'm going to say, but if anyone wants to ask about the difference between being in existence and we can talk about it in discussion, there'll be some time for questions at the end of this talk. Now, some philosophical answers in recent years to the questions of what is it to exist? Or what does it mean to exist? Or what is it to be? Rather predictable ones. To exist or to be is to occupy space and time. To exist is to be physical, so that everything is physical. Everything which has existence has some physical nature. Then there's this famous slogan coming from the American philosopher Quine, who said that to exist is to be the value of a variable, to be is to be the value of a variable. And if you don't know what that means, then I recommend you keep it that way. Your life will not be enhanced by knowing what that means if you don't know what it means already. And I can explain that in discussion too, if anyone has the temerity to disagree with me on this point, then of course you get philosophers who say there's nothing informative to be said about this question, or that the question is meaningless, or the question cannot be addressed, or the question rests on a mistake, or the question rests on a confusion. And there are those philosophers who use the word confusion when they mean mistake. And you'll know who they are. Now, I don't think this question rests on a mistake, and I don't think it rests on any confusion. I'm going to tell you what the question means and how to answer it. And the way I'm going to do that is that I'm going to think about what existence is. I'm not going to give you any sort of theory of existence or something like that, but I'm going to tell you some things about existence and I'm going to address that by contrasting it with non existence. In particular, what I'm going to do is to talk about what existing things are by contrasting them with non existing things. And I'm not going to accept any of the answers given above that to exist is to be in space and time, to exist is to be physical or to Be is to be the value of a variable or things like that. I'm going to contrast the existing with the non existing and see what we can say in the most general or abstract terms about that distinction. However, some people might immediately get concerned about this by well, if you think that there's actually something rather strange about the idea of a non existing thing, what does it mean to talk about non existing things? One dogma of contemporary philosophy is that the idea of a thing that does not exist is somehow contradictory to say that some. Because the idea of a thing is just the idea of something that exists. Things are what exists. If you ask, well, what what exists in the world, you might start off in a sort of modest way by saying, well, things, stuff. And they say, well, which things exist? And then you start giving your particular theory of what of what is in the world. But these people say by assuming the idea of the thing, you're assuming something like the idea of existence. So talking about things that don't exist is talking about in effect existing things that don't exist. And that's a bit like talking about red things that are not red. Something seems to be something contradictory. Now, for those of you who know what to be is to be at the value of a variable means that's basically the idea behind this criticism. The dogma of contemporary philosophy comes from American philosophy of language of the mid 20th century that says that the idea of the thing or the idea of something goes with the idea of existence. So it's just a confusion or a contradiction to say that there are things that don't exist, for example, example. Or to say some things don't exist, or to talk even about things that don't exist is a kind of confusion. Now you might have been tempted by that line of thought. Nonetheless, the fact is that we do talk about things that don't exist all the time. Not just in philosophy, but in ordinary life. Unicorns. Unicorns don't exist. There aren't any unicorns. We tell our children stories about things that don't exist. Santa Claus doesn't exist. And at some point you tell them Santa Claus doesn't exist. Or they find out from some mean person at school that Santa Claus doesn't exist. That's a discovery for them. They thought Santa Claus existed, maybe. And then they discover that he didn't. When I was preparing for this lecture, I did some research which of course involves that remarkable invention Google. These days, research on googling are the same thing. And I discovered that the learned publication USA Today on 17 October, which is my birthday. 2006 published a list of the hundred and one most influential people that never lived. Here are some of them. It's a very interesting list actually. And it is a little bit. Of course they're talking about people who never lived rather than people who never existed. And that might be a different thing. Of course not everything that exists lives, but maybe everything that lives exists. It's a little bit confusing. The Marlborough man, of course is a character in an advert for cigarettes. And in fact the Marlborough man died. On my view, you can't die unless you once lived. When people say the Marlborough man died, what they mean is the actor who played the. Who was the model in the photographs. He was the one, his name was Wayne McLaren. I think he died. It's interesting. The Marlborough man is the most influential person that never lived according to USA Today. Big Brother, of course, King Arthur, Santa Claus. And here's an interesting phenomenon which would be worth talking about which is two names for the same non existing thing which is a very interesting puzzle about when you have. When you can say you've got the same non existing thing if it's not something real. Their counting is a bit odd as well because they have Romeo and Juliet as number eight and they're two people number nine. Nonetheless, the pervasiveness of talk about