Speaking of Something: Plato’s Sophist and Plato’s Beard

The Eleatic Visitor speaks forcefully when he insists, ‘Necessarily, whenever there is speech, it is speech of something; it is impossible for it not to be of something’ (Soph. 262e6–7).¹ For ‘if it were not of anything, it would not be speech at all; for we showed that it is impossible for there to be speech that is speech of nothing’ (Soph. 263c9–11).² Presumably, at 263c10, when he claims to have ‘shown’ that it is impossible for speech to be of nothing, the Visitor is referring back to the Parmenidean puzzles at Sophist 237ff.³ The passages from 237b7–239c3 provide the only arguments in the dialogue for thinking that speech ( ) must be of something ( ) and cannot be of nothing ( ). The Parmenidean view defended there requires that whoever does not speak of something says nothing at all and is not even speaking. Apparently, then, the Visitor never gives up the something requirement on discourse articulated at 237ff.. Indeed the something requirement — the tinos requirement — quickly spreads. Thought too must be of something since ‘thought and speech are the same ( ) except that what we call thought occurs without the voice, inside the soul in dialogue with itself’ (263e3–5). Thought just is silent speech, and both must be of something.⁴

After close examination of the Eleatic Visitor’s arguments, I shall defend the view that Plato intends the something requirement articulated in the Sophist to be a metaphysical condition on significant discourse and contentful thought.⁵ For Plato, whatever is something is some one thing that is. In other words, whatever is something exists as a well-individuated, countable entity. Being and number ‘belong to’ whatever is something. Moreover, whatever is something is self-identical (by sharing in sameness) and different from everything else (by sharing in difference). One of the central aims of the Sophist is to articulate and to develop Plato’s metaphysics of somethings. We learn in the dialogue that, strictly speaking, speech and thought must be of existing, countable beings that are self-identical and different from everything else. Some qualifications are, of course, in order. There is reason to believe that not simply any apparently contentful piece of speech commits Plato to the somethinghood and existence of the purported subject. For example, the apparent meaningfulness of the sentences ‘Pegasus does not exist’ and ‘Pegasus is winged’ does not commit Plato to the somethinghood or existence or being of Pegasus. Or so I argue.

I. The Ontological Problem vs. the Semantic Problem

Before turning to the details of the Sophist, it will be useful to record some of the main challenges that have been raised for Plato’s tinos requirement. There is a history of reading Plato as embracing an especially bloated ontology in order to accommodate as meaningful certain types of discourse. W. V. Quine places much of the blame on Plato for the development of a tradition of holding that meaningful names require corresponding objects as referents and for the consequent problem of nonbeing Quine sees as arising out of the tradition, a problem Quine calls Plato’s Beard. Plato’s Beard is the result of a particular view of meaning according to which a term is meaningful and can be used in meaningful sentences only if the term has a referent.⁶ That this view gives rise to a problem becomes apparent when we consider a sentence such as ‘Pegasus does not exist.’ The truth the sentence expresses seems to require that its subject term lacks a referent; yet according to the view at issue, in order to be meaningful, the sentence presupposes the existence or being of Pegasus. But if Pegasus somehow is, then how can he be said truly not to be? The problem of nonbeing has the perplexing consequence that negative existence claims quite generally seem to require the being of the very objects they deny. Quine is no fan of Plato’s Beard and he warns us that this tangled doctrine frequently dulls the edge of Ockham’s razor as it invites the proliferation of...