Acta Anal

DOI 10.1007/s12136-014-0216-x

Existence as the Possibility of Reference

Howard Peacock

Received: 22 October 2012 / Accepted: 20 December 2013

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

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Abstract The mere fact that ontological debates are possible requires us to address the

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question, what is it to claim that a certain entity or kind of entity exists—in other words,
what do we do when we make an existence-claim? I develop and defend one candidate
answer to this question, namely that to make an existence-claim with regard to Fs is to
claim that we can refer to Fs. I show how this theory can fulfil the most important
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explanatory desiderata for a theory of existence; I also defend it against the charges of
illegitimate ‘semantic ascent’ and of making existence counterfactually dependent on
human linguistic ability.
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Keywords Existence . Reference . Ontological commitment . Metaphysics .
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Metametaphysics

Suppose there are such things as ontological debates: discussions in which one party
puts forward the view that such and such entities exist, while another party disagrees. If
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such debates are possible, then there must be a distinctive kind of speech act which I
will refer to as the act of making an existence-claim. This kind of speech act will be
‘distinctive’ in the sense that, at least sometimes, it must be possible for parties to a
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debate to know that an act of that kind has taken place—for there would be no sense in
claiming that genuine ontological debates occur unless it made sense to say that, at least
sometimes, participants in the debate could identify that an existence-claim (or non-
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existence claim) had been made. The view that there is such a distinctive kind of speech
act is, I take it, relatively uncontroversial: it is common ground between those who
believe that existence is simply existential quantification, those who treat existence as a
predicate or even a genuine property of individuals, and those who claim it to be a
second-order concept. Moreover, it is arguably a view shared even by those who say
that assertoric uses of the verb ‘exist’ do not always function to make a genuine
existence-claim—for in stating the doctrine that a certain form of words does not

H. Peacock (*)
James Allen’s Girls’ School, 144 East Dulwich Grove, London SE22 8TE, UK
e-mail: howard_peacock@hotmail.com
 H. Peacock

involve the speaker in making an existence-claim, the theorist must himself employ a
form of words which genuinely do concern existence, simply to be able to say what it is
that the target words or phrases do not succeed in doing. For similar reasons, a belief
that there is such a speech act as ‘making an existence-claim’ may plausibly be
attributed even to those ‘ontological superficialists’ (Hawthorne 2009) who propose
conciliatory semantics according to which apparent rivals in ontological debate can be
interpreted as recognising the same number of entities: to say that two theorists do not
disagree ontologically is not to claim that neither theorist succeeds in making any
genuine existence-claim, merely to say that, properly understood, both theorists are—
despite appearances—claiming the existence of the same entities.
Thus, the main aim of a theory of existence is, or ought to be, to clarify what we do

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when we make an existence-claim: to give an account of what kind of speech act the act
of making an existence-claim is. This is not the same as giving an account of the
semantics of the verb ‘exist’, for some would say that this verb does not always serve to

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make an existence-claim, and many would say that it is possible to make an existential
claim without using ‘exist’, relying instead on ‘there is…’ or using the formal apparatus
of existential quantification (∃x).1 Nor is the current project directed towards giving an
account of ‘ontological commitment’: as I have argued elsewhere, ontological com-
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mitment is best understood as a matter of the ontological costs or preconditions of a
statement, and so does not directly concern whether or not a given statement counts as
an act of making an existence-claim (Peacock 2011). Moreover, in the absence of any
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account of what it is to make an existence-claim, it might seem impossible even to
begin the subsidiary debate about whether forms of words such as ‘exists’ or ‘there is’
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are reliable indicators that an existence-claim is being made, as it is not clear that it
makes sense to debate whether certain forms of words have a particular function while
unable to say anything at all to characterise that function.
The purpose of the current paper is to highlight the advantages of one candidate
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account of the nature and function of existence-claims in natural language; it is an

account that has not recently received sustained defence and elaboration,2 although it
may already be present in some remarks of Frege.3 The basic idea is that to make an
existence-claim is in a sense to license the use of a noun or general term in debate; in
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particular, the function of an existence-claim is to convey the idea that use of the
word(s) in question is legitimate because those words indicate an entity or kind of
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entity to which we have it in our power to refer. In short, to say that a exists is to
indicate that we can refer to a (whether through using the name ‘a’ or by using other
means of identification)—that we have it in our power to refer to a, that it is possible
for us to refer to a. Conversely, to say that a does not exist is to indicate that we cannot

1
Some would also say that existence-claims can be made by using predicates other than “…exist”, for
example “occur” (Moltmann 2011)
2
Thomasson (2007, pp. 64–67; 2008, pp. 45–8) considers and endorses a “metasemantic” account of
existence similar to the one presented here; an account of non-existence statements in terms of failure of
reference is also proposed by Donnellan (1974, p. 35). Both authors recommend the account primarily on the
basis of its ability to provide a coherent account of the truth conditions of negative existentials; however, as I
argue below, the ability to deal with such statements is common to many rival theories of existence and
consequently does not do much to establish one candidate account as preferable to another.
3
See especially his remarks in the ‘Dialogue with Pünjer on Existence’ in Frege (1979), where he considers
the view that “ ‘Sachse exists’ is supposed to mean ‘The word ‘Sachse’ is not an empty sound, but designates
something’”.
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

refer to a. Existence-claims made using a particular name thus license the further use of
that name in substantial debate; conversely, making a non-existence claim with regard
to a particular name functions to shut off further debate using that name, since such a
claim indicates that the name has no referent and so any further literal use of it is likely
to be false or meaningless, depending on which semantics for empty names applies to
the sentence in question.
That is at best an outline of a theory; in the following discussion, I shall attempt to
fill in the details of the account by considering the desiderata for a theory of existence,
and showing how this theory can meet them. First, however, I should deal with two
obvious objections to the attempt to give such an ‘account’ of existence-claims: one is
that everything we could usefully say about existence is captured by the extensional

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equivalence between existence-claims and the corresponding existentially quantified
sentences; the other, that existence is in some sense conceptually basic, and so no

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further elucidation of it is possible.

1 Preliminary Objections

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‘Existence is what existential quantification expresses’. So said Quine (1969, p. 97),
and his laconic utterances have inspired a philosophical orthodoxy: that, in so far as we
understand what it is to make an existence-claim, we do so because we understand the
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apparatus of existential quantification that is used to represent existence-claims in
formal notation. Thus, we understand the existence-claim that we might make by using
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the sentence ‘dogs exist’ because we understand the apparatus of existential quantifi-
cation in the formalised counterpart ‘(∃x) x is a dog’. It might be thought that an
‘explanation’ of existence along these lines is no explanation at all, on the grounds that
the apparatus of quantification was introduced precisely by stipulating that it should
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function to represent existence, and we cannot elucidate the meaning of natural

language idioms by appealing to artificial idioms whose meaning is in fact parasitic
on those natural language idioms. Not so: the meaning of the existential quantifier does
not have to be stipulated with reference to existence, since we can understand the
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quantified sentence as saying that something is a dog (Dummett 1981, p. 36), or (if we
want to treat the existential quantifier on a par with other quantifier expressions such as
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‘at least three’), as saying that at it is true of at least one thing that it is a dog (Van
Inwagen 2009, p. 496), or even as making a higher-order assertion, either about the
predicate governing the bound variable of quantification or about the concept
represented by that predicate, saying that the predicate ‘… is a dog’ is satisfied
or that the concept ‘x is a dog’ is instantiated—a view which of course
originates with Frege. So it is by no means an empty gesture to claim that
existence is to be understood by understanding existential quantification; rather,
such a hypothesis enables the theorist to explain what is achieved by the
speech act of making an existence-claim, by claiming (for example) that this
speech act is the same kind of speech-act as the speech act of claiming that at
least one thing satisfies the predicate in question.
Unfortunately, although this suggestion offers several plausible ways in which one
might go about explaining what it is to make an existence-claim, it cannot be correct,
because not every sentence apt for formalisation using an existential quantifier can be
 H. Peacock

construed as a sentence which is used to make an existence-claim. Consider these

candidate existentially quantified sentences:

(1) The King of France is bald!