the non existent is a fact which is so obvious that to somehow banish this talk and say that underneath when you say many things we talk about don't exist or many characters in Greek mythology didn't exist, maybe all of them or some people like to say that some characters in the Bible existed and some didn't. This is my view. I think Jesus existed. I think King Solomon I think probably existed. I think probably Moses didn't exist, Abraham didn't exist. That's my attitude to the Bible. So I can say some people in the Bible existed and some didn't. Well, there I am, I'm talking about the ones that didn't. So talk about things that don't exist is a pervasive feature of our talk and thought about the world. World. There are many distinctions and subtleties that you can make or draw in talking about these things. I want to draw a broad distinction, which is very important to me between one kind of thing that doesn't exist, fictional characters, by which I don't mean Mr. Cumberbatch, I mean the character Sherlock Holmes. I think Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist. You may disagree with me about that and that's fine. And we can Debate that. But I think that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character who doesn't exist. By a fictional character, I mean a character talked about in a fiction. So some characters talked about in fiction exist and some didn't. Napoleon, for example, was a character in War and Peace. Napoleon existed. So I'm talking about fictional characters who don't exist, like Sherlock Holmes, for example. If you're skeptical, you might think Sherlock Holmes is in some ways real or existing or has some sort of being, and then we can come back to that. But this is the distinction I make at the moment is fictional characters that don't exist. Where it's normally taken to be a proper understanding of the. The fiction that you know they don't exist, you don't think they're part of the real world. It's normally part of the proper understanding of the fiction. To properly grasp the fiction, you need to have accepted that they don't exist. And I want to distinguish that from another kind of non existent thing, non existent object, which is when you're mistaken about what exist. So if you're an atheist, you think that the theist, the believer is mistaken about whether God exists. And if you're right, they are mistaken. This is a representation of the planet Vulcan which doesn't exist. Planet Vulcan was a planet which was hypothesized or postulated by the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, who in 1859 he proposed that there was a planet between Mercury and the sun. And he used the methods he used to do that were the same methods that he used to hypothesize the planet Neptune about 10 years earlier. So with Neptune, he obviously thought he was onto a winner because then they found Neptune. Neptune does exist. It's out there. And he tried it again with Mercury to explain. Sorry, with Vulcan to explain some perturbation in the orbit of Mercury, which was unexplained by Newton's cosmology. And he said there must be a planet out there between Mercury and the sun, but it doesn't exist, there's no such thing. So Leverian made a mistake, he was in error because there is no such planet. And that's another kind of case. So that's different from Sherlock Holmes. No one's saying that Conan Doyle made an error in saying there was Sherlock Holmes because everyone knew what he was doing. So I want to make that distinction between error and fiction. And in general, I want to say similar kinds of things about both cases. I will say different things about them too, but in the general, for the point of this lecture I want to say we can say the same thing about cases of error and cases of fiction. So I say, and I've convinced you I know, that we do talk about things that don't exist. Are we just talking nonsense? It's the idea of a thing that doesn't exist, somehow contradictory or deeply confused. I want to say no, but then I have to say. But I have to then say to you, what are things that don't exist? What do I mean by this? A further question, which I'll come to right at the end of the lecture, is why it matters to understand the idea of things that don't exist. I'll only really address that at the end of my lecture. And when I say what are things that don't exist? Part of that question can be understood as what properties they have. And by properties I mean what people, what philosophers also call attributes or qualities or the features of things. I'm not distinguishing between the uses of any of those words. So the properties of things are things like the shape of something, its color, its mass or its weight, its density. All these things which are properties of people. If a person is attractive, that's a property of them. If a person is standing in a certain relation to another person, like it's being a cousin of some person, then that's a property too, or a relation. Some, sometimes called a relation, sometimes called a relational property. So all these things which are the features of things as opposed to things themselves, are what we call in metaphysics, what we call properties. So another way to put it is that the properties of things, or the properties things have, are things that are true of them. I shouldn't have said things twice there. What's true of things, what's true of the objects we talk about, those are the properties of things, things. So if you say Le Verrier is French, I said that a minute ago, that's true. Arthur Conan Doyle was an author, that's a property of him. And then you know, the table is brown because you have to, in every philosophy lecture you have to mention the table. There's always a table somewhere for some reason. That's what it's all about somehow it's all about tables. So this is what I mean by properties. So when I say what are non existent objects? You know, I want part of that question is asking, well, what kind of properties do