“Existential
Import in Cartesian Semantics,”
History andPhilosophy
of Logic, 32:3 (2011), pp. 211-239.
Abstract
The
paper explores the existential import of universal affirmative in Descartes,
Arnauld and Malebranche. Descartes holds, inconsistently, that eternal truths
are true even if the subject term is empty but that a proposition with a false
idea as subject is false. Malebranche extends Descartes’ truth-conditions for
eternal truths, which lack existential import, to all knowledge, allowing only
for non-propositional knowledge of contingent existence. Malebranche’s rather
implausible Neoplatonic semantics is detailed as consisting of three key
semantic relations: illumination by which God’s ideas cause mental
terms, creation by which God’s ideas cause material substances by a kind
of ‘ontic privation,’ and sensation in which brain events occasion
states of mental awareness. In contrast, Arnauld distinguishes two types of
propositions – necessary and contingent -- with distinct truth-conditions, one
with and one without existential import. Arnauld’s
more modern semantics is laid out as a theory of reference that substitutes
earlier causal accounts with one that adapts the medieval notion of objective
being. His version anticipates modern notions of intentional content and
appeals in its ontology only to substances and their modes.