From pcliffje@CRL.COM Sat Mar 6 22:56:09 2010 Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 19:57:27 -0700 From: "John E. Clifford" Subject: existence To: Bob LeChevalier X-From-Space-Date: Wed Apr 26 03:30:30 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Message-ID: Leaving _lo_ aside as a confusing factor, I see the question of the range of quantifiers thusly. In most languages I know about -- and in logic -- quantifiers range over the "universe of discourse," the things we want to talk about, the things we are willing to name or describe in the present conversation (being named is a sufficient condition for being in the range of a quantifier usually). This universal has no fixed relation to the real-only world (assuming that even that is fixed -- or to any of the real-only universes, if not): it may be wholly included in that universe (as it usually is for hard sciences), wholly outside it (as at a trekky convention) or overlap it in any number of ways (as usual in casual conversation). We have in most languages a number of expressions which we apply to things in our universe of discourse to indicate that they are not in the(a) real-only world: nonexistent, unreal, imaginary, fictional, mythological, and so on. Yet we can often say of any of these categories that there is something in it, showing that the limits of the existent/real/literal/etc. is not the limits of the quantifiers. Although, occasionally, we may use one of these terms explicitly to put something outside the universe of discourse as well. The various categories of unreal are probably also different from one another, although it is not always clear what these differences are. >From a strictly logical point of view, we do not have to have that things which are unreal in one possible world but are mentioned there are real in some other possible world. Something which is imaginary (say) in every world in which it occurs at all is not a contradictory concept, though the object that had that property very likely would be. Admittedly, the more standard ways of doing possible world semantics would seem to require that what is imaginary in one world be real in some, but that seems to be a part of a rather involved metaphysical prejudice at the heart of most standard logicians who wander into modal logic without really believing in it. pc>|83