Again on Existence as a Predicate

Author(s): Ermanno Benciv Enga

Source: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic
Tradition, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 125-138
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4319358
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 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE

(Received 4 August 1979)

Philosophical slogans are usually very vague. Of course, they may have
precise meaning within the systems of the authors who first propose them
but their use often extends substantially beyond the boundaries of those
systems, and their meaning becomes correspondingly less precise. In spite
of their vagueness, however, or perhaps because of it, such slogans are usual
quite stimulating: most of the time basic intuitions are expressed through
them, and it is interesting to see to what extent the intuitions in question
are independent of any given system, that is, how much of them can be ca
tured in different systems.
One of the most important and controversial slogans of contemporary
philosophy is the Kantian dictum that existence is not a (real) predicat
Certainly, this dictum expresses a presystematic intuition (that one migh
not share, but whose importance for many a speaker can hardly be denied
that is, the intuition that saying that something or other exists is differen
from saying that something or other is green in a sense in which saying th
something or other is green is not different from saying that something o
other is circular. In the present context, however, I will not be concerned
at all with the relation between the above dictum and intuition, or for th
matter with any way of directly defending the dictum itself, nor will I be con
cerned with the interpretation of the dictum inside Kant's philosophy. What
will be concerned with is the meaning the dictum can have in contemporary
philosophy of logic, especially in connection with the formal systems and t
formal semanties that have been developed recently for (existential presupp
sition-) free logics. Such systems and semantics will justify my looking fo
alternatives to what I regard as the two main attempts at interpreting th
Kantian dictum within the above mentioned context, and will suggest quit
naturally one such alternative, which constitutes the positive contribution
of the present essay.
The first line of interpretation of the contrast between existence and oth

Philosophical Studies 37 (1980) 125-138. 0031-8116/80/0372-0125$01.40

Copyright i 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A
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 126 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

predicates I want to discuss stems from Frege's work,2 and can be described
roughly as follows. Existence is not a property of objects, as for example is
redness; it is a property of concepts, and as such cannot be correctly
predicate of (say) John or the present King of France. So the contrast in
question is a contrast of levels: existence is a second-order concept, while
redness and the like are first-order concepts.
Certainly, this interpretation is reasonable, so far as it goes; but - one
might say - it simply does not go very far. One might agree with Frege's
intuitions about conceptual levels and with his identification of a second-
order concept of existence, and still claim that this is not the whole story.
One might think that Frege gives a good analysis of existence as involved
in statements of the form

(1) There exist P's,

and still be convinced that he should also have allowed for statemen

(2) a exists,

in which existence is actually predicated of objects. To introduce some

handy terminology, one might think that Frege dealt correctly with ge-
neral existence but failed to do justice to singular existence3 (indeed, one
might even go so far as saying that he did not give us any way of (formally)
expressing singular existence, but later I will have some objection to this
view).
Leonard (1956) argued that singular existence should be taken into
serious consideration, by reasoning substantially in the following way:

(3) (a) Standard (that is, Fregean) logic contains an implicit assumption
of singular existence, that is, the assumption that all the singular
terms available in the language are denoting.
(b) But the presence of this assumption is a defect of standard logic,
because among other things it restricts the range of applicability
of the logic and blurs the distinction between the inferences to
which the assumption is really relevant and the ones to which it is
not.

(c) Hence we should take seriously the possibility of negating the

assumption in question, and this of course cannot be done
without being able to express it, that is, without having some

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 127

symbolization for singular existence in our formal language and

some place for it in our conceptual apparatus.4

Of course, this argument is not going to impress the standard logician. For
one thing, he is by no means forced to admit the truth of premiss (b), as he
can deny d la Russell that there are any (genuine) singular terms which do not
denote, hence that there is a wider applicability to be gained or there are dis-
tinctions to be blurred, or claim d la Frege that the presence of non-denoting
singular terms in natural languages is a defect of such languages, to be elimina-
ted in the construction of a logically perfect language.5 So we might try to
reformulate the argument in the following way:

(4) (a) Standard logic contains an implicit assumption of singular

existence.
(b) But a theory is always improved when one of its implicit assump-
tions is made explicit, whether or not the assumption in question
is a true (or perhaps a good)6 one.
(c) Hence we should make explicit the assumption of singular
existence contained in standard logic, and this of course cannot
be done without....

Once more, however, our standard opponent would not be convinced.

