Gaunilo, a Benedictine monk of Marmoutiers, replied to Anselm's *Proslogion* in the late eleventh century: the ontological argument's form, if sound, would prove the existence of a perfect lost island (an island than which no more perfect could be conceived), and since no such island exists, the argument's form cannot be sound. His parody was the first great demonstration that an argumentative form can be tested by seeing what else the form delivers. Nine centuries later, Douglas Gasking extended the tradition in a manuscript circulated in the late 1970s and published after his death: the greatest conceivable achievement, he argued, would be creating the universe while not existing, since creation from nothing without resources or powers is a greater feat than creation by an omnipotent being. If maximal greatness entails necessary existence in the Anselmian tradition, parody-greatness entails necessary non-existence. The parody is deliberately absurd. Its point is methodological: an argument whose form licenses its own *reductio* never really licenses its conclusion.

Gaunilo's *Pro Insipiente* (c. 1078) set the template. Gasking's "Proof of the Non-Existence of God" (commonly cited 1978; published posthumously in *Language, Logic and Causation*, 1996) modernized it. Mackie (*The Miracle of Theism*, 1982) and Oppy (*Ontological Arguments and Belief in God*, 1995; *Arguing About Gods*, 2006) developed the parody tradition into a general diagnostic: an argumentative form that delivers one impressive conclusion can usually be adapted to deliver its opposite, revealing that the form's apparent productivity rests on hidden premises about greatness, predication, or modal reasoning. Plantinga (*God, Freedom, and Evil*, 1974a) responded that the modal ontological argument survives parody because the parody premises are not genuinely possibly instantiated in the way the original premises are. Grim ("There Is No Set of All Truths," 1984) opened a different parody-adjacent front via Cantorian diagonalization (the powerset technique that, given any proposed totality, generates an element outside it) against omniscience. Adams ("Flavors, Colors, and God," 1987) and van Inwagen ("Ontological Arguments," 1977) canvassed the conditions under which a parody does and does not mirror its target. The tradition's shared assumption is that arguments with modal conclusions are particularly susceptible to parody because modal space is abundant enough to contain mirror-image premises the original argument cannot exclude.

Brought to bear on the present argument, the parody tradition tests whether □(T∧S∧Φ) (the necessity of Time, Space, and Substance together) is earned by content or by form. If the argument's machinery, the Modal Identity from [§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>), S5 / Necessary Possibility from [§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>) (the modal-logic system in which whatever is necessary or possible at any world is necessary or possible at every world), and the ∅ result from [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) (the null state, the absolute absence of being), could be redeployed to produce inverted or absurd conclusions, the machinery is suspect. A parody that successfully mirrored the argument's form would deliver a structural result the argument cannot accept, revealing the necessity claim rests on hidden premises rather than on the form the argument presents. The question is whether the formal structure is neutral between its intended conclusion and a parody-conclusion, or whether the content of T, S, and Φ does work the form alone cannot carry.

A clarification before the moves. The argument's conclusion is not 'T, S, and Φ are great and therefore necessary.' It is 'T, S, and Φ are the structural requirements of any change, any extension, any persistence, and therefore no medium can be without them.' The content is functional, not evaluative. A parody that substitutes an evaluatively defined alternative ('maximal Non-Being,' 'greatest achievement of non-existence') is not running the argument's form with new content. It is running a different form entirely, one the present argument never uses. Three forms of the parody; each breaks at a point where the present argument differs from the Anselmian one.

*First.* The inversion move runs Gasking's exact trick on the present argument. The greatest conceivable being, the objector presses, is one whose existence is not presupposed by the categories of existence: a being that grounds the structure without instantiating it. This is the exact move classical theists make for God. By parallel reasoning, there must be a maximally great Non-Being that grounds the structure while instantiating no structural role. If the ontological argument's form is legitimate, the parody's form is equally legitimate.

The parody fails at the point the original argument is made. Gasking's greatest-achievement move trades on a category confusion the structural account explicitly rejects. Greatness in the ontological tradition is defined by impressiveness — by what it would be more impressive for a being to be. The structural argument does not work with this concept. It works with Functional Potency: the capacity to act, cause, and affect. Non-existence possesses zero potency. A non-existent cause cannot produce a manifest effect. 'Necessary Non-Existence' is not a form of greatness: it *is* the ultimate state of causal inertness, which *is* what ∅ names. The structural roles possess the full functional architecture that makes causal efficacy possible at all. The parody inverts the argument's definition of greatness and then treats the inversion as a *reductio*. The inverted definition, not the argument, generates the absurdity. Swap 'impressiveness' for 'potency' and the parody cannot even begin: a non-existent ground is not more potent than a structural one. It is maximally impotent.

*Second.* The S5 symmetry move targets the logical machinery directly. The argument moves from ◇C to □◇C via S5, applied to change-permission. By parallel reasoning, ¬◇C should yield □¬◇C: the necessary impossibility of change. If the logical machinery licenses the first move, it licenses the second. But the second contradicts the first. The S5 system powers both, so the argument's conclusion rests on a prior decision about which modal premise to start with.

