Denying Existence: The Logic, Epistemology and Pragmatics of Negative Existentials and Fictional Discourse

From the truth that Flaubert did not fly it follows logically that there was someone who did not fly. From the truth that Emma Bovary did not exist does it follow, similarly, that there was someone who did not exist? Given the fact that Cerberus is non-existent, what sort of information is it that Cerberus guards the gate of hell (and not of heaven)? The first woman to be born in the 21st centrury does not yet exist but is she as unreal as Emma Bovary? These and other tangled issues regarding singular or seemingly singular existence-denials, empty subject terms and fictional discourse have occupied centre-stage in Philosophy since Russell, spurred on by Meinong's realism about the round-square, offered his theory of Definite Descriptions as a solution of the Platonic puzzle of non-being. This book discusses and evaluates currently offered solutions to these issues. It shows what is wrong with treating fictional names as referring to dwellers of other possible worlds or to sets of properties and why we cannot solve the problem by distinguishing between full-blooded and nominal existence or by regarding existence-denials as talk about linguistic expressions. ortraying a plurality of language-games, the book suggests that singular existence-negations involve us in a switch of language-games. We refer to Emma Bovary inside the conventions of the relevant fiction-game and deny her existence inside the definitive game of sincere world-reportage. This switch itself is a move in the Master-game. In the final two chapters, the nature of this Master-game is clarified through a series of anticipated objections and their answers. A longish appendix retells, in an analytic idiom, the complicated story of the controversies in Classical Indian Philosophy between the Buddhist Grammarians and the Nayiyayikas about statements like: `The rabbit-horn does not exist'.