While glancing through Graham Priest's new book I came across a place where he said something to the effect that what distinguished existing from non-existing things was whether or not the thing in question was causally efficacious.
Following up on Mark Lance's suggestion that we should be most skeptical when a philosopher suggests something taken to be obvious enough not to elaborate on (look for adverbs of the clearly family).* I think that this is probably a case of that.
On counterfactual analyses of causality, non-existent entities and events clearly have causal powers. At the 2014 Narrative Theory Conference at MIT I saw a great paper by Emma Kafelanos called "How Can Events that Do Not Occur Make Things Happen?" that conclusively showed that any theory of narrative structure will have to include nodes denoting events that didn't happen. The speaker gave real world examples such as Obama not ordering the bombing of Syria. She didn't mention counterfactual analyses of causation, but clearly many counterfactuals of the form "If it were not the case that Obama hadn't ordered the bombing of Syria, then it would not be the case that P" are true.
This doesn't just occur with non-existent events but also with impossible events. The fact that Max can't surf explains quite a lot about him. Consider the sentence "Hobbes' inability to square the circle caused him to experience no small amount of ridicule." On a counterfactual analysis of causation with impossible worlds** there is nothing wrong with sentences such as that. Maybe these work as counterexamples to the counterfactual analysis. I don't know.
If you don't buy counterfactual analyses of causation,*** and causally powerful non-existent entities offend your ontological sensitivities, then you'll have to give some kind of account between non-existent events (and/or discourse presupposing them) and existent events (and/or discourse) that shows why our our true/useful causal talk presupposing causally efficacious non-existent events works.
The standard old-school trick would be to try to paraphrase away talk about non-existent events in terms of true causal claims that only refer to existing events. I think the general consensus is that in the last third of the twentieth century this kind of project foundered in every case it was tried.
One might try to say that a certain class of propositions featuring reference to non-existent events is in some manner supervenient on propositions that only refer to existent events. However, my impression is that supervenience has foundered in the same way that reductive paraphrasing did.
One would hope that Jonathan Schaffer type grounding would work. But the problem with that is that its second biggest motivation (in addition to skepticism about supervenience type attempts to characterize ontological dependence) is to preserve Moorean inferences of the "There is a number five, therefore there is a number, therefore numbers exist" while also preserving the intuition that things like numbers have a lower-level ontological status (being grounded in more fundamental entities). But, in addition to Jessica Wilson's critique, it would be perverse to apply the Moorean inference to things that everyone agrees are non-existent. Interestingly, one of Wilson's criticisms is that the grounding project is often motivated by the failure of supervenience. Wilson argues that this is a false dichotomy, since there are so many other types of dependency relations in the ontology literature. It would be fun to go through all of them and see how the relation between causally efficacious non-existent events and existent events might be worked out.
In any case view that non-existent events causally influence existing events looks more and more plausible to me. The fact that Obama didn't order the bombing of Syria had lots of causal weight. If it had not been the case that he didn't bomb it, then many things would be far different.
I wish I was more skilled at defending views that most people find antecedently implausible. . .**** In any case, if anyone knows of relevant literature on this issue, I'd be interested. I know that there is a long tradition in the truth-making literature about "negative facts." Maybe some of that work is relevant.
[*One should add the proviso that you can't find any papers on google that address the issue one way or the other. As far as I can tell, this issue passes the Lance/Google test. But I'm not widely read in this area, so if someone knows any relevant articles please let me know. If not, then it passes the Lance/Google/Blogged-About test.
**For a great paper on counterpossibles, see a this and this by Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno.
***Which should be separated from accepting possible worlds + counterparts theories of counterfactuals! I'm going to do a post on this in a few days.
****If I wasn't Presbyterian, I'd almost certainly make intercessory prayers to the soul of David Lewis. But we don't truck with that. It all starts innocently enough. Things are going fine and you find that you can get more papers published defending antecedently implausible things. But then before you know it you have to pay a fee to get philosophers higher up than you in the food chain to make the prayers for you. This is how colleges actually started, as prayer societies endowed by rich people so that they'd end up spending less time in Purgatory. It ended up being a disaster. A weird fact about the Reformation is that the countries that remained Roman Catholic after all of the wars were precisely those countries where indulgences had not been widespread.]
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