Nihilism

If we are granting classical logic, then the only other way to avoid the existence of sharp cutoffs is to either deny the first premise—that anyone with 100,000,000 cents is rich—or accept the conclusion—that someone with 1 cent is rich.

Note that the nihilistic response, if it is to serve as a general response to the sorites paradox, must generalize in a few ways. It must firstly extend to people who have more than 100,000,000 cents—thus no-one, whatever their wealth, is rich. Secondly, if the response is to be general it must extend to other properties that can be the subject of a sorites sequence; thus a nihilist thinks that nobody has ever been to the moon, learnt to swim, kissed, flipped a pancake, and so on, for clearly each of these properties is susceptible to a sorites sequence. Note that this is more radical than accepting a mere conspiracy theory, for the nihilist not only thinks that nobody has been to the moon, they also think that nobody has even appeared to have gone to the moon, no-one has seemed to have flipped a pancake, and so on, for these subjective properties are no less susceptible to sorites reasoning than their original counterparts. Thus straightforward observational facts about how things seem to us also go out of the window if nihilism is to be accepted. Symmetrical things must be said about universalism.

How, then, do nihilists explain these wacky sounding claims? Typically they do so by invoking some peculiar feature of the language that is used to express the strange sounding claims—according to nihilism vague language is defective in some way.

Nihilism:

- The predicate ‘rich’ does not apply to anybody.

- Sentences of the form ‘S is rich’ are never true.

- Belief tokens corresponding to ‘S is rich’ are never true.

They will of course say similar things about other vague predicates.

Atthis pointitwillbeusefultodistinguish twodifferentwaysone couldbeanihilist. The first way, which I take it is the most common way, is to accept the semantic claim about the word ‘rich’ but to nonetheless retain one’s common-sense beliefs about who is rich and who isn’t. Let’s call this the semantic nihilist. The other kind of nihilist—the radical nihilist—not only comes to think that all of their ordinary beliefs are untrue, they come to reject those beliefs as well.

Let me start with the semantic nihilist. The thinking behind it goes as follows: the belief that Warren Buffett is rich, while strictly speaking semantically defective and thus untrue, is nonetheless an incredibly useful belief to have and thus we should retain the belief that Warren Buffett is rich despite this semantic defect. Without beliefs like these it would be impossible to go about our ordinary business. I don't know exactly how much money I have, but I have a rough idea.

Parallel thingscanbesaidabout assertiononthisview. Although thistype of nihilist will maintain that uttering the sentence ‘Warren Buffett is rich' involves uttering an untruth, they will still retain the practice of uttering this sentence provided they believe that Warren Buffett is rich. The thought is that in uttering strictly untrue sentences one communicates beliefs that, while also strictly speaking false, are useful.

Note that we have to be careful about what we mean by the word ‘true' in these contexts. The nihilist I've described believes both that Warren Buffett is rich and also that their belief that Warren Buffett is rich is untrue. Let us say that a belief is ‘Ramsey- true' if it is a belief that P and, in fact, P.^[15] Thus any moderately reflective person who believes that Warren Buffett is rich believes that their belief that Warren Buffett is rich is Ramsey-true. They believe (i) that Warren Buffett is rich, and since they are moderately reflective they realize that (ii) this belief is a belief that Warren Buffett is rich and therefore are in a position to conclude (from the definition of Ramsey-truth) that this belief is Ramsey-true. Thus the nihilist I am describing is not talking about Ramsey-truth when they talk about their vague beliefs being untrue. These theorists rather think that there is another property, more substantial than Ramsey-truth, that playsanimportantrole in semanticsand they moreover believethattheir vague beliefs do not have this property.

For this kind of nihilist it is important to distinguish sharply between the following two questions:

1.       Are there any rich people?

2.       Does the word ‘rich' apply to anyone in English?

Whether or not you are a nihilist, these are quite clearly not the same question.

This example is actually not that far-fetched: the semantic nihilist thinks the actual world is like the world described above in the relevant respects. Due to the way we actually use the word ‘rich', and other vague predicates, it ends up expressing an

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inconsistent property (or perhaps no property at all). However, the semantic nihilist maintains that despite the fact that the word ‘rich’ does not apply to anyone in English, this is not a sufficient reason to abandon the common-sense belief that there are rich people. Thus according to the beliefs of the semantic nihilist the actual world is a bit like the world described above: there are rich people, but the word ‘rich’ doesn’t apply to anyone.

This highlights the most important feature of this kind of nihilist: they have a completely standard conception of what it is to be rich—they retain the common­sense belief that billionaires, like Warren Buffett, are rich and that people with only a few cents to their name are not. It is their understanding of ‘truth in English’ and ‘applies in English’ that is non-standard: they will agree with everyone about who is rich and who isn’t, and only disagree about who the word ‘rich’ applies to in English.

