Remaining Azzouni matters

       
        Apologies again to Jamin for not alloting him enough time.
        His critical point is a very good one, (not surprisingly) parallel to my basic complaint about Meinongians generally: What is the noncommissive quantifier supposed to mean?  (This is independent of and unmitigated by Azzouni's distancing of himself from Meinong, which consisted only of (a) perversely rejecting or pseudo-rejecting Sosein and (b) rejecting "mind independence.")  We talked about truthmaking, and I think Ram was right to point out that Azzouni is pretty clear about truthmakers for sentences about nonexistents.  But a truthmaker is not a truth-condition or other representation of meaning.
        In light of Azzouni's correct insistence on the prevalence of the noncommissive quantifier in natural language and in light of his (Noûs) remarks on our ability to understand a primitive concept without even having a word or phrase that unambiguously expresses that concept, I expect he would reject Jamin's question.  After all, why should there be another English expression that is synonymous with the noncommissive quantifier and is also somehow clearer than it?--which is what would be required for an illuminating answer.  And on pp. 67-73 he explicitly argues (convincingly or not) that the noncommissive quantifier admits of no paraphrase, is not merely substitutional etc.  If all that is right, then Azzouni is a Relentless Meinongian in my sense, i.e., one who simply insists that there are two distinct existential primitives and goes on to explain, "Shut up." And/but, in light of ditto and in light of ditto, maybe Relentless Meinongianism isn't as bad as I made out in 1979/1994.

        Thanks to everyone, especially Felipe, Jason and Jamin, for much-needed help with Azzouni interpretation.  I like the hermeneutic principle that emerged:  When you see the characteristic Azzounian hyperbole and oracular italics, do not take what he says literally, but dial the rhetoric `way back and see what slipshod tendency of mind he is hyperbolically warning us against. 
        I've downloaded several reviews in addition to Thomas', and put them in the folder.  Curiously, none of them helps with our main interpretive issues.

        I return to a few issues that we didn't finish discussing.

Quantifier vs. predicate

        Surprisingly, in fn 6 to Ch. 3 and in fn 32 of the article Azzouni concedes my point about trivial interdefinability.  How does he then buttonhook that, instead of taking back all the hammering on "existence predicate" and saying "Sorry I spoke"?  In the first footnote he says only (what is obvious) that to interdefine a predicate with the noncommissive quantifier would not serve his commissive purpose.  In the second, he (correctly) accuses a particular opponent of begging the question.  Thus, neither footnote is responsive.  The mystery remains.  (After class, Dean suggested a mild reading, nicely in keeping with the hermeneutical principle stated above:  Maybe all Azzouni means is that natural-language quantifiers have nothing at all intuitively to do with ontology, and so when we get around to regimenting it would be mildly unfortunate to use a quantifier rather than a predicate to represent actual existence.)

Vs. Meinong: Making things up

        As Jason rightly noted, one of Azzouni's two disagreements with Meinong is over what might be called the "realm" issue:  He denies that nonexistent individuals inhabit a realm or sector of being that is in some sense independent of us.  Rather, "we make [them] up" (p. 71, italics of course original). 
        It would perhaps be mere churlish wordplay to point out that as the phrase is used in English, to make up something, especially an individual, is to bring that individual into being.  And Azzouni points out on p. 83n that we don't make fictional objects out of anything.   But in any case his idea is too simple.  Authors do make up their characters (on which, see Kingsley Amis' wonderful if mendacious essay, "Real and Made-Up People," variously reprinted).  However: (1) They don't make up everything about them.  Characters often surprise their authors, often by refusing to do what the author wants them to do or by taking over and morphing into something the author does not want.  (2) More generally, as we shall learn from Lewis' "Truth in Fiction," a lot is true in a given fiction that the fiction's author didn't put there.  (It's just false that "what's true about..fictional entities is only what the author stipulates as true of them" (p. 93, slightly out of context).)  Perhaps more to the point, (3) there are garblunkajillions of nonexistent possibles that were never made up by anyone, have never so much as been thought of, etc.

Ontological independence

        This notion, especially when specified as "mind" independence, is very important to Azzouni, indeed the basis of his test for actual existence.  But what notion is it?  Not what its name suggests, that a "mind independent" item is "independent of linguistic and psychological processes" (p. 97).  For one thing, as Azzouni observes, the latter independence isn't necessary for actual existence.  (To take the most obvious example, many linguistic and psychological processes themselves are actual, but could not very well be called independent of linguistic and psychological processes.  Notice also, as reviewer Julian Cole does, that cultural and conventional artifacts such as the U.S.-Canadian border, the banking laws, and the game of chess are perfectly real too, though entirely made up by human beings.)  What is "mind independence," then, given that it's not independence of mind?

'Ontologically dependent' here is not understood in the sense that...[a thing is], say, a psychological state or a linguistic item...but in the sense that it's (part of) the content of such a thing,...in the more elusive sense that a hallucination of an elf (or apple) has as its content "an elf" (or "an apple") that exists in no sense at all....  (p. 98)      

    I daresay I'm not being fair to Azzouni.  So far as I can see, though, I've been fair to the text.  Anyone?