(2) Someone stole my bicycle!
(3) Everybody loves somebody.
(4) Jones buttered the toast slowly at midnight.

I take it that—at most—these sentences might convey a strong presupposition and/or

conversational implicature of the existence of the things they refer to—moreover, they
might entail a different sentence which can be used to make an existence-claim; but this

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is not to say that they themselves are sentences that are fit for use in making existence-
claims: (1) and (2) no more claim that a King of France, or a bicycle thief, exists, than a
sentence like ‘Adam is bald’ or ‘Adam stole my bicycle’ can be used to claim that

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Adam exists. This is even more apparent in a sentence such as (3), where the bound
variable of existential quantification occupies second place in the predicate ‘…
loves…’; anyone who believed that uses of (3) function to make existence-claims
would be someone who could no longer distinguish when they were engaged in
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ontological debate and when they were discussing universal truths of human nature.
Sentence (4) is more controversial, since its structure conceals an underlying quantified
structure only if we accept Davidson’s proposal that the logical form of such action
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sentences must involve existential quantification over events (Davidson 1967). Never-
theless, it should give pause even to those who reject Davidson’s proposal—for even
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those who reject the analysis do so for better reason than simply that (4) does not
function to assert or claim that events exist. The mere fact that a sentence cannot be
used in ontological debate to claim that an entity exists is a poor reason to deny that the
sentence can have an existentially quantified underlying form—which just goes to
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show that making an existence-claim is not merely a matter of having an existentially

quantified underlying form. At best, the sentences which are apt for making existence-
claims—fit for use in ontological debates—constitute a proper subset of the sentences
with an existentially quantified underlying form; in which case, we cannot explain what
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it is to make an existence-claim merely by gesturing to the presence of an existential

quantifier in the analysis. Genuinely existence-claims must be doing something more
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than merely quantifying over the entities they claim to exist.4

A second objection to the current project is this: existence is conceptually basic, a
concept which we rely on in elucidating other concepts; there is no other, more basic,
concept in terms of which existence could be explained; therefore, there is no prospect of
arriving at a theory of existence. This is an argument of which we might grant the
premises while denying the conclusion: even if existence is a ‘basic’ concept in this
sense, it does not follow that it is impossible to work towards a theory of existence by

4
Of course, someone in the grip of an intensional theory of meaning who thinks that the significance of a
sentence is exhausted by its association with a function from possible worlds to truth values is duty-bound to
say that a sentence such as ‘The King of France is bald’ in fact has the same significance as its conjunction
with a sentence which does make an existence-claim, i.e. ‘The King of France is bald and the King of France
exists’. I am inclined to think that this shows merely that an intensional semantics lacks the resources to
explain what it is to make an existence-claim; so much the worse for intensional semantics. (For more on the
disadvantages of such an approach, see Hawthorne (2009, p. 224ff)).
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

elucidating its connection to other concepts. In fact, the situation ought to be familiar from
recent debates on knowledge and truth: even if we assign conceptual priority to knowl-
edge (Williamson 2002), it still makes sense to try to come to a better understanding of
what knowledge is by asking, for example, whether knowing that p entails believing that
p, whether knowing that p entails having some form of internalist justification that p,
whether the KK principle should be accepted, and so on. Someone who (as Williamson
does) arrives at answers to these questions may be interpreted as having advanced a
‘theory of knowledge’ (in Williamson’s phrase, a ‘modest positive account’ (Williamson
2002, p. 33)), even if it is granted that knowledge itself is conceptually prior to other
concepts in the vicinity. An explicit formulation of this kind of approach is offered by
Crispin Wright in the course of his reflections on truth: even if the target concept cannot be

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analysed in terms of more fundamental concepts, we can still aim towards

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the assembly of a body of conceptual truths which, without providing a reductive
account, nevertheless collectively constrain and locate the target concept and
sufficiently characterize some of its relations with other concepts and its role and
purposes to provide the sought-for reflective illumination. (Wright 1999, p. 226)

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Just such an approach seems appropriate in the case of existence: it still makes sense
to investigate the connection between our target concept and other concepts, even if
those other concepts themselves presuppose a prior understanding of the target concept
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itself. For example, it should not be suggested that the current proposal—that existence
should be explained in terms of reference—collapses into incoherence on the grounds
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that it is impossible to explain the notion of reference save in terms which presuppose a
prior understanding of the target concept, existence. That may be so, yet the proposed
characterization may provide ‘reflective illumination’ of the kind envisaged by Wright
and Williamson. Indeed, it may be that the account simultaneously illuminates both
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existence and reference by explicating the connection between the two. A further
advantage in the case of existence is the prospect of the project becoming more tractable
as a result of the method used: we can hope to understand the ‘concept’ of existence
through addressing the rather more practical question of what it is to make an existence-
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claim; if it were not the case that the notion of existence is so tightly intertwined with the
idea of this distinctive kind of speech act we might be hard-pressed even to grasp how we
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should understand the question ‘what is existence?’ However, an account of existence-

claims which says that such claims serve to indicate that we ‘can refer to’ the entities in
question at least owes something in the way of an account of the intended sense of “can”,
and of “refer to”. That is the business of the following section.

2 The Meaning of ‘Can’ and ‘Refer to’

Although there are in actuality no talking donkeys, I can certainly coherently imagine
myself in the situation of referring to one such creature. So it is true that I could have
referred to talking donkeys, in the sense of ‘could have’ that is (imperfectly) expressed by
the modal logician’s diamond. So too for many other mere possibilia with which we could
have found ourselves sharing a world. If the current account were that existence-claims
asserted the metaphysical possibility of reference, then the ontological cost would be severe:
 H. Peacock

every entity that we could have referred to exists! Nevertheless, it does not follow that the
current account brings with it intrinsic commitment to the existence of mere possibilia, for
the metaphysical possibility expressed by ‘could have’ is different from the practical ability
expressed by ‘can’. To say that I could have ridden a bicycle—that my riding a bicycle is a
metaphysical possibility or that in some possible world I ride a bicycle—is not the same
thing as saying that I can ride a bicycle, in the normal English sense of ‘can’ involved in the
current account. Many people who in fact cannot ride a bicycle may have bicycle-riding
counterparts in other possible worlds, yet this does not contradict the claim that they cannot
(they do not have it within their power to) ride a bicycle.5
Nevertheless, there is some justification for calling this a thesis about existence as the
possibility of reference, for in ordinary usage the things it is possible for me to do just are

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the things which I have it within my power to achieve, rather than the things which are the
case in some non-actual possible world. To say that it is impossible for me to make myself