Even assuming that he gave so much value to explicitation of assumptions as
we (at least for the sake of argument) do, he would have no reason to
describe the assumption contained in his logic as one of singular existence.
"What you call singular existence - he might say - can always be expressed
in terms of general existence; in particular, (2) can be paraphrased into

(5) The concept of being (equal to) a has instances (that is, it has
general existence).?

which by the way suggests very naturally the formal rendering

(6) 3 x(x = a).

Thus singular existence has been after all correctly ruled out, as it is an
unnecessary notion. The assumption you are talking about is (or, more
cautiously, can be interpreted as being) nothing but the assumption that
certain concepts are instantiated, that is, an assumption of general
existence, and you can study it, and even explore the consequences of
negating it, without introducing singular existence at all."

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128 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

I think that objections of this kind

hopes to prove that we should care about singular existence (or at least, to
prove it along the lines suggested by Leonard). They, however, have little
or no relevance to the weaker claim that singular existence is a legitimate
notion, and one that we could - if we so decided - take into serious conside-
ration. For if the possibility of paraphrasing our statements proved anything
against the legitimacy of a philosophical notion, we could use it to disqualify
'singular redness' in favor of 'general redness', hence to conclude that redness
is not a predicate after all. For - we might say - a statement like

(7) a is red

can be paraphrased into

(8) The concept of being (equal to) a has red instances (that is, it
has general redness)

which by the way suggests very naturally the fonnal rendering

(9) Rx(x=a)

in some formal language created for this purpo

The fact is that no serious philosophical prob
to (possible) paraphrases of our statements; r
accepted particular solutions of some philosophical problems that we
establish which paraphrases we are going to use. Thus in our case, it is only a
having decided that existence cannot, and redness can, occur as a predicat
in singular statements (that is, after having decided to rule out singular
existence) that we will accept the paraphrase (5) of (2) together with its
formal rendering (6), while at the same time rejecting the paraphrase (8) of
(7) (or at least not using it to 'infer' any (pseudo) philosophical consequence)
and seeing (9) as at best a notational variant of

(10) R(ed)a.

And conversely, if we made different philosophical decisions, we could

reasonably insist that (2) is not to be paraphrased into (5), and that (6) is
at best a notational variant of

(1 1) E!a

(which, by the way, shows that the problem of whether

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 129

singular existence within the language of sta

clear-cut answer as somebody might think).
Thus the objection considered above does no
is not a legitimate notion. Perhaps some oth
that it will not be a straightforward one, or
commitments to some specific philosophical position.8 In the present
context, however, I am less concerned with the existence of such arguments
than with the following simple fact. As a consequence of Leonard's (and
other people's) seminal suggestions, a number of philosophical logicians today
actually do care for singular existence, in the precise sense that they construc-
ted formal (free) languages in which 'E" or some variant of it is either a
primitive or a defined symbol, and their position has not been shown yet an
untenable one (even if some, or many, may think it is). But, as this is the
case, a new question very naturally arises. Is it possible to contrast singular
existence with other predicates? That is to say, is there any reasonable inter-
pretation of Kant's dictum which is compatible with the view that existence
can occur as a predicate in singular statements?
Once more, the first suggestion for a positive answer to the above question
comes from Frege, and in particular from his treatment of the notion of
presupposition in 'On sense and reference'. Filtered through Strawson's 'On
referring'9 and van Fraassen's 'Presupposition, implication, and self-
reference',' this treatment could be spelled out as follows. A statement like

(12) John is young

presupposes the existence of a denotation for the singular term 'John'; t

is, the truth of

(13) John exists

is a necessary condition for (12) to have any truth-value at all. The same
holds if we replace '...is young' with other typical predicates, such as '...is
fat' or '...is tall', but when we come to '...exists', that is, when we take (13)
itself into account, the situation gets more complicated. For on the one hand
it seems that, when John does not exist, we can at least say that he does not
exist, that is, that (13) is false and

(14) John does not exist

is true, which would mean that neither (13) nor (14) presuppose (13), and on

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 130 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

the other hand, if we insist that even

(13) then it is easy to see that (13) can never come out false and (14) can
never come out true, while of course (12) and the like can sometimes come
out false and

(15) John is not young

can come out true. In both cases, a contrast between existence and other
predicates is thus established, which one may describe by saying that
existence is not a (real) predicate. And furthermore, this contrast does not
depend on any paraphrase of statements like (13) in terms of general
existence. It allows one to take (13) exactly at its face-value, that is, as predi-
cating existence of John.
So far so good. Unfortunately, however, when we consider more closely
the (free) logics which have tried to embody Leonard's suggestions, we realize
that the above is more an account of a possible position on the subject than
of an actual one. For if taken to its ultimate consequences, the choice of such
a position would entail that practically no logical law A could be asserted
without adding to it the proviso

