The average philosopher disbelieves this thesis

I take it most of us agree that some form of compositionality is true and that many of us have an aversion to paraphrase strategies. Nonetheless, even amongst those philosophers who share our commitments and aversions there are few, if any, who would accept that we should take phrases of the form ‘the average F is G’ at face value. Most of them will say either than it is literally false and conveys the some truth or other about philosophers or that it simply means the same thing as a truth that has a radically different grammatical structure. I wish to present a strategy for taking phrases of the form ‘the average F is G’ at face value.

Nathan Salmon, and others, have defended the view that certain activities give rise to certain kinds of mentally and socially dependant entities. For example, worship-like activities in ancient Greece gave rise to a particular kind of entity. These philosophers also think that some such entity is the referent of ‘Zeus’ in our mouths. I think that Salmon says, a bit more controversially, that some such entity is the referent of ‘Zeus’ in the mouths of the ancient Greeks.

The view sometimes seems a bit less crazy if we note that these entities are much like bank accounts. Few people would believe that bank accounts are physical objects. Rather, bank accounts seem to be entities the existence of which is dependant upon certain human activity.

I would like to suggest that the same strategy might be adopted to provide satisfiers to phrases of the form ‘the average F is G’. On this view, there would be an entity that arises from certain human activities and it is this entity that makes it true that the average philosopher has read Russell. This entity is the average philosopher. It is not itself a philosopher. But, the activities that give rise to its existence require that, for example, if the average philosopher has read Russell, then a randomly chosen philosopher will have read Russell. That is, there are interesting relations that obtain between the average philosopher and real philosophers.

Here is a problem for the view. Suppose that the average philosopher has 1.6 children. If the view suggested above is true, then it seems to follow that something has 1.6 children. It also seems to follow that there is an average philosopher. But, surely there is no thing that has 1.6 children and there is not average philosopher.

I am not sure how best to respond to this problem. I guess my first inclination is to adopt a kind of Meinongianism. I would reject that there is an average philosopher. This would require rejecting the seemingly plausible thesis that any instance of the following schema expresses a truth:

(S1) ‘Necessarily, if the F is G, then there is exactly one F and it is G.’

One idea might be to make a distinction, as Priest does, between the ‘there is’ quantifier and the ‘some’ quantifier. We might replace the schema above with the folloing:

(S2) ‘Necessarily, if the F is G, then some F is G and only one F is G.’

But, this doesn’t seem to get at the heart of the matter either. Although such a distinction allows us to avoid the inferences noted above, it doesn’t allow us to avoid the following inference: The average philosopher has read Russell. So, some average philosopher has read Russell. Moreover, (S2) just doesn’t sound quite right (even when we use some standard instances of the definite description).

I guess I would suggest rejecting any unrestricted schema like (S1) and (S2). But, I am not sure how plausible this is. So, I guess my questions to the crowd are the following: are there any more unhappy consequences of this view? Do the happy consequences outweigh the unhappy ones? And, relatedly, is it better to just say sentences of the form ‘the average F is G’ are just plain false but convey a truth?