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younger today is to say that there is nothing I can do to achieve that end; it is not to deny
the existence of possible worlds in which, on the equivalent date, my age is less. Talk of
modality in terms of necessity and possibility encourages confusion on this score: it is
tempting to render the logician’s diamond with ‘it is possible that…’ even though this
locution more naturally reads as expressing ability, capacity, or epistemic (rather than
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metaphysical) possibility. (A better rendering of the diamond would be ‘it could have
been the case that…’ were it not for the fact that this, unlike the diamond, suggests
counterfactuality.) The ‘it is possible to’ formulation should, however, be distinguished
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from an ‘it is possible that’ reading—the latter, and not the former, implies that there
might be things which we claim to exist because, although we now lack the linguistic and
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cognitive ability to refer to them, one day we might.6 It is the former which is required for
the current account: the formulation according to which an existential claim attributes a
definite ability to parties to the debate. Otherwise, we would license existential claims
with regard to ineffable entities—entities which we lack the cognitive resources to
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describe in any way that identifies them either individually or as a determinate class.
But of course, if an entity or entities can in no way be determinately picked out in our
language (even by ingenious use of definite descriptions), how could we possibly claim
that it (or they) exists? The question at issue is the nature of existential claim, and we do
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not want a theory according to which we can claim the existence of that which in no way
can be identified or spoken of using our current language, for it is hard to see how we
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could count as having claimed that a certain thing or kind of thing exists despite being
incapable of specifying in any way what we had made the existence-claim about.
Correctly understood, then, the use of ‘can’ in the formulation does not force the
admission of a disorderly proliferation of entities. (See below for a more serious objection
from modality.) Nevertheless, it might be claimed that the appeal to reference in this
account would lead inevitably to ontological extravagance. One version of this objection
appeals to our ability to construct and use so-called ‘referring expressions’ in cases where

5
Keen cyclists might complain that this example demonstrates an objectionable ambiguity in ‘can’—for
strictly speaking, and barring motor impairment, is it not the case that everybody in a sense can ride a bicycle
given adequate training, and yet in another sense we may be correct to say that they ‘cannot’? I am inclined to
reply that the ambiguity here is merely temporal: someone who cannot ride a bicycle today may yet have the
ability to learn, and thus the inability expressed by ‘cannot [now]’ is not incompatible with the ability
expressed by ‘can [in the future, if I so choose]’.
6
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this ambiguity.
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

there nevertheless exists no entity which the expression succeeds in picking out. The
problem is especially acute because a theory of existence in terms of reference must accept
definite descriptions and some quantifier phrases as well as names among the expressions
it recognises as means by which we might achieve reference—for not everything that
exists has a name, and we need to address the converse objection that we can truly claim
that there exist entities to which we cannot refer—perhaps because they are too remote to
be individuated or because we are unaware of their existence in the first place. Here, it
seems right to say that, although reference to such entities by such means as giving each a
unique name might be impossible, what we might call ‘descriptive’ reference is some-
thing that is within our grasp for any existing entity. For example, we can refer to the
entities to which we cannot achieve singular reference by using the plural description ‘the

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entities to which we cannot achieve singular reference’. Indeed, when Quine answered the
question ‘What is there?’ with the one word ‘Everything’, he in a sense succeeded in
referring to everything to which one can refer—that is to say, everything that exists.7 One

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objection to this strategy should be excluded from the start: it is not part of the intended
sense of ‘reference’ that it should mean only singular reference, i.e. the unique identifi-
cation of a single entity. Reference here is to be understood in the broader—and arguably
more natural—sense of a term identifying one thing or a plurality of things which are
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relevant to determining the truth of sentences in which the term occurs. In this sense of
‘refer’, as well as referring to individuals, we can refer to collections or classes of entities,
either by using names which identify a plurality, or by descriptions which indicate a
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condition on membership of the class of things we are talking about; to claim otherwise
would be to separate the notion of reference from the idea of identifying the entity or
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entities with which our speech is concerned, and thus render the notion of reference of
only peripheral theoretical importance.
So the more serious objection is that, on the current description of what it is to be a
‘referring expression’, there are more phrases which might be counted as ‘referring
expressions’ (for example ‘the first female President of the United States’ or ‘the present
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King of France’) than there are entities; if existence is simply the ability to use such a
‘referring expression’, then we turn out to be committed to the existence of everything we
have it in our power to describe. This version of this objection is relatively easy to deal
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with, by exploiting a distinction between specifying a putative entity and actually referring
to it—i.e. the difference between an expression being constructed in a way suitable for
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picking out a determinate individual or individuals, and the expression’s actually having a
referent. We can certainly use words to specify more things than actually exist; this is just
to say that we can use words in such a way that there would be no doubt about which
entity counted as the referent of the term if it had a referent. But that is not the same thing
as accepting that these terms do have a referent. For example, there would be no doubt
about which entity would be referred to by ‘The present King of France’, or ‘Julius’
(Gareth Evan’s stipulated name for the unique inventor of the zip if there were one—
Evans 1979) if these expressions had referents. But the mere fact that these expressions
succeed in being that specific does not yet force us to conclude that they have a referent—

7
It might be objected that quantifiers are not referring expressions because they do not play the characteristic
referential role of ‘indicating to the audience which object it is which is thus relevant to the truth of the remark’
(Evans 1982, p. 2). However, this does not hold for the unrestricted universal quantifier ‘everything’: we are in
no doubt as to which objects are relevant to the truth of a remark employing this word—they all are!
 H. Peacock

i.e. that they bear the reference relation to some entity. To explain existence in terms of
reference is not to say that every term which is determinate in this way has a referent, and
therefore it does not force us to concede that the (apparent) referents of such terms exist.
This response can be extended to other specifiables—for example, possible worlds other
than our own. We might be able to specify a possible world (e.g. by using the definite
description ‘the world most similar to our own in which donkeys talk’); but this does not
mean that such a world exists unless we also believe that our success in specifying such a
world is accompanied by the further success of the phrase used having a referent.8
An alternative way of formulating the objection is inspired by Frege:9 for a word to ‘have
a reference’ is merely for it to make a systematic contribution to the truth conditions of
sentences in which it occurs; any word which makes such a contribution has a reference;

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thus, we must recognise the existence of an entity to serve as the referent of every word
which makes a contribution to truth conditions, including predicates. However, this is merely
to redefine ‘reference’ in such a way that it is no longer essentially relational—in such a way

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that a having a referent is not a necessary condition of having a ‘reference’. Under this new
account of ‘reference as semantic role’ (referenceS), it does not follow from the fact that a
term ‘has a referenceS’ that the term refers to an entity. That much is clear from the fact that
even logical operators such as ‘and’ or ‘not’ have a referenceS in virtue of the systematic
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contribution they make to truth conditions, even though there is nothing to which they ‘refer’
in the usual sense of being related to some entity. But as long as we stipulate that our account
of existence in terms of reference is to be understood in terms of the standard relational kind
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of reference rather than as Fregean referenceS, there is no danger of having to recognise the
existence of a referent for every semantically significant term in the language: such
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expressions may have referenceS without counting as ‘referring’ in the sense at issue here.
Thus, the kind of reference involved in the current account is relational—it is reference
conceived as having a referent, i.e. bearing the reference relation to an entity. With that
stipulation in place, it should be clear that any worries about multiplying entities beyond
necessity are misdirected: it is a necessary condition of achieving ‘reference’ in the current
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sense that the putative referring expression has a referent, i.e. an entity or entities which it
picks out. That much was already implicit in the initial proposal, for even a defender of the
Fregean proposal for attributing referenceS to all systematically contributive elements of a
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sentence would not count these expressions with ‘referenceS’ as ‘referring to’ something
or other, and the initial proposal was that making an existential claim was to say that we
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can refer to the entity or entities, not to say that a particular term or expression should be
counted as having a ‘reference’ in the Fregean sense.

