In some cases, is Existence a Predicate?

[Boojatta]

Suppose you have two detailed and different sets of blueprints. The first set of blueprints is for a warehouse. Consider these sentences:

1) "There exists a building that is indeed a warehouse and that was built in accordance with the first set of blueprints and no renovations or other events have created any discrepancy between those blueprints and that building."

2) "As far as we know, the building described by the second set of blueprints is not in the process of being built and has never been built."

What prevents us from introducing, for every date and time, a predicate that asserts, in regard to a given subject, that the subject is a set of blueprints and that the blueprints correspond to or describe an actually existing building as of the specified date and time?

[rock]

1. We have some time on our hands, do we?

Yes, I include myself.

[saltpoint]

2. Boojatta, for the love of Christ, what are you talking about?

What blueprints? Whose blueprints for what building? What's the building for? Residential or Commercial? All-candy like the Hansel&Gretel witch's house or suspended in air like Magritte's castle?

Do you want us to imagine those components or do you want to provide a context?

I read your post and it isn't registering.

Do I need a wheelbarrow full of psychedelic compounds to respond to this post?

Can they be a random ingestion or is a specific regimen required?

Is Dolly Parton involved?

I need to know these things before I can proceed.

Thank you and God Bless America.

[Boojatta]

4. Use your favorite search engine to find pages that include all of these

words: Kant, existence, predicate.

You won't need a wheelbarrow full of anything.
Dolly Parton isn't involved.

[saltpoint]

6. Well, damn. I was kinda hoping Dolly Parton WAS involved.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. I'm not sure where you are going with this

and why it is in R/T. Are you trying to make an analogy between fundamentalist religious belief and other religious belief? If so, I'd make this analogy:

The fundies see the Earth as following a set blueprint, which has remained the same throughout time.

Others see the Earth as following a blueprint that is continually changing, evolving, as conditions change.

[Boojatta]

5. It's in R/T because "existence is not a predicate" is a famous reply

to an Anselm's ontological argument. The Original Post in this thread is fairly direct.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

8. ok

I've never heard of Anselm and I have no clue what an ontological argument is. I'm at work, and can only peek in here from time to time, so I'll have to wait until I get home to do research on this subject. Thank you! Looks like by this evening I'll have broadened my vocabulary and learned some things.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

11. I couldn't wait to find out

and if I get fired, I'm using you as the excuse! (Don't worry-I answer phones, and right now they are dead).

Ok, I found a site explaining this guy's argument, which is that if you believe God exists as a concept in the mind, you can't say God doesn't exist. Intersting, but the problem I have with it is that I acknowledge that someone may have a God concept of a being that is most superior, yet seperate from onesself-many religous people have this concept. My problem is that my God concept is different from this, in that God is everything, and therefore there is no seperation between God and what we perceive as an individual. (perhaps this is what Mr. A meant-I read the information hurriedly, and was interrupted by a customer-rather hard to switch from bugs to philosophy for me!) If the pantheistic defintion of God is used, it is rather hard for someone to say God doesn't exist, as I have yet to meet someone who denies the existance of everything.

Anyway, anything you can do to clarify Anselm's argument will be greatly appreciated.

[Boojatta]

15. Maybe we can do some searching and find clear explanations that

have already been written. I doubt that we need to personally clarify Anselm's argument.

It might be more profitable to look in a library than on the internet.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

16. Except a decent library near me that might contain some answers

is about an 8 hour drive away. :)

[zeemike]

7. There is nothing new under the sun

As it is said;
SO a set of blueprints, if they are conceived by a mind and printed must somewhere exist in time and space. If it can be conceived by the mind then it some where, and at some time, must exist.
Is that what you are talking about?

[Boojatta]

9. I'm talking about ordinary blueprints.

I suppose that if you paid an architectural firm to draw up blueprints and you were told that the work had been completed and that you could come to the office to look at them, then you would expect them to actually exist in space and time.

Must a building based on blueprints exist? No. That's why it might be useful to have a predicate that asserts, for given subject blueprints, that those blueprints describe an actually existing building.

Note: I refer to "subject blueprints" because we conventionally speaks of a "subject" and "predicate". A predicate grammatically takes a subject and I am trying to make the format of the sentence clear.

[saltpoint]

10. Buckminster Fuller said "I seem to be a verb."

[Random_Australian]

21. Don't tell me there was someone with that actual name!

So, was there?

[Orrex]

12. A few questions--not sure if they're central

It seems to me that, given a predicate, one can infer that its subject may exist, but one can draw no clear conclusions about the subject unless it can be examined directly. At best, one may make inferences about part of the subject.

The blueprints for a given building, for example, might be only one set of blueprints in a thick book full of blueprints. Seeing only the one building, we can't infer anything about the predicates of those other blueprints.

Similarly, if an infinite entity happens to exist, one can't make any inferences about its nature (re: good and evil, for example) unless one is able to examine the entire infinite entity. Any lesser examination will permit only an inference based upon an (relatively) infinitessimal sample-size.

And now, the questions:

1. Can a person who has never seen the warehouse discern which of the two sets of blueprints might correspond to an actual, existing building? That is, is anything inherent in the subjects that dinstinguishes the existence/nonexistence of their respective predicates?

2. What distinguishes the correspondence of subject-to-predicate? That is, by what criteria do we assert that the blueprints relate to the warehouse?

3. "No discrepancy between blueprint and building" demands a three-dimensional 1:1 correspondence of scale. Any translation between scale of the map and the real-world building requires an extrapolation. How does this affect the relationship (since we're talking Existentialism here) between blueprint and building, if at all?