(16) if all the singular terms occurring in A are denoting,

but no free logician has ever found such ultimate consequences attractive.
As a matter of fact, many existing free logics agree in accepting

(17) a=a
(without any proviso) as a theorem, and the agreement becomes almost
universal for tautologies like

(18) Pav -Pa,

which means, for example, that

(19) John is (equal to) John

or

(20) John is either red or not red

should be true according to these systems independently of the existence of

John." Thus self-identity and red-or-not-redness behave according to these
systems exactly as existence, in the senses now relevant to us: a statement

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 131

of self-identity or of red-or-not-redness doe

a denotation for the singular term occurrin
statement can never be false (and its negation can never be true). Shall we
conclude that self-identity and red-or-not-redness are not (real) predicates
either?
Perhaps somebody might think that we should, arguing that 'analytic'
predicates such as the ones we are considering must be contrasted with
'synthetic' ones such as fatness or baldness, and, even if it is strange that
existence winds up on the same side as self-identity, this thesis at least makes
sense. But difficulties arise as soon as it is formulated. First of all, there are
bivalent semantics for free logics, that is, semantics in which a statement of
the form

(21) a isP

is always either true or false, whether or not a exist

our attention to non-bivalent semantics, a few years ago van Fraassen
proposed one such semantics in which

(22) Pegasus is winged

and

(23) Zeus was a Greek God

could come out true independently of the existence of either Pegasus or

Zeus,13 and I have proposed another one in which

(24) The young fellow is young

would be true whether or not there is one and only one young fellow.14
Certainly, one could insist on saying that a statement containing non-
denoting singular terms is, if true, analytically true,15 but this claim would
not help us in the present situation. For what is relevant here is not the
analyticity of the statements but the analyticity of the predicates (supposing,
for the sake of argument, that we take such a notion seriously), and if "...is
winged' or '...is young' were to be judged analytic on the ground of their
occurring in the above statement then any predicate (or perhaps any non-con-
tradictory predicate) would. And thus the contrast we had established
between existence and other predicates vanishes. 16
Various morals might be drawn from this conclusion. The moral I want to

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 132 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

draw is that we have reached one more dialectical turning-point of our

analysis, from which (at least) one more question arises: Is there any
reasonable interpretation of Kant's dictum which is compatible both with
accepting singular existence and with allowing any predicate to occur in true
or false statements containing non-denoting singular terms? In what follows,
I will try to give a positive answer to this question, by making essential
reference to a general scheme for the construction of semantics for free
logics that I have presented and discussed elsehwere.17 It is important to
point out, however, that mine will be an answer to the question Iformulated,
and not to such more specific questions as: Is there any reasonable interpreta-
tion of Kant's dictum within van Fraassen's (or anybody else's) semantics?
To simplify matters, I will only consider for the time being atomic state-
ments;18 at the end of the paper I will indicate how my conclusions can be
easily generalized to all statements. Within the scope of this simplifying
hypothesis, the features of the above-mentioned scheme that are relevant
to our present purpose are the following:

(25)(a) Atomic statements containing no non-denoting singular terms are

evaluated with respect to a given situation (or world) S in the
usual way, and their truth-values are characterized as factual
ones;
(b) an atomic statement containing some non-denoting singular term
cannot receive in S a factual truth-value, but
(c) if in all the alternative situations in which the singular term in
question is denoting, and which in every other relevant respect
coincide with S, the statement has the same (factual) truth-
value, then that truth-value is assigned to the statement in S
(and characterized as a formal one).

Let us see how this scheme applies to some of the examples mentioned
above. Self-identity is simple: the term 'a' occurring in (17) may be non-
denoting in a particular situation, and as a result (17) will lack a factual
truth-value in that situation, but in all altemative situations in which 'a'
is denoting (17) will be true, hence it will be (formally) true also in the situa-
tion above. Elsewhere I have described this procedure as a mental experiment,
and indeed a good way of putting the matter intuitively might begin as
follows: "Well, 'a' is non-denoting here, but suppose it were denoting...".
The same line of reasoning applies to (24), but with one main complica-

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 133

tion: our mental experiments cannot assign to

denotation (in case it does not have a denotatio
only a denotation which actually is a young fel
the scope of the mental experiment). Technical
of worlds that would be relevant for the evalua