3 Criteria for an Adequate Account

Any adequate account of existence must attempt to explain some of the distinctive features
of existence-claims; here, I outline some of the most significant and show how the current
proposal addresses them. The case in favour of the proposal is simply the fact that it is able
to deliver adequate accounts in all these areas. First, an account of existence should explain
the intuitive validity (in most contexts) of the inference from ‘Fa’ to ‘a exists’—the fact that

8
See below, ‘major objections’, for more on the correct treatment of modal existence-claims.
9
See also Dummett (1981, p.529) and passim.
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

a conviction of the truth of any predicative statement concerning a seems to license us in

making the corresponding existence-claim. Moreover, a comprehensive account should
also explain why some people reject the universal validity of this inference, in a way which
does not convict them of simple blindness to the laws of logic. The current proposal can
explain both features. If claiming that a exists is a matter of asserting that we have it in our
power to refer to a, then it is easy to see why such a claim can seem appropriate in every
situation in which we are inclined to treat ‘Fa’ as true—for most would say that such a
sentence can be true only if the expression ‘a’ has a referent. Nevertheless, there is a
principled way to deny the universality of the inference, should we feel so inclined: if we are
prepared to accept that there can be true sentences of the form ‘Fa’ in which ‘a’ lacks a
referent, then we have a reason to refrain from making the corresponding existence-claim in
such a circumstance, for to do so would be to attribute a referent to ‘a’ which it in fact lacks.

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For example, if one were inclined to say that ‘Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective’
expresses a literal truth even though ‘Sherlock Holmes’ lacks a referent, then one ought to

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refrain from making the corresponding existence-claim; one should then treat this sentence
as a counter-example to the principle ‘Fa’→‘a exists’.
So-called ‘neo-Meinongians’ will object to this position: according to them, it is
possible to refer to entities which do not exist; the predicate ‘exist’ thus serves to
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indicate a proper subset of the things that ‘are’ or ‘have being’ (Parsons 1980; McGinn
2002). However, the neo-Meinongian position can be accommodated within the current
suggestion along lines parallel to David Lewis’ ‘Allism’ (Lewis 1990). When a neo-
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Meinongian says that the realm of things that are extends beyond merely those things
that exist, he has in fact made an existence-claim, in the sense of ‘existence-claim’ used
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in this paper: to say that there are such ‘non-existent’ things is to make a positive move
in an ontological debate, asserting that such things should be admitted to our ontology;
and to counsel the admission of such and such things to an ontology just is to make an
‘existence-claim’ in the current sense. No matter that the neo-Meinongian withholds
the predicate ‘exists’ from certain entities; this does not change the fact that (in the
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current sense) the neo-Meinongian makes an ‘existence-claim’—a positive ontological

move, as it were—with regard to every entity to which we can refer.
A second criterion for any adequate account is this: the account should show how
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existence-claims can be made not only using names of objects (‘Prince Charles exists’)
but also with bare plurals and mass nouns, e.g.
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Tables exist
Cheese exists

The hardened Realist or Trope Theorist might argue that these sentences
serve to assert the existence of abstracta—universals or sets of tropes—but
their interaction with tenses makes this implausible: a natural disaster wiping
all tables off the face of the planet might lead us to say that tables no longer
exist, even though the universal tablehood continued to exist unperturbed. 10
10
This would be true even for ‘aristotelian’ (small ‘a’) theories of universals which depend on their instances
for their existence: such theories usually say that a universal exists in a world so long as it has an instance
somewhere in the temporal history of that world, whether or not it is instantiated now. See Armstrong (1978)
for the canonical modern account of the difference between ‘aristotelian’ and ‘platonic’ [sic] realism about
universals.
 H. Peacock

Better, perhaps, to read such sentences as making a claim about the instances
of such general terms, a move also endorsed by proponents of the quantifica-
tional view of existence: to say that tables exist is to assert the existence of at
least one entity which is within the extension of the predicate ‘… is a table’
or which falls under the concept table. According to the current proposal,
then, to say that tables exist is to say that we can refer to some entity which
is a table—although that reference might have to be achieved through a
definite description, for example if the sole remaining table is on the other
side of the world.
This suggestion raises an apparent problem for tensed non-existence claims:
we can still talk (descriptively) about dinosaurs, and thus apparently refer to

L
them, although it is true that dinosaurs do not exist these days. But if we
understand the claim that dinosaurs do not exist these days as making the

VA
claim that

(1) These days, we cannot refer to dinosaurs

then the theory collapses, since we have no way of explaining how a present-
tensed non-existence claim could ever be true if it concerned something to which
O
reference is still possible. To solve this problem, we have to treat any tense marker
as forming part of the description of the thing to which we cannot refer, along
these lines:
R
(2) We cannot refer to (dinosaurs these days)
Since there is no entity which satisfies the description of being a
PP

dinosaur these days, our claim can be read as true even though reference
to dinosaurs which existed in days gone by remains possible. Of course,
with some English formulations, the paraphrase required will be more
invasive: the claim
A

(3) Dinosaurs did exist, but do not exist anymore.

is most naturally understood as the conjunction
(4) Dinosaurs existed in the past, and do not exist now.
which in turn should be understood as
R

(5) We can refer to (dinosaurs in the past) and we cannot refer to (dinosaurs now).
This approach also enables us to make sense of ‘location-relative’
FO

existence-claims (Moltmann 2011) such as ‘badgers exist in Devon’; we

can read this as the claim that we can refer to entities satisfying the
description ‘badger in Devon’ rather than as a claim that, in Devon,
reference to badgers is possible. This expedient should not strike anyone
as very outlandish, as something similar will probably be required by the
proponent of the quantificational view of existence: on such an account,
‘Badgers do not exist in Devon’ is most naturally read with the place
marker as part of the predicate governed by the existential quantifier:
(6) (∃x) x is a badger and x is in Devon.
However, a problem threatens: surely by committing ourselves to the claim that
entities exist if we can refer to them, and then proposing that that the first conjunct
of (4), ‘Dinosaurs existed in the past’, should be understood as the first conjunct
of (5), ‘We can refer to (dinosaurs in the past)’, we thereby commit ourselves to
the view that
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

(7) (Dinosaurs in the past) exist.