These nihilists are guilty of the very mistake I raised at the beginning of this chapter. Consider the following argument, which is somewhat analogous to the argument we opened with:

1.       The word ‘rich’ applies to anyone with 100,000,000 cents (a millionaire).

2.        For any n if‘rich’ applies to a person with n + 1 cents, it applies to a person with n cents.

3.        Therefore ‘rich’ applies to anyone with 1 cent.

In response to this sorites it is completely clear which premise this nihilist denies: since the word ‘rich’ does not apply to anything, premise 1 is denied.

However, we took care to distinguish the above paradox from the paradox we opened with, which did not assume that the word ‘rich’ applies to millionaires; it simply assumes that millionaires are rich. And we have noted already that the nihilist I have been describing has a completely standard conception of what makes someone rich. Thus the semantic nihilist grants the first premise of our original argument, and we are back to where we started. If the nihilist retains the common-sense beliefs about richness, then they accept the first premise and reject the conclusion. So given classical logic, they must accept that there is a last rich person in a sorites sequence for richness. Of course, there is no last person to which the word ‘rich’ applies, but this is of little comfort if you already have to accept the existence of a sharp cutoff point for richness.

This type of nihilism is one instance of the general tendency in the philosophy of vagueness of changing the subject from puzzles about richness, baldness, and so on, to questions about language.

These problems stemmed from the fact that the semantic nihilist kept her common­sense false beliefs. There is a much more radical way of being a nihilist—not the kind that is typically endorsed—that seems be in a better position to resist the original sorites paradox we opened this chapter with. This is the kind of nihilist who not only declares common-sense beliefs to be untrue, but also abandons those beliefs. The radical nihilist therefore not only thinks that the word ‘rich’ does not apply to anybody, she also thinks that nobody is rich and is therefore well placed to answer our original paradox by denying the first premise. (Strictly speaking, the nihilist could abandon the belief that millionaires are rich by being agnostic, but then she would have to be agnostic about the existence of cutoff points; I shall therefore focus on the view that there are no rich people, etc.)

While it is consistent for a radical nihilist to continue the practice of assertively uttering vague sentences, whatever the reason she gives for that practice, it is presum­ably not about passing along useful beliefs. Presumably the only beliefs the radical nihilist has are the kinds of beliefs you can state in logico-mathematical language, and perhaps the language of fundamental physics, since vagueness is pervasive in other realms of discourse. Thus in uttering ‘Warren Buffett is rich’ the only contingent belief I could be passing on is a belief about fundamental physics, and it seems relatively clear that I do not learn anything about fundamental physics upon hearing utterances like these.

However, a little further reflection reveals that the radical nihilist doesn’t really need to explain why English speakers go about uttering vague sentences because, according to the radical nihilist, they don’t. In fact, radical nihilists believe that there aren’t any English speakers and there is therefore no need to explain their practices.

Unfortunately, this type of reasoning highlights why it’s almost impossible to be a radical nihilist—for if you are a radical nihilist it is unclear why you need to do anything. A radical nihilist should feel that she has no need to do the groceries because she believes that there are no grocery stores, and moreover no need to eat since not only is eating impossible, but there is no food to eat and no one ever dies of starvation anyway.^[17] If a radical nihilist does decide to go grocery shopping, surely it is not her logico-mathematical beliefs that explain this action, nor her beliefs about fundamental physics—and if it is none of these, it is unlikely to be a precise belief, for very little is precise outside of those realms.

One response you could make, at this juncture, is that there is another attitude, not belief, which our hypothetical radical nihilist holds towards the vague. Maybe this attitude is something like ‘pretending that P for such-and-such purposes’, or ‘believing that according to the fiction of grocery stores, P^, or maybe it is just a sui generis attitude that plays a particular causal functional role. Whatever this attitude is, perhaps it is this attitude and not belief that explains action: when the agent goes to the grocery store this is because she has this attitude towards the proposition that there is food in the grocery store whilst desiring to have food. And perhaps it is the passing on of this attitude that communication achieves.

It is clear that this attitude, whatever it is, pretty much plays the role that belief plays according to a common-sense view. Once we have introduced an attitude that plays the belief role, then I think we have just introduced belief under another name; radical nihilism collapses into the more moderate nihilism we rejected earlier. In the important respects this kind of nihilist agrees with me, for the attitude that rationalizes action is one which is held towards the proposition that millionaires are rich, and the proposition that people with nothing are not rich. Moreover, assuming that this attitude is belief-like enough to be subject to the norms of classical reasoning, the attitude must also be held to the proposition that there is a last rich person in a sorites for richness. In the sense in which this nihilist can be said to be committed to anything at all, this nihilist is committed to sharp cutoff points.