4. How does this hypothetical construct address the problem of identifying causation?

[Boojatta]

14. An attempt to provide answers

1. Can a person who has never seen the warehouse discern which of the two sets of blueprints might correspond to an actual, existing building?

No, I don't think so. However, I suppose that someone who is familiar with extreme warehouses might happen to know that, for example, no actual warehouse on Earth is as large as the warehouse described in some blueprints.

2. What distinguishes the correspondence of subject-to-predicate? That is, by what criteria do we assert that the blueprints relate to the warehouse?

You probably need to know the standard conventions used in making and reading blueprints plus some common sense. For example, if you wish to sue a builder for a clear violation of a contractual agreement to build according to some particular blueprints, then you might need an expert witness to pin down an evasive builder who pretends to not know that there is a problem. However, a judge would probably not need to examine any philosophical controversies to settle the matter.

3. "No discrepancy between blueprint and building" demands a three-dimensional 1:1 correspondence of scale. Any translation between scale of the map and the real-world building requires an extrapolation.

Could you explain what you mean by "requires an extrapolation"? I would think that, just as an ordinary map indicates the scale, blueprints also indicate the scale.

How does this affect the relationship (since we're talking Existentialism here) between blueprint and building, if at all?

Why are we talking Existentialism?

4. How does this hypothetical construct address the problem of identifying causation?

I don't think it helps with that problem. If you want to discuss causation, perhaps there is a thread we can use that is more appropriate than this thread for that topic.

[Orrex]

17. Oops--doop

As in "dooplicate."

[Orrex]

18. An attempt to answer your answers

Could you explain what you mean by "requires an extrapolation"? I would think that, just as an ordinary map indicates the scale, blueprints also indicate the scale.

Well, I was thinking in terms of Eco's "Scale Map of the Empire," which explores the representational limitations of a map in a way that I think (IIRC) would apply equally to a blueprint. I'll need to re-read it.

Why are we talking Existentialism?

Uh. Hmm. Um, we aren't. I was, uh, just testing you. Move along. Nothing more to see here...

I don't think it helps with that problem. If you want to discuss causation, perhaps there is a thread we can use that is more appropriate than this thread for that topic.

Maybe I was misinterpreting the example, then. All the talk of "subject" and "predicate" suggested an issue of causation to me, but I see now that that's not necessarily the implication.

But maybe I'm missing the point altogether. Are we talking about the necessity of X without which Y can't be/can't occur? Are are we talking about how Y correlates with X which seems to entail Y?

Or is it something else entirely?


Anyway, I'm right and you're wrong. Best to get that out of the way at the outset...

[Boojatta]

19. After some delay...

Are we talking about the necessity of X without which Y can't be/can't occur? Are are we talking about how Y correlates with X which seems to entail Y?

Or is it something else entirely?

It's probably something else entirely.

Look at this:

'Being' is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposition, 'God is omnipotent', contains two concepts, each of which has its object -- God and omnipotence. The small word 'is' adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. If, now, we take the subject (God) with all its predicates (among which is omnipotence), and say 'God is', or 'There is a God', we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates (...)

Source:
http://ghc.ctc.edu/HUMANITIES/DLARSON/kanto.htm

[SPKrazy]

13. Whoooooooooooosh!!!!!!

the sound of this discussion going wayyyyyy over my head

have fun

[rug]

20. The egg came before the chicken.

[tomcalab]

22. As-Built Drawings

Thank you for the analogy.

1) "There exists a building that is indeed a warehouse and that was built in accordance with the first set of blueprints and no renovations or other events have created any discrepancy between those blueprints and that building."

Response: This would imply no "As-built" blueprints.

2) "As far as we know, the building described by the second set of blueprints is not in the process of being built and has never been built."

Response: The original warehouse remains intact as per the first set of blueprints.

What prevents us from introducing, for every date and time, a predicate that asserts, in regard to a given subject, that the subject is a set of blueprints and that the blueprints correspond to or describe an actually existing building as of the specified date and time?

Response: Where are the original blueprints? "As far as we know" means "as far as we know". One could look at the building and make an educated guess about the date and time of its construction, but just how the building has changed would also have to be detected. If there was any major rebuilding then the original building could not be determined.

One could develop a new set of blueprints, but it would be at best misleading to call them
"As-Built Drawings". And, without "As-Builts" one could not interpolate how something has changed in the past, and then extrapolate what will happen in the future.

[Jim__]

23. Kant's claim about existence does not conflict with your assertion

I'm accepting the desciption given on wikipedia as accurate; and based on that description, I don't see any conflict with your argument.

According to this article, the essential point of Kant's argument is:

Kant, himself a theist, argued that the ontological argument illicitly treats existence as a property that things can either possess or lack. According to Kant, to say that a thing exists is not to attribute existence to that thing, but to say that the concept of that thing is exemplified in the world. The difference, and its significance for the ontological argument, are described below.

Most statements of the form “S is p” are true if and only if there is something in the world that is picked out by the name S, and the thing picked out by the name S satisfies the description “is p”.

My reading of this is that the question of existence with respect to the blueprint is NOT A is B where A is "a building" and B is "the realization of this blueprint" - essentially, your proposition. Kant is arguing that you can't argue about the existence of the blueprint. To speak of the blueprint is to acknowledge its existence (in some form, even if it is only as a concept). Existence is not a property of the blueprint - it is a fact just because you can speak of the blueprint.

I believe Kant's argument is applied to Anselm's ontological argument, by stating the simple fact that if the atheist has the concept of God in his mind; then, this very fact means that the concept of God exists, and we need no further realization of this concept to bring it into existence. If the concept of God exists - as it does by assumption in Anselm's argument, that can lead to no further conclusion about the existence of anything that matches that concept.