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Notes
The example is from Brand (1971, pp. 45–46).
I don’t mean to imply that omitting is the same thing as refraining, nor that every absence of action is an omission. In fact I believe neither of these things. I discuss differences between omitting and refraining, and in which cases an absence of action is an omission, in Clarke in press.
The first and second points here are raised by Varzi (2006, p. 131).
The example is from Mele (1997, p. 232), though he employs it for a different purpose.
I’ve adapted the example from Varzi (2006, p. 135), making changes to illustrate my points here.
Armstrong (1978, pp. 23–29) advances these reasons for rejecting negative properties.
Priest says at one point that we needn’t think of the polarities “as objects. They simply code the fact that there are two ways in which [a property] may relate to [an object], namely, positively or negatively” (2000, pp. 317–318). Stating the view this way suggests that it distinguishes two kinds of ties–instantiation and non-instantiation–that can each bind an object and a property into a state of affairs.
Both Beall and Priest cite Barwise and Perry (1983) as a source of their view. Barwise and Perry take each “abstract situation” to include as a constituent 1 or 0: 1 if the object or objects instantiate the property or relation at the location in question, 0 if they don’t.
But abstract situations are introduced as representations of what are called “real situations.” The former are “abstract set-theoretic objects, built up from the individuals, properties, relations, and locations abstracted from real situations. They play no role in the causal order. People don’t grasp them, see them, move them, or even know or believe them” (1983, p. 9). In contrast, real situations “are not sets, but parts of reality” (p. 58).
Barwise and Perry caution: “It is important…not to confuse real situations with their abstract counterparts” (1983, p. 58). When they list the things that make up real situations (7, 50), nothing corresponding to the 1- or 0-constituent of an abstract state of affairs appears in the list. What would it be?
“The numbers 0 and 1,” Barwise and Perry say, “unlike the individuals [who partly make up real situations], are just tools we use to build up our system of classifying real situations” (1983, p. 8). They are, I take it, just constituents of representations of real situations.
Armstrong (2004, p. 59) makes a similar point. He posits “totality states of affairs” as truthmakers for truths such as (our imagined truth) that there are no wooden spheres. Such a totality might consist of positive states of affairs involving the sphere a together with the (higher-order) state of affairs of these being all the (lower-order) sphere-involving states of affairs. Totality states of affairs would be a kind of negative state of affairs, but none of the kinds we’ve considered here. They would, Armstrong says, give us limits but not absences.
Might omissions be said to be limits of this sort? One difficulty concerns wrongly identifying certain omissions. The totality state of affairs consisting of all that I did during a certain interval on a certain day (and the state of affairs of that being all that I did) isn’t both my omitting to get the milk and my omitting to pick up the dry cleaning, for it isn’t true that these omissions are identical.
Lewis (1992, p. 216) suggests this sort of treatment of negative existentials, such as that there are no unicorns.
In comments on this paper for the Bellingham meeting, Sara Bernstein suggested that what she calls failures—absences of things that could have or should have been—are possibilia.
Peter Forrest proposed this view during the discussion at Bellingham.
Several members of the Bellingham audience seemed to like this idea.
Another proposal is that omissions are things not identical with but constituted, at least in part, by the ways agents actually move their bodies at certain times (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, pp. 132–134). One difficulty for such a view lies in saying to what category of being these constituted entities belong. The constituting things are events, processes, or states of affairs; are the constituted things negative versions of one or another of these things? If so, my discussion in the text above bears on this view. A second kind of problem is that for many cases this view implies incorrect attributions of locations, times, causes, effects, and other features to omissions. I develop this criticism in Clarke (2011) and in press.
Varzi (2006, pp. 138–139) makes similar points, but his focus is on analyses of sentences we might affirm regarding omissions. My concern here is not with analysis or logical form of sentences but with what entities must exist if those sentences are to be true.
The causal notion isn’t the only one. Philosophers fond of a view of the world as multi-leveled often take higher-level entities to result non-causally from lower-level things. And perhaps sums result from addition. But it isn’t either of these notions that I’m employing here.
Weinryb (1980) argues that omissions have no consequences. His argument relies on a claim that omissions cause nothing. But ‘causal consequence’ isn’t pleonastic.
Some writers have proposed views of absence causation aimed at selecting some among the many causally relevant absences that might be said to be causes. McGrath (2005) and Thomson (2003) advance views on which absence causation has a normative dimension. I find this doubtful. Dowe (2010) suggests that we might apply Yablo’s (1992, 1997) proportionality constraint to select which among various candidate absences to count as causes. However, as Dowe observes, the resulting view would commonly conflict with folk judgments about absence causation.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper, I want to thank Kent Bach, Mark Balaguer, Sara Bernstein, John Heil, Stephen Kearns, Al Mele, Achille Varzi, and the audience at the 2011 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference.
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Clarke, R. Absence of action. Philos Stud 158, 361–376 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9881-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9881-z