This may seem too much of a hostage to fortune: (7) prima facie entails that
presentism is false, since it seemingly commits us to the existence not only of the
things that exist now, but of things which do not exist now but existed in the past.11

Nevertheless, a proponent of the current theory has at her disposal two responses to
such an accusation. One is enthusiastic acceptance of the ontological consequence: surely
the truth or falsity of presentism ought to be deducible from the correct analysis of tensed
existence-claims; if our analysis of tensed existence-claims were neutral on the issue of
presentism and non-presentism, it would inspire concern that either the analysis were
superficial or the debate intractable. Alternatively, should the rejection of presentism seem

L
over-hasty, the theorist can at minimal cost reformulate the theory to accommodate the
presentist’s insistence that existence is extensionally equivalent to existence now, simply by

VA
proposing that we explain the claim that Fs exist, not as the claim that it is possible to refer to
Fs, but rather as the claim that it is possible to refer to (Fs now). Indeed, some existence-
claims may have a context which guarantees that they must be understood as tensed in this
way. On this way of implementing the theory, there will be things to which we can refer but
which do not exist (for example Napoleon)—but one might plausibly argue that this is a
O
demerit of any presentist approach, and not a particular problem for the current theory. Thus,
it seems that devotees of presentism can adopt the current theory with only minor adaptation.
A third criterion for a satisfactory theory of existence-claims is that it should explain
R
our divergent intuitions about the triviality or significance of positive existence-claims,
and about the apparent redundancy or self-defeating nature of non-existence claims.
PP

The orthodox Quinean view is that ‘ontic decision’—decision about what exists—can
be achieved only at the end of an arduous process: not only must we arrive at our best
overall theory; we must then translate that theory into an ontologically perspicuous
‘canonical formulation’, perhaps adjusting that theory in the course of translation to
A

achieve maximal ontic economy (Quine 1960, p. 242). Thus, finding out what exists is
a considerable challenge, requiring success in both total science and philosophy of
language. An alternative view is that disputed questions about ontology—for example,
whether numbers, propositions or universals exist—can be decided quite straightfor-
R

wardly, simply by paying attention to the kinds of utterance that are treated as
legitimate within our current common sense, scientific or mathematical discourse.
FO

Thus, for example, the existence of prime numbers might be taken as established
simply by the fact that everyone accepts the truth of ‘there are prime numbers greater
than five’. A natural corollary of this view is that the existence-claims concerned,
because obvious, are insignificant or trivial, although not every defender of the ‘easy’
approach to ontic decision accepts that.12
The current proposal offers an account of why existence-claims can seem trivial. If
claiming that something exists is simply licensing the use of a name or general term, on
the grounds that we can refer to that thing or to things of this kind, then our right to

11
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for clarifying the nature of this problem.
12
The suggestion that apparent ontological disputes can be trivially settled within a discourse originates with
Carnap (1950) and has been defended more recently by Stephen Yablo (1998). Van Inwagen (2009) suggests
that the existence of properties can be settled quickly, but rejects the suggestion that the conclusion reached is
ipso facto trivial.
 H. Peacock

make such an existence-claim is secured simply by the fact that we have a right to use
the name or general term in the first place. A statement such as ‘mammals exist’ can
seem trivial because its truth is suggested by the use of the word ‘mammals’—to use
such a word in most contexts is already to suggest that reference to entities of that kind
is possible. This also explains in what sense an existence-claim can be described as
‘internal’ to a discourse in roughly the sense intended by Carnap: anyone who engages
in a discourse in which free use is made of some general term ‘F’ ought already to be
committed to the view that it is possible to refer to Fs, in which case she should also be
prepared to claim that Fs exist, since the purpose of such a claim is precisely to suggest
that such reference is possible. Thus, existence-claims are ‘internal’ to a discourse in the
sense that anyone who accepts that names and general terms associated with the

L
discourse have a genuinely referential use should thereby be prepared to endorse the
corresponding existence-claims.

VA
What, then, of the contrary intuition, that existence-claims are deep, significant, and
hard to adjudicate? That can also be accommodated: although existence-claims seem
trivial, since acceptance of the claim that Fs exist is mandatory for anyone who accepts
that reference to Fs is possible, it follows neither that they are insignificant, nor that
they must be easy to adjudicate. Determining whether a given existence-claim should
O
be accepted is just as hard as determining whether we can refer to the entity or kind of
entity indicated, and this may be a matter of serious empirical investigation (as in the
case of Phlogiston), or complex philosophy of language (as in the debate over our
R
alleged ontological commitment to universals). Moreover, claiming that a certain kind
of entity exists is a speech act of immense significance, in so far as it licenses continued
PP

free use of the names and general terms contained within our current discourse.
Conversely, claiming that something does not exist is significant because it functions
to close down debate: the importance, for example, of telling someone that Phlogiston
does not exist is that, if the claim is accepted, all further substantial discussion of
A

Phlogiston ought to cease, unless we decide that we will continue to use the word in a
context where words may be used although known to lack a referent, such as fiction. (It
is, of course, consistent with the current approach to allow that some uses of such a
word may continue, since to say that the function of an existence-claim is to express the
R

possibility of referring to an entity is not yet to say that there is no context in which a
word or phrase which lacks a referent can be used.)
FO

A surprising feature of non-existence claims is that they can be made using

sentences which are guaranteed to be true precisely when the subject expression lacks
a referent; this strikingly distinguishes them from normal predicative sentences, for our
usual intuition would be that when such a sentence lacks a referent it either lacks a
truth-value or expresses a falsehood. Indeed, this feature of non-existence claims has
been proposed by Moltmann (2011) as a test for whether an expression should be
counted as an existence predicate. Famously, Quine used the term ‘Plato’s Beard’ to
name the puzzle of explaining how a non-existence claim could express a truth, since
using a subject-expression in the first place seems to commit us to the view that the
subject-expression has an existing referent, and thus a non-existence claim presupposes
what it seeks to deny (Quine 1948, p. 1).
In fact, Plato’s Beard can be solved in a way compatible with any theory of
existence, in a two-stage process. First, it is stipulated that claims of non-existence
are to be understood as the (wide-scope or ‘external’) negation of the corresponding
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

existence-claim, so ‘Pegasus does not exist’ is read as ‘¬(Pegasus exists)’ rather than as
ascribing some special nonexistence predicate to Pegasus. The problem of explaining
how a claim of non-existence can be true then reduces to the problem of
explaining how the corresponding existence-claim can be false; for as long as
we understand how it can be false to claim that Pegasus exists, we thereby also
understand how it can be true to make the non-existence claim which is simply
the wide-scope negation of the former statement. A means for completing this
second stage of the explanation of true nonexistence statements is offered by
Sainsbury (2004, p. 196): he counsels that we adopt the framework of Negative
Free Logic (NFL), according to which all un-negated subject–predicate state-
ments with a nonreferring subject expression are counted as false. Thus ‘Peg-
asus exists’ is false for the same reason as any statement of the form ‘Pegasus

L
Fs’ is false—that any such statement is to be counted as false so long as
‘Pegasus’ lacks a referent. Such a suggestion, of course, is compatible with

VA
explaining existence in any way we like. Let ‘E’ stand for a candidate expla-
nation of existence (whatever it happens to be). Then E(Pegasus) will count as
false, and ¬E(Pegasus) true, no matter what account of existence is proposed.
However, a demerit of appealing to NFL in this way is that it leaves a hostage to fortune:
O
the ability of a non-existence statement to express a truth depends on a decision to treat
all un-negated sentences containing referential failures as false, although for some such
sentences it may be overwhelmingly more plausible to count them as true: in particular,
R
we might notice the variety of sentences that apparently convey the idea that Pegasus
does not exist while apparently involving no negation whatsoever, viz. ‘Pegasus is
PP

merely a mythical beast’; ‘Pegasus is imaginary’; ‘Pegasus is a fictional creation’, etc.