they have? Because if you say what are insects? You say, well there these beings somewhere in the sort of phylogenetic tree that have these kind of. They have six legs or eight Legs, I can't remember now, six legs. They have a certain kind of body, they have certain kind of features. You describe things by describing their features. And that's the idea of a property is then going to be important property or a feature or quality or an attribute. All these words have been used in different ways. I'm using them all in the same way for simplicity, because nothing depends on it. And what I want to do is to contrast two distinct conceptions of things that don't exist, which are associated by two old bearded figures from the history of philosophy, Descartes on the left and the Austrian philosopher Meinong on the right. Now they have very different conceptions of things that exist or non existent objects. And I'm going to describe those and I'm going to say neither of them is right. Each of them got a little bit right, but neither of them got the whole thing right. The Descartes or the Descartes Malebranche view. I say because Malebranche Descartes, a philosopher who followed Descartes in some ways had this phrase, nothingness has no properties, in other words, nothing. So if non existence, non being is really literally nothing, then nothing can be true of it. It can't have any properties, it's just nothing. So this is what I'm calling the Descartes Malebranche view. As it happens, their view is much more sophisticated than this. So I'm just, I'm pinning this slogan on there, on them, because of this nice phrase, nothingness has no properties. So in this view, if Sherlock Holmes really is a non existent object, then he has no properties at all. He. We don't even know what we mean by he. What does a he referred to there? If Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is really a non existent object, then it's nothing, it has no properties. This raises the question then of how we distinguish between Pegasus and Sherlock Holmes if neither of them have any properties by which we distinguish them. Normally we distinguish things by their properties. We say, you know, people are distinguished by their facial appearance or their height, or their weight, or their DNA or their fingerprint or something like this. These are all properties of things by which we distinguish them. It seems that if literally, literally true that Sherlock Holmes is nothing and has no properties, then and Pegasus also has no properties, Vulcan has no properties, then how do we actually distinguish these things? Now that seems to be a rather confused thought. So that's the Descartes Malebranche view. On the other hand, there's Meinong's view and Meinong's view is that non existent objects have all the properties attributed to them. So in other words, if I'm talking about Sherlock Holmes and I say, you know, Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes was a detective and you say Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe, Sherlock Holmes took cocaine, he played the violin, you know, you're attributing all these properties to Sherlock Holmes, he's just got them just because we're attributing them. So non existent object has the properties attributed to them. Now I should say for those who know a little bit about this, that Meinong distinguished between objects that exist and objects that have being. Meinong thought that only spatio temporal things exist. He's one of those people who held one of the views I mentioned. Existence particularly is the mode of being which spatio temporal things have. And there are things which have different modes of being, things which have existence, which have being rather outside of space and time. And he called that mode of being subsistence. But outside existence and subsistence. He also thought there were things that had no being at all. And the famous example that he used would be took from John Stuart Mill was the round square. Mill thought was an absurd idea that there's a round square. Meinung thought, the round square is an object of thought, it's something we think about, it's an object of our discourse. It's contradictory. It can have no being, it doesn't exist or subsist. Nonetheless, he thinks that the round square is round. And he's got a point, I suppose. I mean it's not. I was going to say it's not square, but it is square, it's not triangular. You might want to say, well yeah, on the one hand, like Sherlock Holmes, even if he doesn't exist, Sherlock Holmes is a detective. He's a non existent detective, but he's a detective nonetheless. There are just some detectives exist and some don't. If you take that view and you know, then you could throw that back to me and say, well didn't you just say that some things exist and some don't. So why can't we say some detectives exist exist and some don't. Some of the inhabitants of Baker street exist and some don't. And I think the inclination to say that Sherlock Holmes is a detective, that he really is a detective even if he doesn't exist, comes from the thought, well he's not. Sherlock Holmes isn't an aerobics instructor or he's not a swimming pool instrument attendant, you know, there are many things he's not and you're getting things right in a certain sense. If you say that he's a detective. Anyway, Mynong. If you wrote a story where Sherlock Holmes, then you attributed the property of being an aerobics instructor to Sherlock Holmes, then Minon would say, well, there is an object of thought there that you've attributed being an aerobics instructor to, and that's you calling it Sherlock Holmes. So Meinock has a very liberal view. He just thinks all of these things have properties and that's because he had what he called the. He thought of the independence of being from being. So this is what his principle of independence was called, the independence of being from being. So whether or not something is. So whether or not something has a property that is. Is independent of whether it has being, that was his view. So that's his view. None of these things exist or have being. I mean, I'm just putting those things together, but that does not stop them having properties. Now there's. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's film the Purple Rose Of Cairo. Has anyone seen that film? It's one of the. One of the Woody anthems that doesn't have Woody Allen in it, which is a point in its favour. A sort of annoying little character that he is. He's not in that film. And it's a very poignant story about. Set in the Depression, where Mia Farrah plays a character who goes to the cinema every day to see the very same film. I think they can't afford to have another film, so they just keep playing the same film. And she falls in love with the character, character in the film who's tremendously handsome and charming and rich and everything. And one day the character in the film looks out of the film and sees her sitting there and says, oh, you're sitting here again. And jumps out of the film and talks to her and falls in love with her and. And it's very funny, actually. It's much funnier than the way I'm telling it. Then back in Hollywood, they get worried because the actor who plays that character is concerned that his fame and payment is going to be diminished by the fact that his character has now run off with someone else. So they send the actor out to wherever Mia Farrow lives and she has to choose between. And he falls in love with Mia Farrow too, and she has to choose between the actor and the character. And the character says, look at me, I'm handsome, I'm rich, I'm brilliant, I'm funny, I've got this beautiful House and the other guy says, yeah, but I'm real. So the idea that you might have to choose between something that has all these properties but isn't real and something that has the properties is real is part, I think, of what's indicative of what's rather peculiar about Meinong's view. There are these things out there that have these properties even if they're not real. They don't have being, they don't exist. What does it really mean? So those are the two views and I'm going to go for a middle way. It might be rather unfashionable these days. I think in the LSE they used to be really keen on middle ways or third ways or something. I don't know whether they do that now. Maybe they're going for fifth ways, but I'm going to go for a third way, which is a middle way. The truth often lies between two extremes. The one extreme is the Descartes Malebranche view that says non existent objects have no properties. The other is the minor view that they says they have all the properties they're represented as having. And my view is that non existent objects have some of the properties attributed to them, but not all. Now that might sound like a really weedy compromise. It's like on the one hand you've got these really strong views that say, like Malebranche says nothingness has no properties. On the other hand, Meinong says being and being so are completely distinct. And then I come along in the middle and say, well, I mean, you know, a little bit of both really. Just some of them do, some of them don't. But this is a very principled view and the it relies on the idea that some attributions of properties to non existent objects are actually incorrect. And I'm going to say Sherlock Holmes isn't a detective, Vulcan isn't a planet, and Pegasus isn't a horse, for example. And in this respect, attributions of properties to non existing objects are just like attributions of properties to existing objects. Some of them are correct. We make mistakes about things, we attribute properties to things that they don't have, and we are ignorant of the properties of things that things do have. The important point is the point that we can be in error about this. So this is going to be my view. I'm going to say some attributions of properties to non existent objects are incorrect. Now the two key questions I'm going to answer are first, what does it mean for an object to have a Property. So I'm going to answer that question first and then I'm going to say, oh, this PowerPoint has called this question one as well. But in fact that's question two. What kinds of property do non existent objects have? The first question is what does it mean for an object to have a property? Second is what kinds of property do these non existent objects have? You'll have noticed that I'm using the word object as well as thing. I'm saying things that don't exist. Non existent objects, those mean the same thing. So my first key question is what does it mean for an object to have a property? Now I've already said a little bit about properties. I said the word property, attribute, qualities, features. I'm using all these words in the same way to talk about, not to talk about an individual, an individual object, an individual person, but to talk about their features, like their height, their weight, their color, their attractiveness, their charm or whatever. The general principle I'm going to appeal to is that whenever we say something that it is such and such, that it's a certain way, that it has a color, a shape or size or something, we're predicating a property of it. Predicating is a linguistic act. It's saying of something that it has a property. And so, for example, you know, if you're saying something is red, red is the name of a property. It's a name for the property that we predicate of something when we say that it's red. So when you say of this, when you say something is a certain way, then you're predicating a property of it. You're saying something is true of it. Now in the philosophical discussion in the last 30 or 40 years or so, distinctions have been made between kinds of properties. And this is going to be very important for what I want to say. There are properties that just correspond to, in a one to one way with the kinds of words that we use to talk about them. What I