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Quine: ‘On What There Is’ – Summary | Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

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(1) Plato’s Beard: to claim that there are things that are not is a seeming contradiction. I.e. there exist things that do not exist! – e.g. McX claims that to assert that ‘Pegasus does not exist’ is still to assert the existence of Pegasus, in some sense. (2) McX does not claim that ‘Pegasus’ (etc.) is a physical, spatio-temporal entity, but rather an idea. – Quine: But the claim ‘Pegasus does not exist’ is not claiming that the Pegasus-idea does not exist. [DEBATE] (3) ‘Wyman’ suggests instead that ‘Pegasus’ here refers to an ‘unactualized possible’ (possibilia). – Quine: Wyman has thus defined ‘exist’ to include also non-actual, non-spatio-temporal entities. – Quine: (i) We should limit our use of ‘possible’ to statements rather than entities. (ii) Another reason for rejecting Wyman’s possibilia (and McX’s ideas) is by considering an oxymoron as subject of a negative existential proposition. (4) We should untangle Plato’s Beard with Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Descriptions (RTD). –

A summary (2016) for my undergraduates on W. V. O. Quine’s seminal paper of 1948, On What There Is . Essay Stages : (1) Plato’s Beard : to claim that there are things that are not is a seeming contradiction. I.e. there exist things that do not exist! – e.g. McX claims that to assert that ‘ Pegasus does not exist’ is still to assert the existence of Pegasus, in some sense. (2) McX does not claim that ‘Pegasus’ (etc.) is a physical, spatio-temporal entity, but rather an idea . – Quine: But the claim ‘Pegasus does not exist’ is not claiming that the Pegasus-idea does not exist. [DEBATE] (3)

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