(26) John is young

(in case 'John' were also non-denoting) are not relevant for the evaluat
(24), and as a result (24) is, and (26) is not,"9 (formally) true.
The above treatment of (24) has an important moral: the structure
mental experiments can be made much more precise by the analysis o
But this analysis need not be (totally) explicit: a good deal of it may
presupposed in what we know (or we establish) about the possible de
tions of presently non-denoting singular terms. In other words, on
remember that the above is a general scheme, working in some gener
(e.g., with self-identity) but in more specific cases requiring a supply
mation to give us the results we want. Once this is understood, the
a satisfactory treatment of (22) and (23) is clear. If we supply the sc
with an adequate semantics of the terms 'Pegasus' and 'Zeus', our mental
experiments relative to them will be much more definite, hopefully so
definite as to exclude situations in which Pegasus is a cow or Zeus is a res-
taurant and to verify the statements in question, while probably leaving
indetenninate the truth-values of, say,

(27) Pegasus is white

and

(28) Zeus loved to play bridge.20

These few remarks should be sufficient to show that the above scheme
allows for any predicate to occur in true or false statements containing
non-denoting singular terms. This conclusion is encouraging, but to get
closer to the answer we are looking for it is important to make the following
observation. Even if in the scheme in question one has two senses of predica-
tion, a factual one and a formal one, the second sense is essentially parasitic
on the first one. It is by means of the factual truth-values it assumes in alter-
native situations that we decide the formal truth-value (if any) of a factually
truth-valueless statement: a formal truth-value is after all simply a factual

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134 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

truth-value which is invariant with respect to a class of situations. In other

words, it is always by the same operation that we decide whether or not Jim-
my Carter is a President and whether or not Pegasus is winged: when we
cannot perform the operation in the actual world, we perform it (even if only
ideally) in more suitable worlds.
This observation can be expressed in a different way: according to the
scheme in question, the truth-values of our (atomic) statements are always
established on the ground of their semantical behavior in situations in which
the singular terms occurring in them are denoting. Whether or not 'Pegasus'
is denoting in our world, the only worlds which will be relevant to evaluate
(22) will be worlds which contain Pegasus. This characterization however
simply cannot be extended to singular existence statements, and it is this
impossibility that constitutes the core of the constrast between existence and
other predicates I am about to propose.
Consider the statement

(29) Pegasus exists,

and suppose that in a given situation 'Pegasus' is non-denoting. Most of us

would be inclined to deny that in such a situation (29) is true, but if we apply
the above scheme to the statement in question (that is, if we treat '...exists' as
we treat the other predicates) this simple and perfectly legitimate
desideratum will not be satisfied. For in that case (29) will have no factual
truth-value, and we will have to consider alternative situations of various
sorts. But no matter what these situations are (that is, no matter what way we
will have implemented the general scheme), they will always share a crucial
feature: Pegasus will exist in each of them. So, (29) will turn out (formally)
true.
This problem can be dealt with in several ways. We may decide to make
(29) factually false, by slightly modifying our notion of factual truth-value;
or we may decide to disregard mental experiments in this particular case, and
stick to the statement's factual truth-valuelessness; or we may decide that the
notion of formal truth-value has to be modified, and that in some way or
other alternative worlds not containing Pegasus have to be taken into account
in the evaluation of (29). For the present purpose, which of these solutions is
chosen is not particularly important,21 but it is important to point out that

(i) a solution is required, for the above scheme makes it impossible

to give a reasonable treatment of singular existence statements;

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 135

(ii) whatever solution we choose, the consideration of some situation

in which the relevant terms are not denoting (be it the actual one
or an alternative one) will become essential for the semantical
analysis of the singular existence statements that we do not want
to regard as true;
(iii) no such solution forces us to modify the treatment suggested by
our scheme for the (atomic) statements not involving singular
existence.22

(i)-(iii) suggest that a natural consequence of adopting the scheme in

question is to develop a semantics which discriminates betwen (singular)
existence and other predicates, or at least, they suggest this as a natural
consequence to anybody who regards a minimal revision of our conceptual
framework as more appealing than simply throwing the framework away.
Within such a minimally modified scheme, the discrimination could be made
precise by stating the following definitions.

