<2 A Logistical Approach to the Ontological Problen’ What does it mean to ask, e.g., whether there is such an entity as roundness? Note that we can use the word ‘roundness’ without acknowledging any such entity. We can maintain that the word is syncategorematic, like prepositions, conjunctions, articles, com- mas, cte,: that though it occurs as an essential part of various meaningful sentences it is not a name of anything. To ask whether there is such an entity as roundness is thus not to question the meaningfulness of ‘roundness’; it amounts rather to asking whether this word is a name or a syncategorematic expression. Ontological questions can be transformed, in this superficial way, into linguistic questions regarding the boundary between names and syncategorematic expressions. Now where, in fact, does this boundary fall? The answer is to be found, I think, by turning our attention to variables. If in the statement: (1) Pebbles have roundness Presented at the fifth International Congress for the Unity of Seience, Cambridge, Mass, September 1939, and printed for distribution at the congress as an advance extract from the Journal of Unified Science, which had been established in Holland as the successor to Erkenntnis after the German annexation of Austria. The Journal itself, containing this and the other congress papers, was destined never to appear, owing to the German invasion of Holland. 1 Acknowledgment is due Mr. H. Nelson Goodman for valuable criticism of an earlier draft.A LOGISTICAL APPROACH 65 the word ‘roundness’ is regarded as a merely syncategorematic fragment of its context, like ‘have’ or indeed ‘bles’ or ‘ness’, then the truth of (1) does not entitle us to infer: ‘ Pebbles have something, Le: (2) (az) (pebbles have z). Where ‘have’ is understood as in the context ‘have roundness’, and ‘roundness’ is understood syneategorematically, the use of the variable ‘e’ after ‘have’ as in (2) would be simply ungram- matical—like its use after ‘peb’ in: (az) (pebz have roundness). Variables are pronouns, and make sense only in positions which are available to names. Thus it would seem that admission of the inference of (2) from (1) is tantamount to recognizing ‘roundness’ as a name rather than a syncategorematic expression; tantamount, in other words, to recognizing an entity roundness. The same conclusion can be reached through less explicitly syntactical channels. (2) says that there is an entity which pebbles “have”; hence, if we allow ourselves to infer (2) from (1), we have countenanced an entity roundness and construed (1) as saying that pebbles “have” it. Some may protest, however, that the quantifier ‘(az)’ in (2) says nothing of entities nor of existence; that the meaning of so-called existential quantification is completely described merely by the logical rules which govern it. Now I grant that the meaning of quantification is covered by the logical rules; but the meaning which those rules determine is still that which ordinary usage accords to the idioms ‘there is an entity such that’, ‘an entity exists such that’, etc. Such conform- ity was the logistician’s objective when he codified quantifica- tion; existential quantification was designed for the role of those common idioms. It is in just this usual sense of ‘there is’ that we mean to inquire whether there is such an entity as roundness; and it in just this sense that an affirmative answer is implicit in the inference of (2) from (1). We seem to have found a formal basis for distinguishing names from syneategorematic expression. To say that ‘roundness’ is a name, i.e., that there is such an entity as roundness, is to say that from a context ‘.. roundness...’ we may infer ‘(3z) (...2...)’. But if such inferences are valid, then in par-66 The Ways of Paradox ticular from a negative context ‘~( . . . roundness... )’ it will be valid to infer ‘(az)~(...2...)', ie, ~(z)(...2 . .)’; wherefore, by contraposition, it will be valid conversely to infer“. . roundness...’ from ‘(z)(...2...)% The law whereby the existential statement follows from the singular is indeed equivalent to the law whereby the singular follows from. the universal. It thus appears suitable to describe names simply as those constant expressions which replace variables and are replaced by variables according to the usual laws of quantification. Other meaningful expressions (other expressions capable of occurring in statements) are syncategorematic. It is to names, in this sense, that the words ‘There is such an entity as’ may truthfully be prefixed. Elliptically stated: We may be said to countenance such and such an entity if and only if we regard the range of our variables as including such an entity. To be is to be a value of a variable. The formulation at which we have arrived is adapted only to those familiar forms of language in which quantification figures as primitive and variables figure solely as adjuncts to quantifica- tion.” Ensuing considerations will likewise be limited to lan- guages of that sort. Superficial revisions would be needed to adapt these developments to languages in which abstraction is primi- tive;? and basic revisions would be needed for adaptation to languages in which variables are eliminated in favor of combina- tors.“ One sometimes chooses to speak as if certain syneategorematic expressions were names of entities, though still holding that this is merely a manner of speaking, that the expressions are not actually names, and that the alleged entities are convenient fictions. This notion of fiction can be given a clear meaning from the point of view of the present developments. To speak as if certain expressions were names is, we have seen, to allow those expressions to replace and be replaced by variables according to the laws of quantification. But if this is to be merely a convenient and theoretically avoidable manner of speaking, we must be able 2g, Tarski’s “Wahrheitsbegriff,” pp. 363-366, and my “Set-theoretic foundations” and “New foundations.” Eg, my System of Logistic and “Logic based on inclusion and abstrac- et Behiafiakel; Cumy.