Thanks for your comment, it’s nice to know that someone else out there is taking an interest in Gauthier! His Morals by Agreement (1986) generated a lot of excitement when it first came out, resulting in three anthologies of discussion:

[1] Paul, E. F., Miller Jr., F. D, Paul, J., and Ahrens, J., eds., The New Social Contract: Essays on Gauthier (1988)

[2] Vallentyne, P., ed., Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement (1991)

[3] Gauthier, D., and Sugden, R., eds., Rationality, Justice and the Social Contract: Themes from Morals by Agreement (1993)

My impression is that the best articles are concentrated in [2], but the other two anthologies also contain some gems.

It’s pretty clear to me that some devastating criticisms of Gauthier have been raised in these articles. For example, Gauthier claims to have derived impartial moral principles from a non-moral basis, but Goodin’s article in [3] argues convincingly that Gauthier smuggles moral assumptions through the backdoor (i.e., through the Lockean Proviso). Gauthier’s argument that it is more rational, from the point of view of self-interest, to be moral rather than immoral also fails, and this has been noted by several critics (e.g., Smith in [2]).

Drastic revisions will have to be made to Gauthier’s system in order to meet these criticisms. Danielson in [2] proposes some interesting revisions in response to the sort of worry that Smith raises.

I have a lot of respect for Gauthier’s work. The most valuable insight I find in it has to do with his position that the utility-maximizing conception of practical rationality has to be revised (i.e., modular rationality has to be given up), if there is to be any hope of deriving morality from practical reasoning. So my blog post presents a version of contractarianism that builds on this insight, and the hope is that it can successfully address the problems that plague Gauthier’s contractarianism.

I’ve been reading Gautier (and those opposed) recently. I’m trying to wrap my head around these concepts.

Best of luck.

(Oh I see this was posted a long time ago.)

I hope you are enjoying the road trip! As to how Quine would put “Everything exists”, “Something exists” in FOL, if at all…. I’ve just read his “Existence and Quantification” (in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays), where he explicates singluar existence claims of the form “a exists” as:

(1) ∃x x = a

This suggests to me that Quine might explicate “Something exists” as the existential generalization of (1):

(2) ∃x ∃y x = y

…and “Everything exists” as:

(3) ∀x ∃y x = y

In plainer words, you can read (1) as “Something is a“, (2) as “Something is something”, and (3) as “Everything is something”.

This is quite speculative, I’m trying to guess how Quine would explicate “Something exists” and “Everything exists”, but what he says about “a exists” might not be reliable evidence about how he would explicate these two claims.

I vaguely seem to recall van Inwagen (a self-avowed Quinean in meta-ontological matters) briefly (in passing) explicating “Everything exists” as “∀x x = x”. I tried to locate it but unfortunately I can’t.

Any meaningful existence claim is not an existence simpliciter claim, but a claim about existence-in-some-restricted-domain-of-discourse (or in other words, a claim about domain-membership) where linguistic rules for formulating and verifying such claims are in effect. But there are no linguistic rules in place for formulating existence simpliciter questions and verifying answers to them. E.g., mathematics provides rules for formulating questions such as “Is there a prime number between 2 and 10?”, as well as admissible answers to such questions, but in mathematics itself we cannot meaningfully ask or answer the question “Are there numbers?”; much less can we meaningfully ask it in any other discipline that offers linguistic rule-guidance in formulating and verifying claims.

I agree with Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions of existence. But I disagree with him on external questions of existence (what I’m calling existence simpliciter questions), and my reasons for thinking this I will save for a later blog topic.

As with most interpretations of Carnap out there I’ve probably put my own spin on it, so here’s the classic Carnap on internal and external questions of existence:

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Yeah, that makes sense that the free logic approach wouldn’t really be Carnapian. But maybe, statements like “everything exists” would be a Carnapian external question that, while we know what it’s supposed to mean, from the approach of Quinean meta-ontology it’s otiose owing to the fact that you can make all your ontological commitments in FOL. Since, on this view, “exists” isn’t equivocal, existence is a straightforward concept, and there’s no call to inflating one’s ontology willy-nilly. I think that’s what Quine’s getting at in “On What There Is.”

My reading of Quine there, in “On What There Is,” is that you can express an ontology in a correct but trivial way: “Everything.” So I think Quine would agree that you can’t put that in FOL, and that, rather, one does make ontological commitments in statements translatable to FOL.

I don’t see the option (x)(x=x) as saying “everything exists”; maybe it entails that, given an ontology in some nonlogical form. Rather, it seems to me you’d have to go with option (2) and some kind of existence predicate, of which Quine would certainly not approve; this would be in keeping with his apparently not thinking the ontological answer “Everything” to be of logical interest.

[Colin] “…one way to understand the existence predicate is by means of what are called “inner” and “outer” domains which have a sort of Meinongian flavor.”

Or Carnapian?

But what I find esp. interesting is that your second option seems to exclude your first option, since the outer domain of free logic will include self-identical things that don’t exist. So we may choose either your first or second option, but not both. (Also, “Everything exists” will be false, if the quantifier ranges over both the outer and inner domains.)

I like the free logic option better than the self-identity option, though for largely inarticulate reasons. To make the free logic option metaphysically more palatable, perhaps we can have a free logic that is not Meinongian, if ‘∃’ = “some” and ‘∀’ = “all”, and nothing more…. That is, if they can be used to make quantified statements in a given domain of discourse, without committing us to the existence of the subjects of discourse (or to their subsistence, or some other shady mode of existence).

Clearly in meta-fictional discourse (by that I mean talk about fictional characters) we often want to make quantified statements without thereby committing ourselves to the existence of the characters we quantify over. E.g., ∃x such that x is a faithful friend and biographer of Sherlock Holmes.

So my suggestion is that we can distinguish between quantificational and ontological commitment. We assign to quantifiers the job of committing us to how many objects, in a coarse-grained way, satisfy this or that predicate in the intended domain of discourse: zero, at least one, all, not-all. We assign to the predicate ‘exist’ the job of committing us to the existence of a given type of object.