Simulating Routley - Professor Fred Kroon (Auckland)

Routley’s noneism, a view he first proposed in the 1960s and a version of which is accepted by, among others, Graham Priest, held that there are two kinds of quantifiers, existentially loaded and neutral, with the neutral quantifier’s expansive range including not only existent objects but also items like numbers, frictionless planes, persons no longer alive, Meinongian objects, etc., that have no form of existence whatsoever (none of these things exist, hence noneism). The most interesting and nuanced reaction to Routley’s view from the traditionalists’ camp came from David Lewis in ‘Noneism or Allism?’ (AJP 1990), which subjected the view to a kind of hermeneutic examination. In the end Lewis concluded that we — the right-thinking establishment — should interpret our one quantification as Routley’s neutral quantification, not as Routley’s existentially loaded quantification. Upshot: Routley emerges as a particularly extravagant allist. Along the way, Lewis suggests one alternative option: that “when Routley quantifies without quantifying, he engages in some sort of simulated quantification” (similar to the way substitutionalists, for example, “simulate quantification over fictional characters by quantifying for real over fictional names”). Lewis quickly dismisses the idea (“there is no textual evidence in its favor”). But in his ‘Quasi-Realism is a Fictionalism’ —the last paper he ever presented on Australian soil — Lewis suggests a different version of the idea of simulation, one he uses in the attempt to understand Blackburn’s quasi-realist account of morality. In the present paper I discuss a way of using this version of simulation to help us understand a view like Routley’s.