Reply to Reviewers

Abstract

Eli Hirsch's attempt to reconstruct my fundamental argument for the Denial is a serious and careful piece of work. And yet it seems to me to get my views on ontology and language almost entirely wrong. How can this be? I think the explanation must in the end be philosophical: Hirsch and I have such different ideas about ontology and language that it is very hard for him to understand me. And, I would add, it is very hard for me to understand him. Let me assure any reader who detects a note of exasperation in what follows that this exasperation is directed at myself and my apparent inability to make my views clear to a philosopher I respect. I want to consider the numbered propositions that make up Hirsch's attempt to reconstruct my argument-especially the first three. These misrepresent my views, and the misrepresentation is not a simple one: there is not just one thing to get straightened out. There is a well-known joke whose punch line goes more or less as follows: You have the story wrong. It isn't Moskovitz, it's Boskovitz; and it isn't timber, it's furs; and it isn't 20,000 rubles, it's 60,000 rubles; and he didn't make it, he lost it. In a similar vein, I want to say that Hirsch has the story wrong: it isn't existence, it's composition; and it isn't of, it's general theory about when it occurs; and it isn't people engaged in the ordinary business of life, it's philosophers; and it isn't arbitrariness, it's inconsistency with the ten constraints-plus incapacity to withstand dialectical pressure. I will proceed to elaborate on these statements. (i) I employ the same concept of existence as most analytical philosophers: Quine's. That is, I take 'Fs exist' to be equivalent to 'the number of Fs is 1 or more'. And, like all Quineans, I believe this to be the ordinary concept of existence, the one employed in science and pure mathematics and everyday life; in short I believe this to be the concept of existence. In my view, those who say that tables and stars and apples exist and I, who deny the existence of these things, are employing exactly the same concept of existence-unless they happen to be Meinongians or something of that sort. We simply disagree about what exists. We disagree about what exists because