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Referring to What Does Not Exist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gerald Vision
Gerald Vision*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

Under the title of ‘the axiom of existence’, hereafter (AE), John R. Searle has reduced to compact dictum a view to which many philosophers subscribe:

(AE) ‘Whatever is referred to must exist’.

(A less equivocal, though inelegant formulation would be: ‘It is necessary that whatever is referred to exist at some time or other’.) In this paper I shall offer two major arguments against adopting (AE), at least on certain assumptions. There have been a number of defenses of (AE), among them those arguing that it is fundamental to any systematic philosophy of language or logic. With the exception of discussing some of Searle's remarks in part Ill of this paper I shall not comment on any of these defenses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , June 1974 , pp. 619 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Speech Acts (Cambridge), 1969, p. 77.

2 E.g. Shwayder, D. S. Modes of Referring and the Problem of Universals (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar, ch. 1; Alston, William P. “The Ontological Argument Revisited,” The Philosophical Review, vol.LXIX (1960).Google Scholar

3 Geach, Peter Thomas Reference and Generality (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

4 Bertrand Russell's work is largely confined to ‘denoting.’ See for example “On Denoting” and “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” lecture VI, both in Logic and Knowledge, ed. by Marsh, Robert C. (London, 1956)Google Scholar; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London, 1919), ch. 16.

5 Compare the following from H. P. Grice: “ … it will be very unplausible to hold both that there exists a particular interpretation or sense of an expression E, and to use E in this sense or interpretation is always to do something which is conversationally objectionable.” “Vacuous Names,” in Words and Objections, ed. by Davidson, Donald and Hintikka, Jakko (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 131.Google Scholar

6 P. P. Strawson, “On·Referring,” Mind (1950), and frequently reprinted.

7 In “On Denoting,” op. cit., p. 54; “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” op. cit., p. 253; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, pp. 178–79.

8 Russell seems to concur in the following: “For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g. by Meinong, that we can speak about “the golden mountain,” “the round square,” and so on: we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless.” Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 169.

9 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, 1965), p. 123. On the relevance of quantifiers see note 13 on pp. 225–26, and on their potential unavoidability see p. 144. For an application to our specific issue see pp. 144–46. Chomsky does not give a detailed account of (structural) indices. Their role in the cited discussion is simply to give a name to whatever information one needs, in addition to a certain orthographic/phonetic similarity, to allow for various transformations. Since this rôle fits the claims I am presently making, and does not go on to specify features for unrelated functions, I shall also call whatever it is that incorporates the additional information I have claimed is necessary an index.

10 Chomsky envisages the indices as integers. He says “… by the recoverability condition on deletion [note 1, p. 222), the reflexivization rule (similarly, the pronominalization rule) will apply only when the integers assigned to the two items are the same. The semantic component will then interpret two referential items as having the same referent just in case they are strictly identical-in particular, in case they have been assigned the same integer in the deep structure.” (Ibid., p. 146.) See also McCawley, James “Meaning and the Description of Languages,” Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Rosenberg, J. F. and Travis, Charles (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), p. 522.Google Scholar

11 Quine, Willard Van Orman From a Logical Point of View(Cambridge, 1961), pp. 7–8Google Scholar; Word and Object (New York, 1960), §37.

12 Plato, E.G. Sophist, 237c-e; Russell, Principles of Mathematics(New York, 1964), 427Google Scholar and “On Denoting,” op. cit., p. 48; Quine, W. V. “Designation and Existence,” Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. by Feigl, Herbert and Sellars, Wilfred (New York, 1949), p. 45.Google Scholar