Adopting NFL would require us to count these as literally false if ‘Pegasus’ lacks a
referent—although at least prima facie they are used to make claims that are literally true
if Pegasus does not exist.13
Better, then, to try to explain the falsity of ‘Pegasus exists’ without appeal-
A

ing to a universal stipulation that failure of reference entails falsehood. On the

current account, this can be done easily: if claiming that Pegasus exists is a
matter of asserting that we can refer to Pegasus, then it is obvious that this
R

claim is false; likewise, if claiming that Pegasus does not exist is a matter of
asserting that it is not the case that we can refer to Pegasus, then it is easy to see
FO

how this claim can be true: if the word ‘Pegasus’ lacks a referent, then we cannot refer to
Pegasus! Indeed, ‘We can refer to x’ passes Moltmann’s proposed test for an existence
predicate already mentioned. On her account, a predicate E… is an existence predicate if
the result of combining it with a non-referring subject expression a and a negation
operator yields truth rather than a truth value gap: if ¬Ea is true even though a lacks a
referent then E is an existence predicate. If Moltmann is right, then ‘we can refer to …’ is
indeed an existence predicate, since substituting it for E in the formula yields truth
precisely when a does not refer.

13
Evans (1982, p. 349) discusses an alternative solution, which he attributes to Kripke: the suggestion is that
we introduce a ‘negation operator [N], which… yields a sentence which is true if and only if there is no true
proposition which says of a that it is F’. Then ‘exists(a)’ can be read as ‘N(exists(a))’—a sentence whose truth
is guaranteed by the fact that the absence of a referent for a prevents ‘exists(a)’ from expressing a proposition.
The major problem for this, of course, is that we are inclined to count an utterance of ‘exists(a)’ as expressing a
definite falsehood, rather than constituting a failure to express a propositional content.
 H. Peacock

4 Major Objections

There are two major objections to the project of explaining existence-claims in terms of
reference: one is the accusation that it involves illegitimate ‘semantic ascent’, turning
existence-claims into metalinguistic assertions about words in one particular language;
another that the proposed account makes existence dependent on human linguistic
ability, in effect committing us to an extremely controversial form of idealism. I shall
deal with the problem of ‘semantic ascent’ first. Suppose that the proposal were slightly
different, namely that the function of an existence-claim is to make an assertion about a
particular word or phrase in the language, thus:

‘The present king of France does not exist’ means that the phrase ‘The present

L
king of France’ does not have a referent.

VA
This proposal is clearly unsatisfactory, for reasons outlined by Salmon (1998, p. 284;
Salmon attributes the original insight to Church): the analysans (‘The present King of
France’ does not have a referent) cannot mean the same as the analysandum (The
present King of France exists), since when translated into another language, they both
clearly say different things, viz.

Le roi présent de France n’ existe pas.

O
R
‘The present king of France’ ne fait référence à rien [en anglais].
PP

The suggestion should not have been very appealing in the first place: when we make
an existence-claim we are saying something whose significance extends beyond a feature
of one word or phrase in our language. The evidence for that is as follows: first, if I say that
A

the Prime Minister exists, I thereby license the use of any form of words by which we
might refer to him, not merely the use of the phrase ‘the Prime Minister’; second, the same
existence-claim can be made in different languages and hence using different words (this
point is already implicit in Salmon’s objection); third, as Dummett points out, where the
R

reference of a name is fixed partly by context, that name may in fact have many candidate
referents even though—in the current context of use—that name may coherently be used
FO

in a claim of non-existence: someone who said ‘Socrates did not exist’ would

not be meaning to exclude the possibility that anyone was ever called “Socrates”;
his assertion would be consistent with there having been millions bearing that
name. (Dummett 1983, p. 282)

Thus, attributing non-existence to Socrates cannot be the same as saying that

‘Socrates’ lacks a referent—for one can do the former while recognising an abundance
of referents for the word ‘Socrates’.
A similar objection to the metalinguistic account is raised by Kripke:

Suppose someone says ‘The Greeks believed that there was such a divine being
as Zeus’, or ‘that Zeus existed.’ Well, what are we saying that the Greeks
believed? On the analysis in question we are saying that the Greeks believed that
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

the name ‘Zeus’ had a referent. This I suppose is true in this particular case, but it
is true only because the Greeks used the same name as we. For all we know, when
we say ‘The Greeks believed that Zeus existed,’ it may be the case that the Greeks
either used a different name, or that they didn’t use any name at all.14

In fact, Kripke does not push the point as hard as he might: the fifth-century Greek
zeta was pronounced as ‘zd-’, and their diphthong –eu- was phonetically quite far
removed from the vowel sound we use in pronouncing the word ‘Zeus’ (Sihler 1995, p.
194); it is not the case that what the Greeks believed was something about the word
‘Zeus’ as we recognise it.
Clearly, the issue here is the ‘semantic ascent’ itself: our explanation of what it is to
say that Socrates (or Zeus) exists, or does not exist, must use the word ‘Socrates’ in the

L
same way it is used in the sentence used to make the original existence-claim;15 it is no

VA
good to present the word as used in a different way (e.g. in quote marks, referring to the
word itself rather than to that word’s normal referent). This might be thought to present
an insuperable obstacle to any account which preserves the name in question as a name,
rather than replacing it with a predicate in the manner suggested by Quine (i.e. reading
‘Socrates exists’ as ‘Something Socratizes’). If we suppose that a name’s contribution
O
to the truth conditions of statements in which it occurs is exhausted by its having the
referent that it does—something that can seem reasonable even to those, like Frege,
who credit names with sense as well as reference—then an ‘empty name’ which lacks a
R
referent cannot contribute anything to those truth conditions, and presumably any
statement including a use of that name has an undetermined truth value. 16 So given
PP

that (1) any candidate explanation of ‘a exists’ must use the name ‘a’ in the same way
as it is used in the target sentence, on pain of illegitimate semantic ascent, and (2) when
‘a’ lacks a referent under a certain use any sentence using that name in that way will
lack a truth value, it seems to follow that any acceptable explanation of existence-
A

claims will be committed to the view that there can be no true non-existence statements
on pain of contradiction: if ‘a does not exist’ is true, then ‘a’ lacks a referent, in which
case ‘a does not exist’ must lack a truth value.
One proposal to meet this problem is offered by Thomasson; she suggests that:
R

We can use star quotes to pick out terms individuated not phonologically or
FO

typographically, but on the basis of meaning. (2008, p. 65)

Thomasson’s account is then ‘metasemantic’ rather than ‘metalinguistic’: the expla-

nation will have the following form:

Ks exist iff *K* refers (2008, p. 65)

Since the use of star quotes guarantees that the expression *K* picks out the term
‘K’ with the very meaning it has when used in ‘Ks exist’, there is no chance of a

14
Kripke, 6th John Locke Lecture (1973)
15
This point is also emphasised by Evans (1982, p. 349)
16
One might go further, and follow Kripke in claiming that a sentence containing a use of such a name fails to
express a proposition; see also Evans (1982, pp. 348ff)
 H. Peacock

situation such as that envisaged by Dummett, where ‘K exists’ is false but ‘*K* refers’
must be counted as true because the term ‘K’ has a referent in a different context of use
from the one intended. However, this suggestion does not address the Salmon/Church
and Kripke objections: even when using star quotes to individuate terms according to
their meaning, the translation of the analysandum ‘Ks exist’ into French will obviously
have a different meaning from the translation into French of the analysans ‘*K* refers’,
since the French version of the latter and not the former will then be a statement about a
term in English. Similarly, what the fifth-century Greeks believed cannot be that
*Zeus* referred, since they knew nothing of any such name. Using star quotes rather
than normal quotes does not get round the fact which these objections highlight: an
existence-claim is not a statement about a term in one particular language.

