‘Quantified pure existentials’ are sentences (e.g., ‘Some things do not exist’) which meet these conditions: (i) the verb EXIST is contained in, and is, apart from quantificational BE, the only full (as against auxiliary) verb in the sentence; (ii) no (other) logical predicate features in the sentence; (iii) no name or other sub-sentential referring expression features in the sentence; (iv) the sentence contains a quantifier that is not an occurrence of EXIST.

Colin McGinn and Rod Girle have alleged that stan- dard first-order logic cannot adequately deal with some such existen- tials. The article defends the view that it can.

{ Disputatio | PDF }

unrelated { A few new words: Doxing, Errbody, Grok, Muppies… }

Linguistics, ideas | April 18th, 2012