Keeping an open mind about what exists

My previous post, a scattering of seeds on rocky, sun-baked soil, has produced a crop of thirty fold (comments-wise). Since comment threads that take five minutes to scroll through tend to become rather unwieldy, I have decided to respond to some of the comments in new posts for a special Easter Week treat.Here I'll respond on two fronts.

What is supernaturalism?

One of the most important issues to deal with is a misunderstanding over the meaning of "supernaturalism". One common definition of supernaturalism is belief in an entity which transcends the natural sphere and interacts with it. Apparently based on this assumed meaning of supernaturalism, AcesLucky took me to be offering an argument for God's existence: "Dispute naturalism and out pops Supernaturalism! (And isn't that where god resides?)"

But I offered a different definition of supernaturalism, and I placed it front and center of the post:

"Christians are supernaturalists. That is, they believe that there are things that exist which are neither material (where material is understood to encompass both matter and energy) nor supervenient upon the material."

On my definition, the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a supernaturalist consist in believing that there are aspects of reality which are, ontologically speaking, wholly unconnected to the material. As a result, on this view a person who believes in platonic universals but no God would be a supernaturalist. Thus I wasn't arguing for theism but only against naturalism. (But neither was I arguing against theism. Christian theism is a token of the type supernaturalism, Platonism is well, but naturalism is not. So my argument supports both Christian theism and Platonism as it seeks to undermine naturalism.)

The Ontology of Mathematical Reality

Now on to some glimmer of agreement from the other side.

I was happy and surprised that The Other Sorceror was willing to concede something:

"I see your point, and you're right to an extent. Mathematics does not necessarily supervene on the material, but that is because mathematics is completely abstract and has no physical presence (as opposed to physical manifestation)."

TOS seems to concede the possibility that mathematics has an independent ontological status from the material, a fact which would falsify naturalism.

Sorceror also says:

"I have some sympathy for Rauser's argument. It's hard to say that the Mandelbrot Set doesn't "exist" in some sense. But if you want to say that it does 'exist', you're adding another sense to the term 'exist' that differs significantly from the way you or I exist, or even the way this message I'm typing 'exists'."

Here is a vote of sympathy and a worry. Yes, Sorceror appears to say, mathematical reality seems to have its own ontological status, but doesn't this complicate things by introducing a new sense of existence?

I am less worried by this than Sorceror is. You see, we already recognize a plurality of nuance in our application of the predicate "exists". I recognize that a peppermint ice cream cone exists and the dollar I used to purchase it also exists. But the dollar's existence is not reducible to the material composition of the bill. The dollar's existence also depends on social construction - in a way that the ice cream cone's existence does not. (And if you want to debate the ice cream cone, then the bill's existence is socially determined in a way that a rock or tree's existence is not.) So dollars exist in a different way than do ice cream cones and rocks and trees.

Things get even more complicated, for Beethoven's 9th Symphony also exists. But if it exists then WHERE IS IT? And what are its persistence conditions? Again, we must recognize that we have a complex predication of existence.

And then what about the qualia (sensations) I experience when I eat the ice cream cone and listen to Beethoven's 9th? (Actually, I tend to listen to heavy metal and 70s MOR, but philosophers usually use classical music as their examples and so I'll conform and pretend I'm culturally sophisticated.) These qualia also exist, but they have no physical extension or determinate spatial location. Again our catalogue of existence expands.

And so on we could go. Existence is not a stipulative concept. We need to treat it openly as a good free thinking empiricist. And if that means admitting mathematical abstracta into our catalogue of what exists, then so be it, even if that means granting existence to entities wholly unconnected (ontologically) with the material realm.

Our commitment to what exists should be deeper than our commitment to any particular worldview, naturalism included.