L
A possible response on the part of Thomasson is to revise the intended sense of
‘individuate’, and say that the claim is really that the star quotes enable the term in

VA
question to indicate the meaning of the term rather than the term itself. It is, indeed,
plausible to claim that English ‘Zeus’ and Attic Greek ‘Ζεῦς’—although different
‘terms’—nevertheless share a common meaning; thus the claim ‘*Zeus* refers’ is
really a shorthand for ‘The meaning of *Zeus* refers’, and this is a belief which could
plausibly be attributed to the inhabitants of the ancient world, even granted an
O
unfamiliarity with the English language, since it is a belief about a meaning with which
they are familiar (even if this meaning attaches to a different word in their language).
The problem with this expedient, however, is that it is hard to see what differentiates it
R
from a standard Fregean suggestion: without a fully worked-out metaphysics of
‘meanings’ (and an explanation of what it is for them to ‘refer’) it is hard to avoid
PP

the suspicion that the proposed analysis is merely a terminological variant of the
Fregean analysis, ‘The concept Zeus is instantiated’. It seems that this attempt to save
the ‘metasemantic’ approach collapses back into a familiar proposal.
However, our current theory can meet the objections which assail the metalinguistic
A

account. First, it does not commit the error of semantic ascent: when we say that
claiming that a exists is a matter of saying that we can refer to a, we make the same use
of the term ‘a’ in both explanans and explanandum; there is no shift of context from
talking about the thing itself to talking about the word which attempts to refer to it.
R

Moreover, even within the restrictions noted above on the contribution an empty name
can make to truth conditions, we can explain how the sentence ‘we can refer to a’ can
FO

be definitely false (as opposed to meaningless) although ‘a’ does not refer, without
violating the principle that the contribution made by this name is exhausted by its
connection to a referent. Again, a suggestion of Dummett’s is germane: we should ‘take
the semantic role of an empty name to consist in its having no bearer’ (1983, p. 295).
Thus, a name with no referent does not fail to make a contribution to the truth-
conditions of statements in which occurs; rather we should say, in line with the
principle, that the contribution of an empty name to the truth conditions of statements
in which it occurs must be limited to the fact that the name has no bearer. For most
statements, of course, the consequence will be the same as if we treated the name as
making no contribution at all: for any predicate ‘F…’ such that the applicability of the
predicate is not decided by the fact that the name has no bearer, a sentence ‘Fa’ will
have an undetermined truth value when the name ‘a’ is empty, since the contribution
made by the empty name is insufficient to determine the truth or falsity of the sentence.
However, in a sentence such as ‘we can refer to a’ or ‘reference to a is possible’, the
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

minimal contribution to truth conditions made by the empty name—the mere fact that
the name lacks a referent—is sufficient to determine that the sentence is false when ‘a’
is an empty name. As long as we interpret the principle as saying that an empty name
can contribute to truth conditions, only the fact that it lacks a referent, rather than as
saying that an empty name fails to make any contribution whatsoever, we can explain
how this sentence can be false rather than undecided when the name ‘a’ is empty. This
also enables us to explain how a claim like ‘Pegasus is merely a fictional character’ can
be true: this can be read as the conjunction of a claim about the nonexistence of (i.e. our
inability to refer to) Pegasus, and a claim about the stories found within one or another
fiction. Neither conjunct presents a difficulty on the current analysis.
The proposal also meets Kripke’s concern about attributions of belief. If what the

L
classical Greeks believed when they believed that Zeus exists is not that the word
‘Zeus’ has a referent, but rather that it is possible to refer to Zeus, there is no problem in

VA
attributing such a belief to them—for exactly the same belief could be identified as
something they might express in their own language without absurdity; since the term
‘Zeus’ is used rather than mentioned, it is legitimate to translate it when translating the
belief-attribution between different languages. 17 Of course, a consequence of this
account is that existential beliefs cannot be attributed to people who have nothing
O
resembling a concept of reference; however, this should not concern us too much. For
one thing, the idea of referring to something—using a word or phrase to pick out some
specific entity or entities in the world—is arguably fundamental to anything
R
recognisable as a language; for another, it is no more absurd to claim that the ability
to have existential beliefs requires a concept of reference than it is to suggest (as the
PP

proponent of the quantificational view must) that the capacity for existential belief
requires an understanding of quantification.
The second major objection is that an account of existence-claims in terms of claims
about our ability to refer makes the existence of everything dependent on the existence
A

of creatures with the necessary cognitive and linguistic abilities, and thus leads to a
version of idealism so extreme as to constitute a reductio of the theory. Here, I shall not
address the question of whether this kind of idealism is in itself unacceptable, as I do
not believe that the current theory is committed to it. A first step in response to the
R

challenge is to distinguish between trivial and nontrivial versions of the objection. The
trivial version is this:
FO

(NL) If there were no language-users, there would be no-one capable of referring

to anything, and so it would not be possible to make any existence-claims.

I take it that (NL) expresses something obviously true, and so unthreatening

to any theory of existence: in a possible world containing no language users, no
existence-claims would be made, because no claims of any sort would be made.
In such a world, there would be no-one capable of referring to anything; but
nor would there be anyone capable of quantifying over anything, or using a sui
generis existence predicate, or indeed of expressing an existence-claim using
any candidate analysis of existence whatsoever. In such a world, nothing could
be said to exist—but that is not a problem for any theory, as it is obviously the

17
In Attic Greek, the relevant belief might be expressed thus:
 H. Peacock

correct description of what would be the case within a counterfactual situation

involving a world devoid of language users.
That cannot be what the objector has in mind. 18 Rather, it seems that the
correct formulation of the objection is something like this: the current theory, in
claiming an equivalence between the existence of something and our ability to
refer to it, makes it a necessary condition of the existence of anything that we
can refer to it—but of course there could have been a world in which objects
existed even though there were no language users. In other words, the objection
is that

(NL*) ◊ (objects exist and language-users do not exist)

L
is obviously true, but comes out as false on the current analysis, because the current

VA
analysis is committed to translating (NL*) as

(NL**) ◊ (we can refer to objects and language-users do not exist)

(NL**) requires that we could have been in a position to refer to objects, in a world
O
where language users did not exist, which obviously could not have been the case. So
the current proposal is reduced to the absurdity of analysing the obviously true (NL*) in
terms of the obviously false (NL**).
R
As a preamble to a response to this issue, a tu quoque: it is the case that any
theory that does not analyse existence in terms of quantifiers or higher-order
PP

concepts is going to face some difficulty with statements of (metaphysically)

possible existence or nonexistence, because every theory needs to be able to
account for the truth of statements about things which do not exist but could
have done, such as
A

(V) Vulcan could have existed.

