A Critique of the Quantificational Account of Existence

Abstract

A CRITIQUE OF THE QUANTIFICATIONAL ACCOUNT OF EXISTENCE ARITICISM OFTEN brought against philosophers who raise questions about Being or existence charges that these philosophers have simply been misled by the surface grammar of existence statements into thinking that " exists " and its cognates are logical 1 predicates, and thus into thinking that there must be some mysterious property or quasiproperty called " Being " 2 to which this putative predicate refers , and into which it would make sense to inquire. According to Bertrand Russell, ... there is a vast amount of philosophy that rests upon the notion that existence, is, so to speak, a property that you can attribute to things, and that the things that exist have the property of existence and the things that do not exist do not. That is rubbish ...3 In a somewhat more restrained tone, Rudolf Carnap agrees that "Most metaphysicians since antiquity have allowed themselves to be seduced into pseudostatements by the verbal, and therewith the predicative form of the word 'to be,' e.g., 'I am,' 1 "Logical" as opposed to "grammatical." Note that Kant uses "logical" in the sense of " grammatical". For Kant it is self-evident that " exists " is a logical predicate; the only question is whether it is a "real" or "determining" predicate. (See Critique of Pure Reason A598 B6~6.) In recent discussions, it is taken as self-evident that "exists " is a grammatical predicate; the only question is whether it is also a logical predicate. 2 I capitalize the initial letter of "Being," not out of misplaced piety, but in order to mark the distinction between Being and being. Lower case " being" can be used to refer collectively or distributively to. the' totality of beings. Upper case " Being" refers, however, not to beings collectively or distributively, but to that which constitutes beings as beings, the " property " which they all have " in common." s " The Philosophy of Logical Atomism " in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), p. 252. Cited hereafter as LK. THE QUANTIFICATIONAL ACCOUNT OF EXISTENCE ~43 'God is.'" 4 In the same vein, A. J. Ayer claims that"... those who raise questions about Being which are based on the assumption that existence is an attribute are guilty of following grammar beyond the boundaries of sense." 5 As a last example we find Wolfgang Stegmiiller stating that " Es ist also nur eine mangelhafte Grammatik, die uns veranlasst, von dem 'Sein des Seienden' zu reden." 6 The list could be extended, but one begins to get the point. On this issue we find an almost monolithic consensus among language-analytic philosophers: questions about Being or existence are pseudo-questions whose origin lies in an uncritical mistaking of grammatical for logical structure. But this is only the negative side of the issue. The positive side consists in an account of how " exists " and " is " function if they do not function as predicates. Let us call this the "quantificational account of existence." It may also be identified by its major exponents: Frege, Russell and Quine. If the quantificational account is true, " exists " and its cognates are syncategorematical expressions which disappear into the apparatus of quantification. One then could not legitimately ask about their meaning, if by " meaning" is meant something above and beyond their merely syntactic" meaning." On the quantificational account, "exists " and "is " function in a manner closely analogous to that of the logical connectives. Just as the tilde (" ,_..,, ") has no meaning in itself but only when used to operate on a proposition to form its negation, so too " exists " and its cognates have in themselves no extralogical significance, and attain to such only when appended to an expression which does have extralogical meaning. On this view, the question as to the meaning of " Being " or " existence " (and the question as to the meaning of the concepts Being and existence) is either 4 " The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language " in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 28. 5 Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952), p. 48. 6 Der PhiinomenaUsmus und seine Schwierigkeiten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellshaft, 1969...