(30) An atomic statement A 'expresses a real predication if and only if

its truth-value (if any) in any given situation is always a function
of its factual truth-values in situations in which all the singular
terms occurring in A are denoting.
(31) An atomic open formula A (x 1, ..., x,) is a real predicate if and
only if the result of uniformly substituting singular terms for all
the individual variables occurring free in it is a statement expres-
sing a real predication.23

At this point, it should be clear that according to (30)-(3 1) and within

the above modified scheme '...exists' is not a real predicate, while '...is fat',
'...is tall' and '...is self-identical' are. And this, together with the fact that in
the scheme in question anything can be predicated of 'non-existing objects',24
gives a first (partial) positive answer to the question we are interested in. To
complete this answer, that is, to generalize it to the case of compound state-
ments, we can proceed in several ways. The way that I regard as the most
natural is the following.
First, let us define in an obvious way the notion of substatement and
atomic substatement of a given statement. Then, let us add to (30-31) two
more definitions, that is,

(32) A statement A expresses a real predication if and only if all of its

atomic substatements express real predications.

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 136 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

(33) = the result of dropping the qualification 'atomic' in (31).

According to (32)-(33), (18) and

(34) VxPxa

express real predications, while

(35) Pa&E!a

does not; hence red-or-not-redness is a (real) predica

and-existent is not.

University of Pittsburgh

NOTES

1 See the: Critique of Pure Reason (trans. by Norman Kemp Smith) (

p. 504. Notice that the word 'real' is usually forgotten by people discussing
for this reason I put it between parentheses. Notice also that (as what follows will make
clearer) I am not interested (nor - I think - is anybody) in the question whether or not
existence may be called a predicate, but rather in the question whether or not, whatever
we call existence, a reasonable contrast can be found between existence and other things
that we (also) call predicates. For this reason, I will occasionally use expressions that
might suggest that existence is (referred to as) a predicate (as for example 'the contrast
between existence and other predicates', 'predicating existence of John'), but I do not
think that such a use is of any relevance for my present concern, or even less begs any
question.
2 See for example: The Foundations of Arithmetic (transl. by J. L. Austin) (New
York 1960), p. 65.
3 As far as I know, Quine was the first (in his 'Designation and existence', Journal of
Philosophy 36 (1939), pp. 701-9) to contrast general existence statements (such as the
ones of the form (1)) with singular existence statements (such as the ones of the form
(2)). Later on, Leonard (in his 'The logic of existence', Philosophical Studies 7 (1956),
pp. 49-64, from now on referred to as Leonard (1956)) contrasted more directly
general existence with singular existence. It is not my concern here to explore Leonard's
interpretation of this contrast; I will just use the words 'general existence' and 'singular
existence' as shorthand for 'existence as involved in general existence statements' and
'existence as involved in singular existence statements'. And there is plenty of evidence
that Leonard would have agreed on this much. (Cf. for example "when I speak of, or
affirm, the existence of southerners, or patriots, or men, or crimes, I am affirming
general existence. ...But if I were to speak of or affirm the existence of Jimmy Byrnes or
Santa Claus or the governor of Connecticut, I would be affirming singular existence."
(Leonard (1956), p. 51).
' As a matter of fact, Leonard does not give such an explicit and formal argumen
the introduction of singular existence, but I think that (3) represents a fair way of su
ming up his reasons for it. Cf. the following passages of Leonard (1956): "modern logic
tacitly presupposes singular existence for its singular term variables" (p. 56); "The

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 AGAIN ON EXISTENCE AS A PREDICATE 137