mean by this is that you might say someone is tall. So you might say Sally is tall. You might say that she's 5 foot 8, you might say that she's over 5 foot 7, you might say she's between 6 foot and 5 foot 6. Or you might say she's 170 something centimeters. These are all different ways of talking about a property that she has, namely her height. This first way of thinking about properties, these are all distinct properties. So saying that someone's tall and saying that they're over five foot six or something or saying that someone is five. Well, actually it's better to say that someone is some particular person. Satisfied Sally is 5 foot 11? Or that she's 5 foot 11 and 1 quarter of an inch or something. These are all distinct properties of things. So for every type of way of talking about something, there is a distinct type of property. Properties are, so to speak, just the shadows of the ways we talk. But there's another way of thinking where the properties of things are the things that we discover about the world. If the properties are things are the things we discover about the world, then they can't just correspond simply to, in a one to one way between the different ways we have of talking about those things. Things. For example, if the property of being made of H2O molecules and the property of being water, it was a scientific discovery to discover that roughly speaking, they're the same thing. The property of being gold being made of gold and the property of being made of the element with the atomic number 79. Those are different ways of talking, but the same property. So it's natural to expect that we should be able to say this because we do the same with names. So, you know, two people can have one person can have two names. One person can be referred to in many different ways. We can talk about the same person in many different ways. So similarly, we can do the same thing with properties. So we might say that this, these seats are a particular shade of green. You can say that they're green. It's true to say they're green. It's also true to say that they are lime green. Let's suppose I don't know whether they're lime green. It's also true to say that they are green 257 or some very specific shade on the ultimate discriminable color chart, the discriminable point in the color chart. On one way of thinking of properties, those are all different properties on the first way. On the second way of thinking of properties, they could be all picking out the same property of this thing, namely the one color that these chairs actually have. So there are different ways of thinking of properties. The first way is what the American philosopher called David Lewis called the abundant way of thinking about properties. This is there are as many properties as there are phrases that we use to talk about them. And then the second way is what Lewis called the sparse way. I'm going to use a different term because I don't like this term abundant and sparse. But I just want to indicate for those who know that work of Lewis, that this is what I'm on about. I'm going to use the word spot substantial, the substantial properties of things for the second kind of thing, that it's one of the substantial properties of gold, that it is an element with the atomic number 79. And then the non substantial properties are all the other ones, the ones that merely correspond to the different ways we have of talking about things. Now I think these are two perfectly legitimate ways, ways of talking about the properties of things. We just have to be clear about which one we're using. So that's the heart of what I'm going to say, this distinction between two kinds of properties, non substantial properties, there are many of them. This is why Lewis calls them abundant, because you can talk about things and you can create complex ways of talking about things by using logical words like or. For example, so here's a red apple, but it's true of this apple that it's red or green in a sort of annoying, boring way, it's red or green because it's red. If something is red or green, then it's either red or it's green. So if that is true of something, it's true because it has one property, not this, what we might call this disjunctive property. So being red or green is a non substantial property. And the reason is that it doesn't tell you that much about the nature of something. To say it's red or green tells you a little bit, but it doesn't tell you that much. Meinong had a very good view. One of his views, a number of his views were very good. But when I say good, I mean correct. I mean right, I mean the same as what I think. And that was that the natures of things determine what they are, that things have natures. And he said this is a nice quote from a book, from a book about mine on by Carol Lambert where he said what an object is, Lambert says, is a function solely of its nature. It's in virtue of their natures that camels have humps. The number one is prime and, and this is the controversial bit, Mill's round square is round. So this is why Meinong said being is independent from being so because being, being so is the nature of something. When I tell you what the round square is, I tell you it's round and it's square. It doesn't have any being, but it's round and it's square. But I think Meinong's right to say what an object is as a function of its nature. And it's in virtue of their nature that camels have humps and that the number one is prime. But I think he's wrong to say that Mills round square is round, because I don't think non existent objects have any natures. The nature of something is its substantial properties, things that tell you what kind of thing it is. But Vulcan, take Vulcan as an uncontroversial example of something that doesn't exist. Vulcan doesn't have any substantial properties. What is if Vulcan were a planet, then it would have to have a certain mass or a certain weight, because all planets have mass and weight. That's what it is