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The (logical) importance of not existing1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

R.  and
V. Routley
R.
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra
V. Routley
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra
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Extract

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 129 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1979

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References

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