presuppositions are of tremendous importance when one undertakes to apply the ab-
stract system to a concrete subject matter. Unless the field of application satisfies
the presuppositions, ...the application is invalid... . The situation is further complicated
...by the fact that not every presupposition is always relevant....The remedy is to make
the presuppositions explicit." (p. 50); "modern logic would be... improved if these
presuppositions could be acknowledged and symbolized, and the circumstances under
which they are relevant or irrelevant be discriminated one from the other." (p. 51).
Notice also that the symbolization that Leonard proposes for singular existence (and
that we will use here) is 'E!'.
5 The Russellian way out is well-known. Less popular is perhaps the Fregean one,
explicitly stated in 'On sense and reference' (in: Translations from the Philosophical
Writings of Gottlob Frege, by Peter Geach and Max Black (eds.), Oxford 1952, pp.
56-78): "Languages have the fault of containing expressions which fail to designate
an object (although their grammatical form seems to qualify for that purpose) because
the truth of some sentence is a prerequisite." (p. 69, italics mine); "A logically perfect
language should satisfy the conditions, that every expression grammatically well
constructed as a proper name out of signs already introduced shall in fact designate an
object, and that no new sign shall be introduced as a proper name without being secured
a reference." (p. 70, italics mine).
6 The qualification 'good' seems to be more appropriate in the case of something like
the Fregean way out mentioned in the previous note.
7 Of course, the standard logician will paraphrase (2) into (5) (if and) only if he
accepts a Frege-like analysis of general existence. Otherwise, he might propose such more
cautious paraphrases as 'There are things that are equal to a'. But this would not
change the substance of his argument.
8 In particular, Frege's account of the matter seems to be at least partly justified by his
acceptance of a thesis that many logicians today would not agree on: the thesis that all
singular existence statements are utterly uninformative. Cf. the following passage of his
'Dialog mit Punjer uber Existenz' (in: Nachgelassene Schriften, Hamburg 1969, pp. 60-
75): "In dem Satze 'A ist sich selbst gleich' erfahrt man ebensowenig etwas Neues uiber
das A, wie in dem Satze 'A existiert' ". (p. 70).
Mind 59 (1950), pp. 320-344.
Journal of Philosophy 69 (1968), pp. 136-52.
l I need hardly to point out that, whatever (real) predicates might turn out to be, they
should have little to do with the primitive predicates of any formal language. For the no-
tion that we are after should cover predicates of any degree of complexity, but formal
languages usually (with a few interesting exceptions) do not allow us to construct
compound predicates, but only compound formulas. Thus a more adequate formal
analogue of the notion we are interested in is the notion of an open formula, and on the
ground of this analogy we can reasonably say that (18) predicates something (namely,
Px v -Px) of a.
12 The most important bivalent semantics for free logics are van Fraassen's semant
classical valuations (for which see e.g. his 'The completeness of free logic', Zeitschrift
fur mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 12 (1966), pp. 219-34) and
Leblanc and Thomason's semantics of outer domains (for which see their 'Completeness
theorems for some presupposition-free logics', Fundamenta Mathematicae 62 (1968),
pp. 125-64).
13 This is the semantics grounded on the notion of an S-model, sketched in
quoted in the previous note.
14 See my 'Free semantics for indefinite descriptions', forthcoming in: Journal o
Philosophical Logic, and 'Free semantics for definite descriptions', unpublished.
'5 Such an insistence however would not be very reasonable, for all the abov
semantics but mine. For take for example van Fraassen's semantics of S-models.

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 138 ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

Certainly, if Pegasus does not exist, there are S-models (for some set S) in which (22)
is true, but there are also S-models (for the same set S) in which (22) is false. And how
can this be consistent with the claim that when Pegasus does not exist (22) is, if true,
analytically true?
16 One might try to save this line of solution by first establishing that a statement
expresses a real predication if either it is analytic or it has existential presuppositions,
and then defining real predicates as I do at the end of this paper. I have nothing in
principle against this way out, and indeed one might conceive of my personal
contribution as the result of adding some qualifications to it. It is worth noticing,
however, that some qualifications are needed, in view of the ambiguity of the notion
of analyticity (which ambiguity, of course, is strictly connected with the problems
mentioned in the previous note).
17 See my 'Free semantics', forthcoming in: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, 'Truth, correspondence, and non-denoting singular terms', read at the 1978
Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, and the papers quoted in note 14.
18 It might be useful to say explicitly that I am using the word 'statement' to designate
ambiguously statements of natural language and closed formulas of a formal language.
19 Of course, (26) is not true by now, but it might become true later, on the ground of
some analysis of the term 'John'.
20 It is easy to see that the procedure mentioned in the text admits of limit-cases in
which every statement containing some non-denoting singular term receives a truth-
value. Such limit-cases would give us of course bivalent semantics.
21 In my own development of such matters (e.g. in my 'Free semantics') I adopted
the first alternative.
22 In my 'Free semantics' and in the papers quoted in Note 14 I modified the above
scheme also with respect to identity (not, however, with respect to self-identity). This
modification, though not being strictly necessary, was in my opinion very natural (in
the sense that we can avoid it only by rather ad hoc hypotheses); hence I think I might
argue that a statement of the form 'a = b' (where 'a' and 'b' are different singular
terms) does not express a real predication. But this is a story for another time.
23 It may be worth noticing that a necessary condition for the reasonableness of this
definition is that, if any such substitution results in (a statement expressing) a real
predication, every such substitution should result in a real predication. But this
condition can be easily proved to hold for the scheme in question.
24 In my 'Truth, correspondence,...' and elsewhere I argued that in a very important sense
my scheme dispenses with non-existing objects. Thus when I use colloquially the expression
'non-existing objects' I prefer to put it between quotation-marks, to emphasize its
technical inappropriateness.

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