The parallel fails because the two premises are not symmetric. ◇C (change is possible) is defended by the Cartesian certainty that change is occurring in the very act of doubt and the subsequent derivation that change requires T, S, and Φ. ¬◇C (change is impossible) has no equivalent step. There is no Cartesian certainty that change is impossible, because the certainty of doubting would itself refute the certainty of impossibility. The parody's starting premise conflicts with the book's Cartesian datum if doubting is correctly analyzed as change. That is a substantive premise about the act, not an analytic truth and not yet a freestanding cross-world proof. S5 preserves whichever modal premise is supplied; it does not establish the asymmetry by itself. The machinery is the same. The inputs are not. This is where the present reply converges with Plantinga's (1974a): a modal argument survives parody only when the parody's mirror premise is not genuinely possibly instantiated. On the book's act analysis, ¬◇C is dialectically unstable because asserting or considering it occurs through an ordered cognitive performance. The force of that reply remains act-side and depends on the argument connecting the performance to real change.

*Third.* Oppy's general indictment presses the crispest version. Any argument attempting to derive substantive ontological conclusions from conceptual premises is suspect in principle, because conception does not deliver existence. The structural argument is such an argument: it conceives change and derives structural necessity. The parody argues, equally validly, that it conceives non-existence and derives structural absence. Both conclusions rest on the same epistemic error: confusing what can be coherently thought with what must ontologically obtain.

The argument does not derive existence from conception. It derives structural conditions from the content of any possible thought. The Cartesian datum (that thought is occurring) is not a conceptual premise but a phenomenally given fact. The subsequent derivation proceeds from what any thought-event structurally requires, not from the conceptual content of any particular thought. Oppy's indictment applies to arguments of the form 'there is a concept of X; therefore X exists.' The argument has a different form: 'there is a phenomenally given fact F; F requires structural conditions T, S, Φ; therefore T, S, Φ obtain.' The parody cannot be reformulated in the same way because there is no phenomenally given fact of non-existence: non-existence is not a fact that can be phenomenally given, because phenomenal givenness requires the very structural conditions non-existence is defined as lacking. The parody can be conceived. It cannot be given. Oppy's indictment targets the wrong kind of argument.

A kindred move drops Gasking's inversion for Grim's Cantorian diagonalization. In its original form (Grim 1984) the target is omniscience: if there is a set of all truths, the powerset argument generates a truth outside it, so the set (and the omniscience that would survey it) is incoherent.

*The Incomplete Universe* (Grim 1991) presses the result much harder, generalizing it past omniscience to any totality of facts: if a world is conceived as a maximal consistent collection of truths, the same diagonalization shows there is no such collection, and the universe considered as a totality of facts is essentially open and incomplete.

This is the more aggressive form, and it bears on the present argument more directly than the omniscience version, since the exhaustion claim can look like just such a totality. Applied here rather than to theism, the Grim-style move argues: if T, S, and Φ exhaust necessary existence, there is a fact about that exhaustion standing outside the structure, and the exhaustion claim is incoherent.

The reply follows the same path against both forms. Facts about exhaustion are statements about the structural roles, made by reasoners instantiating the roles. The meta-fact is not outside the structure; it is within the structure, at a higher level of description. What the diagonalization defeats is the pretension of a totality of *all truths* surveyed from beyond the domain it totalizes; the exhaustion claim is not that. It is the narrower claim that exactly three structural conditions are necessary for any being, and its own meta-statements are themselves further instances of T, S, and Φ at work, not truths inspecting the structure from outside. The account never asserts a closed totality of facts; it asserts the necessity of the conditions under which any fact is stated at all.

The Lewisian modal realism the parody sometimes implicates is [§4.4.1](<4.4.1 Modal Realism.md>). The modal-collapse worry that the necessity claim generates absurd consequences is [§4.4.9](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>). Williamson's necessitism, which embraces necessity at the type level rather than rejecting it, is [§4.4.6](<4.4.6 Necessitism.md>). Sider's structuralism, which deflates rather than embraces necessity, is [§4.4.7](<4.4.7 Sider's Structuralism.md>). The Whiteheadian process alternative is [§4.4.8](<4.4.8 Whiteheadian Process Metaphysics.md>). Modal fictionalism's attempt to deflate the whole apparatus is [§4.4.4](<4.4.4 Modal Fictionalism.md>). The chained-origin counterexamples, which press the modal logic itself rather than the argument's form, are [§4.4.11](<4.4.11 Chisholm’s Paradox Chained Origins.md>).

*What converges.* Each of the three parodies breaks at a point where the present argument differs from the Anselmian one. Gasking's inversion trades on a category confusion the structural account rejects: greatness on the present view is Functional Potency rather than impressiveness, and necessary non-existence is maximal impotence rather than maximal greatness. The S5 symmetry move fails because the two premises are not symmetric: ◇C is defended by a Cartesian certainty that change is occurring, and ¬◇C is dialectically unstable because asserting or considering it occurs through an ordered cognitive performance. Oppy's indictment targets arguments that move from concept to existence; the present argument moves from a phenomenally given fact of change to its structural conditions, and the parody cannot be reformulated in the same way because non-existence cannot be phenomenally given.

Gaunilo's island vanishes beneath a wave the moment it is conceived: not because islands cannot be perfect, but because an argument that proves an island by its mere conceivability has confused what is contained in a concept with what is contained in the world. Gasking's non-existent creator performs an identical trick, translated into the idiom of twentieth-century analytic theism. The argument survives both because it never performs the trick either parody is designed to expose. It does not move from the concept of change to the existence of structure. It moves from the phenomenal fact of change — the thinking now going on — to the structural conditions that make the thinking possible. Constructing the parody supplies an actual structured performance and therefore rebuts a denial aimed at the performance itself. It does not alone establish that every possible world realizes the same loaded types; that broader result depends on the separate modal and role-to-type arguments.


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← [4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>) | [4.4.11 Chisholm’s Paradox: Chained Origins](<4.4.11 Chisholm’s Paradox Chained Origins.md>) →