to be a planet. It's in the nature of the planet to be an object of a certain size. Hence the tragic demotion of Pluto from the status of planet that it's now a planetoid or something. Because it just wasn't big enough. It just didn't get there. It wasn't big enough. Now if Vulcan was going to be a planet, it would have to be big enough. It would have to have size and shape. But of course Vulcan doesn't have a mass. And this is one of the things then where this connects. Questions of error connect with questions of fiction. Because if Sherlock Holmes is a man, even if he's a non existent man, then the question is asked by philosophers. Well, if he's a man, then there must be some determinate number of hairs on his head at any one point. Because that's the way it is with men. They have a determinate number of hairs on their head at any one point. How many hairs did Sherlock Holmes have on his head? That's clearly a silly question that has nothing to do with the understanding of the Sherlock Holmes stories. You would not be entitled to sort of send the book back because it didn't tell you how many hairs Sherlock Holmes had on his head. Or to think that Benedict Cumberbatch was a bad representation of Sherlock Holmes because he had too much hair. That's just missing the point about the whole thing of what fiction is about. However, with a real person, there is a fact of the matter about how many hairs they have at any one time changes over time. But at any one time now we could count the numbers of hairs on your head. So that's part of your nature as a hairy being, that you have some sort of fixed number of hairs on your head. It's part of your nature. Just as it's part of the nature of a planet to have a certain mass, size. It's part of the nature of a horse, to be bred from other horses and to have the internal organs of a horse, for example. And for all these reasons I'm now going to just assert, because I'm coming to my final sort of 10 minutes and I'm going to assert that Pegasus isn't a horse for that reason, because he doesn't have the nature of a horse. Pegasus is a mythical horse, but mythical horses aren't horses. Sherlock Holmes isn't a detective because he never solved a crime in his life or even tried to solve a crime in his life, because he didn't have a life. Sherlock Holmes didn't live on Baker Street. If he lived on Baker street, he would have had to have lived somewhere on Baker Street. But if you listed the inhabitants of Baker street since Baker street came into existence, there will never have been a bit of space and time where Sherlock Holmes lived. Now that's what it means to live on a street, so to speak. The essence of living on a street is that at some point you've lived in a house or something there, that's your address on the street. So I'm labouring the point. Sherlock Holmes didn't live in Baker Street. Of course, in the books he lived in Baker street. That's a different claim. But he didn't live in Baker street and he wasn't a detective. So against my. I say that non existent objects do not have substantial properties. They don't have natures in that sense, they have no nature. That's my point against Meinong. So my point against Descartes and Malebranche is that there clearly are true predications of non existent objects. And my point against Meinong is that non existent objects have no substantial properties. So this is my. Sorry, this is my point against Descartes. Do they have any properties at all? Some people will say will agree with Descartes. Many contemporary philosophers and logicians agree with Descartes and say, no, they don't have any properties at all. But this is where I appeal to the obvious truths about the things I've said already. Not the bits of philosophy I've said, but rather the facts, namely that Vulcan was hypothesized by le Verrier in 1859 using the same method that he used to hypothesize Neptune in 1846. So I've said something of Vulcan. I've predicated being hypothesized by Le Verrier of Vulcan. So I said something true of him. And according to my definition of a property, the non substantial idea of a Property. I predicated a property of Vulcan. It's a non substantial property of Vulcan. That is something true of Vulcan. So that's against Descartes. There are many more cases, of course. A famous example from the philosophical literature on this from Terence Parsons is where Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any living detective, which I think is true actually. For example, Sherlock Holmes is more famous than Sir Ian Blair, who was the head of the Metropolitan Police for some time. Being more famous, I mean, you know, more people have heard of Sherlock Holmes than have heard of Ian Blair and any other living detective you could care to mention. I think that's probably true. So there are true predications of non existent objects. So Descartes is wrong. I say non existent objects have non substantial properties. But this gives rise then to my final question, which is what kind of non substantial properties do they have? It's all very well to say they have some non substantial properties and not others, but unless I can give you a principle for saying when they do and when they don't, I'm just sort of listing things I think are true and things I think are false. So what I need is some sort of principle which will tell you which kind of non substantial properties non existent objects have. You see, because there are many kinds of non substantial properties. But no non existent apple is red or green, because I told you in order to be red or green, you have to either be red or be green. But no non existent object is red and no non existent object is green. So what principle can be used to say which non substantial properties non existent objects have? Here I then find myself in agreement with something Bertrand Russell said, maybe because he said so many things about this subject and they were all in conflict with each other, that in the end you