I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. In earlier posts, I have suggested that such a theory would include a necessary element of death, a form of recurrence (something from the past reappears in the present), and the intimation of an inevitability. How does the implied theory that drives Chislenko’s thought compare with respect to these elements?
7. We’re moving towards the territory of the second Chislenko premise now. There is an interesting question here, about the interdependency of the premises.
The way I have formulated them, it might look as if the first was more basic. It supposes a ghost to be a person (or a continuation, in some sense, of one); whereas the second relies on that identification, making further constraints that depend on it: the person must have died, and in a particular manner (which triggers recurrence). In order to be able to verify the latter, you must know what person it is, and thus already have verified the former. Or so it seems.
But I think this reading of the interrelationship of the two premises is wrong, and instructively so. For we just as well might invert the logical order here, like so:
For the episode to be a ghost sighting, there must
(2*) have been a past death episode with certain characteristics, namely: untypical, untimely, and triggering a form of recurrence;
(1*) now (in the present) occur an appearance bearing markers (visual characteristics) which allow us to re-identify the person who died, as per (2*).
(The remaining reasoning, (3) through (∴), remains the same.)
(It’s perhaps useful to point out, for those with only passing knowledge with logical formalization, that both these formulations make use of a rule called “existential instantiation”. It’s standard procedure, though it tends to make formulations somewhat awkward. The derivation runs from a premise stating “there is an X”, i.e. claiming that there is at least one individual which satisfied the predicate X, through a derived statement that simply names one such individual, to then make further claims about it. In our case, both the sequences from (1) to (2) and from (2*) to (1*) require an intermediate step of existential instantiation between them, which is required for the later of the two premises once the earlier one has been formulated. But note that this is not a logical dependency, in the sense that the second premise in the sequence is not entailed by the first one. It’s just that its formulation is based on a logical property of the preceding premise. And as we’ve just seen, the order is still reversible.)
What changes if we understand the premises in the reformulated way? The main difference is that we no longer take individuation for granted: in the original formulation, the re-identification happens by supposition (it’s the same person), whereas the reformulation makes it clear that it happens by visual matching: the witnesses see a person (in the broad sense of having a visual impression they perceive as a person, leaving it open whether it’s a physical object they perceive, or a hallucination without physical correlate — i.e. whether a video camera would reproduce the same visual impression or not). Later in the story, the person “whose ghost it is” is identified by matching that visual impression with older photographs.
The formulations in the story suggest something along the lines of (1) and (2) much more than the alternative, and thereby cement a reading along the lines of identification of a ghost with a person. Or, more precisely: it blurs the distinction between re-identifying something (the ghost) as the same thing as a person (who no longer exists) and recognizing a person in a visual appearance. But these are not the same thing: suppose I show you an image, and you say: “For this to be a picture of a person, there must first someone have been who this is a picture of.” But that’s not universally true: there are many “portraits” of Sherlock Holmes, and it doesn’t follow that Sherlock Holmes must have existed (as a person, rather than a fictional character); and there are pseudo-photographs morphed from photos of multiple people, which “portray” a person who is neither of the original models, and again it doesn’t follow for this to be an image of “a person” (a fictional or “merged” personality) there must first have been that person! The relationship between persons and images of (real or apparent) persons is more complicated than that, and so may well be the relationships between persons and ghosts.
