Re: Is "existence" a predicate?

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:00:43 +0000 (UTC), Chris Menzel
<cmenzel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:22:09 -0500, David C Ullrich
<dullrich@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach
<paulholbachDELETETHENAME@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

Just out of curiosity, is that actually Quine's view?

It is misleadingly put. Quine very explicitly rejected the idea that
there are things that don't exist (the locus classicus here is his
early-1950s article "On What There Is"). However, he did argue that
talk about fictional and mythological entities and the like was
*meaningful*, just always literally false. For Quine (at least, in the
article indicated), sentences involving, say, the name "Pegasus" are to
be thought of (á la Russell) as truncated definite descriptions, e.g.,
"The winged horse of Greek mythology", sentences containing which, in
turn, are analyzable (á la Russell) in terms of quantification and
identity.

Okie dokie.

By the way, what is the meaning of the (first-order) predicate "to
exist"?

Curious question, given where the thread started.

Regardless of whether existence is a predicate (I'd want a careful
definition of "is a predicate" before tackling that again) there _is_
no such predicate in the standard formalizations of first-order logic,
so I'm a little puzzled when you specify "first-order". If we do add
such a predicate then, in first-order logic (which of course is not
adequate for discussing various things we've been discussing) it's
true of everything; if the "meaning" of a predicate is its
interpretation in a model then "exists" would be special, just like
equality in fol-with-equality, and the interpretation would be
required to be the universe of the model.

(Which of course has little to do with what you meant to ask...)

But which is surely the only sensible answer. First-order logic doesn't
answer Deep Philosophical Questions about the nature of existence

Well of course not. Hence my confusion over the injection of
the words "first-order" above.

<reference to other thread>
Which is exactly why FOL needs to be fixed, right?
</reference to other thread>

and is
certainly silent on such matters as whether:

... "to exist" means "to be independent of being thought about".

David C. Ullrich
.

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