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Is Existence a Predicate?
Author(s): Murray Kiteley
Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 73, No. 291 (Jul., 1964), pp. 364-373
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251942 .
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IV.-IS
EXISTENCE
A PREDICATE?
BY MURRAYKITELEY
KANT'Slaconic observation that existence is not a predicate has
enjoyed an almost spotless reputation. Few philosophical dicta
have been this fortunate. The fortunes of this dictum may rest
on the incontestability of the arguments which have been given
for it and there are several of them.
I should like to look at four of these arguments. I think they
all fail, some more seriously than others. Their failure is, however, instructive.
1. The First Argument
Professor Malcolm has recently made this observation about
existence again, being careful all the while to disengage simple
from necessary existence, so that the latter might not be touched
with the impredicative taint of the former. He cannot, he laments, find a rigorous proof of the doctrine that existence is not a
predicate, but Kant's reasoning should, he hopes, be sufficient
to convince.' The Kant-Malcolm argument is of the you'll-seeit-to-be-quite-obvious-if-you-just-look-at-it-from-this-angle type.
Kant's angle is got by the comparison of 100 existing with 100
non-existent Thalers ; 2 Malcolm's by the king's specifications
of the desired qualities to be sought in a chancellor, existence
occurring last on the list (pp. 43 and 44). Kant wants us to ask,
" Are there more Thalers in the first than in the second ? "
and Malcolm wants us to ask, " Can qualifications for ministerial
appointment include existence ? " (" No non-existent candidates
need apply.") To both questions we can only answer " No ".
But what do these cases show ? Consider the following two.
Say that you were ordering a shipping box for books from a
carpenter and among the specifications, size, wood, strength, you
included non-emptiness. "I don't want a non-empty box
delivered, is that clear ? " "But what," the inarticulate carpenter might ask, " has that got to do with making boxes ?
Non-emptiness, he might have said, is not a real predicate.
Consider a candy manufacturer. Does he, make two kinds of
chocolates, packaged and unpackaged ? Packagedness, Kant1 Norman Malcolm, " Anselm's Ontological Arguments ", Philosophical
Review, lxix (1960), 42-44.
2 The Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (London,
1929), p. 505.
364
IS EXISTENCE
A PREDICATE
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M. KITELEY:
?
IS EXISTENCEA PREDICATE
367
368
M. KITELEY:
IS EXISTENCE
A PREDICATE
369
tame tigers exist" is the same, thus, as the oddness of " There
are all tame tigers ".1 The oddness is somewhere in the same
family with " The warmth of the temperature was . . . " and,
more closely, " All the cars on the freeway were numerous ".
" Exists," when employed exiguously, tells you something about
tame tigers but nothing about each and every tame tiger; it tells
you something about the membership, but nothing about the
members. Existence, here, is something like full strength of a
regiment: the regiment can be at full strength, but none of the
members can be.
The non-exiguous uses of " exists " (where one can say, e.g.
that all tame tigers exist) might be called, following Hall, excluder uses. Excluders, he says, " serve to rule out something
without adding anything, and ambiguously rule out different
things according to the context." 2 Thus, when the tigercanvassers exclaimed " Extraordinary, they all exist ! " they
did so because they had ruled out death in captivity, escape and
shipment back to India. The force of their exclamation is not
the absurd " None of them do not exist ", but rather the intelligible " None of them have died, nor escaped, nor been shipped
back to India ". You can, then, say that all A's exist when by
so saying you are denying for all the A's that thereare that they
are, e.g. extinct, out of production, destroyed, hallucinatory,
mythical, fabulous, or fictional. Each item in this list is an
attribute and as an attribute can be affirmed universally or
denied particularly.
I am tempted to think that if you state existence using the
formula " There are ---s " rather than " ---s exist ", the excluder business would never crop up. I cannot imagine, and
here is the source of my temptation, " There are all ---s " ever
making sense. I have italicized above, however, a form of this
idiom which might be thought to be universal, viz. " all the A's
that there are ". I am uncertain about it, but I suspect that it
would demand the same kind of excluder-analysis as " exists ".
Before drawing the moral from all this, there is an old puzzle
which I should like to exorcise. If, so the puzzle goes, " Horses
exist" and " There are horses" come to the same thing, then
you would expect the statement " There are horses which exist "
to be redundant, and the statement " There are non-existent
horses" to be self-contradictory. The logical transcription of
1 Jesperson calls this use of " there " existential, as contrasted with its
use as a " local adverb ", e.g. " There are all the tame tigers ", Modern
Englishi Grammar, vii (Copenhagen, 1949), 107.
2 Roland Hall, " Excluders ", Analysis, xx (1959), 1.
370
M. KITELEY:
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A PREDICATE
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M. KITELEY:
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