have to agree with some of the things he said. And there's a nice comment that he made about the difference between Napoleon and Hamlet when in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy he said that when you've taken account of all the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and readers of history, you have not touched the actual man. But in the case of Hamlet, you have come to the end of him. If no one thought about Hamlet, there would be nothing left of him. If no one had thought about Napoleon, he would have soon seen to it that someone did. Now he's right. So that's all there is to Hamlet. It's just what people are thinking about Hamlet or representations of Hamlet. That's not all there is to Napoleon. Napoleon and Hamlet are both fictional characters, but Napoleon's a bit more than a fictional character too. He's an existing person. So the answer to my question then is that non existent objects have only those non substantial properties which result from those objects being represented in some way. That's a bit of a convoluted way of putting it. I'm going to use the phrase, but let me give you some examples being postulated by Le Verrier Is a property of Vulcan. Being a mythical horse is a property of Pegasus. I say having a horn is not a property of a unicorn, but being represented as having a horn is. Being famous, I think is a property that you can only have if you're represented in a certain way. You can only be famous if people are representing you, talking about you, writing about you, thinking about you. That's what it is. To be famous is to be well known. Lots of people know about you. And maybe I say even non existence itself. So when you say, when I say Vulcan is non existent, that fact does not depend on the fact that Vulcan is non existent. Does not depend on the fact that Vulcan is represented. But Vulcan's only a non existent planet because someone proposed that it was a planet. If you don't say that, then you have to have this image that there are all these kind of non existent objects out there waiting for us to talk about them, which is just a bizarre way to think that things are. So I think even non existence itself is a property that depends on or results from the representation of objects in thought and language. I've got to call these properties representation dependent properties. I know I've introduced lots of terms for properties and I apologize for that. But this is the key term a representation dependent property. Representation dependent property is a property that something has because it is represented in a certain way. And I borrow this term from a nice book by Colin McGinn called Logical Properties. So there are representation dependent properties and non existent objects have them. So therefore also there are non representation dependent properties which are properties that don't reside in or derive from the fact that something is represented in a certain way. Being a horse, for example. Things aren't horses because they're represented as such. Something isn't gold because it's represented as such. You are not a person because you're represented as such by someone somewhere else. You have a nature and it's part of your nature to be a person. I say these are properties that things can have independently of whether they're represented in such a some way. So I say being a horse, being red or green, being red being A detective living on Baker street is a non representation to bend the property. Arguably that example is a little bit fiddly, but the basic idea is that whether or not you live on Baker street does not depend on whether anyone represents you as living on Baker Street. Notice that some of these properties are substantial in my previous sense and some are not. So this isn't quite the same distinction. Representation dependent properties are a subset of the non substantial properties. So this brings me to then my final point, which is the difference between existing things and non existing things. I say the difference lies in the kinds of properties that they have. Existing things can have substantial and non substantial properties. So existing things can have all those properties like being red or Green, being 50 miles from Baltimore, and all these properties, as well as properties like having the atomic number 79 and all these substantial properties. But they can also have representation dependent properties. So existing things can be famous. Of course, you know, the most famous people in the world exist. Like Madonna must be one of the most famous people in the world, I think. Or the Queen. These are famous people, they exist. Fame is a representation dependent property. So existing things can have representation dependent properties. But my point is that non existing things can only have representation dependent properties. And that's my way of spelling out the insight from Russell's remark about Hamlet and Napoleon. To learn more about this subject, I now turn to my sponsor, Oxford University Press, for this book, the Objects of Thought, which I recommend to you. It's 177 pages long and it only has three footnotes and it will give you more of the answers to this way of understanding. But let me say finally why this is a significant subject. This isn't just a word game or puzzle. In this book I defend a conception of the mind which says that mental representation, or what philosophers have called intentionality, is the essential feature of mental activity. Mental representation involves representing things that exist and things that don't exist. Philosophical theories of the mind have had tremendous trouble explaining how you can have this thing which represents things that exist and things that don't exist. And my view is that unless you understand the idea of things that don't exist and the representation of things that don't exist, then you won't understand the nature of the mind. That's why this subject is significant. Thank you very much.