If we follow the current line of thought, (V) should be analysed as

R

(V*) ◊ (Vulcan exists)

FO

But so long as we also accept an ‘actualist’ restriction on what exists, we also have
to accept the truth of

(NV) Vulcan does not exist

in which case, the name ‘Vulcan’ lacks a referent—in which case, the most
it can contribute to the truth conditions of any statement in which it occurs
is the fact that it lacks a referent; and this of course leaves us at a loss
18
Kripke agrees: according to him, it is a ‘fundamental confusion … [to] identify what people would have
been able to say in hypothetical circumstances, if they had obtained, or what they would have said had the
circumstances obtained, with what we can say of those circumstances, perhaps knowing that they didn’t
obtain.’ (2nd John Locke Lecture, 1973)
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

how to explain what it is that determines that (V*) can express a truth.
(Evans (1982, p. 350) would presumably say that in these circumstances
we should not even concede that (V*) expresses a proposition, since the
significance of the whole sentence is ‘contaminated’ by the embedded non-
referring term.)
A Kripkean response, of course, would be to claim that—like Sherlock
Holmes and unicorns—it is not the case that Vulcan could have existed. This
is indeed plausible if we take Vulcan to mean the Roman god (the equivalent
of the Greek god Hephaistos); to paraphrase Kripke, Vulcan is supposed to be
the name of a unique God rather than picking out just any entity that satisfies
most of the descriptions we give of him: god of metalwork, husband of

L
Venus, etc. But given that there is no such unique god—the name fails to
pick out a unique actual individual—it follows that there is no possible god
picked out either. 19 However, the picture is rather different if we read

VA
‘Vulcan’ here as the name of the planet posited by Le Verrier to explain
irregularities in the orbit of Mercury. This planet does not exist; but even
given Kripke’s reflections on the impossibility of the existence of fictional or
mythological characters, it seems that it could have existed. There is an
O
important disanalogy here. Part of what makes the Kripkean claim about
fictional and mythological characters plausible is an appeal to some form of
origin essentialism. Any intuition that Sherlock Holmes could not have existed
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(taking Holmes as the example to avoid Vulcan/Vulcan confusion) relies to
some extent on the thought that, for anything to be Holmes, it would have
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had to originate in the same way as Holmes originates in the real world—i.e.
from the imagination (rather than the experience) of Conan Doyle. Nothing
could be Holmes and be a real existent, because nothing could be a real
existent and at the same time have been dreamt up as a fictional character by
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Conan Doyle.
Of course, the situation is different in the case of the planet Vulcan. The
origin of the name ‘Vulcan’ is in the naming of a theoretical posit introduced
to explain a set of observations. Now, granted that, for anything to be Vulcan,
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it would have had to come into our language as a theoretical posit intended to
explain a set of observations—indeed, it would have to be the entity that
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explained a set of observations—is there any obstacle to claiming that there

could have been such a planet as Vulcan; to saying that Vulcan could have
existed? It is hard to see what could adjudicate rival ‘intuitions’ here, but there
is at least a prima facie case for saying that a possible world which was
exactly like ours save for the fact that Le Verrier’s theory of the orbit of
Mercury was true, would be a world in which Vulcan existed—not, as the
Kripkean view would have it, a world in which there existed a planet which
matched our (and Le Verrier’s) description of Vulcan and which everybody
called by the name ‘Vulcan’, but in which Vulcan did not exist—since Vulcan
(allegedly) could not exist.

19
See Kripke, 2nd John Locke Lecture (1973)
 H. Peacock

Even if the example of Vulcan is not persuasive, the Kripkean response to this tu
quoque fails in any case, so long as we want to avoid what I’ll call a doctrine of
necessary nonexistence (NN):

(NN) Everything that does not exist, necessarily does not exist.

The reason is this: suppose that there is at least one thing which does not exist, but
could have existed. Let us stipulate that we call the non-existent but possible entity
which is most similar to an actually existing entity Ella. Then it follows that

(E) Ella could have existed.

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which of course entails that

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(E*) ◊ (Ella exists)

which is a sentence of exactly the problematic kind that the Kripkean response had
aimed to rule out. Since—I presuppose—the (NN) doctrine is something which most
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people will want to deny (it entails that the world could not have contained more
entities than it actually does, for one thing), I conclude that the response fails, and the tu
quoque cannot be avoided simply by denying that there are any true statements saying
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of a non-existent entity that it could have existed.
So much for the tu quoque; what about the response? Our problem is to give an
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account of the current proposal according to which the analysis of

(NL*) ◊ (objects exist and language-users do not exist)

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reveals it to express a truth. The first thing to say here is that it is no surprise if a proposed
analysis of existence-claims does not translate neatly in modal contexts: even on the
Russellian analysis, a claim like ‘◊ (the inventor of bifocals does not exist)’ needs further
recasting to distinguish between wide- (de dicto) and narrow- (de re) scope readings of the
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claim. 20 Moreover, it is now widely accepted that a fully perspicuous account of any
counterfactual claim must proceed by ‘cashing it out’ in terms of possible worlds.21 On
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that basis, we can recast our problem; the real task here is to give an account of the truth of

(NL**) There is a possible world containing objects but no language-users

Now, of course, our task is different and potentially more tractable: we have a
description of a possible world, and the claim that ‘there is’ such a world, and the real
issue is to make sense of the ‘there is’.
Things are easiest here for the Lewisian modal realist: she can simply take the ‘there
is’ at face value as an assertion of existence, since she claims that all genuinely possible

20
i.e. it could be read as saying that it could have been the case that there was no unique inventor of bifocals,
or that, concerning the inventor of bifocals, that man could have failed to exist.
21
See Lewis 1986, pp. 9–20), for the canonical account of how an adequate theory of modality needs possible
worlds.
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

worlds literally exist. We can, then, say that the current proposal is compatible with
modal realism: to say that there could have been objects but no language-users is to say
that there is a possible world containing objects but no language users, which is to say
that there (literally) exists such a possible world, which is to say (according to the
current proposal) that we can refer to such a world. Someone might object that,
although we can describe a set of features which many possible worlds have—i.e.
the features of (1) containing objects and (2) not containing language users—we cannot
uniquely specify any particular such world, and thus cannot count ourselves as being
able to refer to any of them. Not so: for any condition Φ which may be satisfied by
more than one world, we can refer either to all such worlds collectively, using the plural
description ‘the possible worlds in which Φ’; alternatively, we can pick out one of them
uniquely with the description ‘the closest possible world in which Φ’, using the familiar

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Lewisian notion of ‘closeness’ (Lewis 1986, pp. 20–27).

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So the current proposal is compatible with realism about possible worlds; however,
it does not follow that it is committed to it. One advantage of advancing a theory about
what it is to make an existential claim, rather than a theory about the meaning of certain
specific English words and phrases, is that it is compatible with the view that the ‘there
is’ in ‘there is a possible world…’ is not used to make a genuine existential claim, but
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rather functions in some other way. One such theory is so-called ‘Modal Fictionalism’
(Rosen 1990): on this account, ‘there is a possible world such that…’ is elliptical for
‘according to the modal fiction (i.e. the fiction of possible worlds), there is a possible
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world such that…’. Again, there is nothing here which is incompatible with a theory of
existence as the possibility of reference, for if it can be part of the possible worlds
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fiction that such and such a possible world exists, it can also be part of the fiction that it
is possible for us to refer to such and such a possible world. Thus, our possible worlds
analysis of the claim (NL*)—that there could have been objects though there were no
language users—becomes this:
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(NL-MF) According to the modal fiction, we can refer to a possible world in

which there are objects but no language-users.
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Now the modal fictionalist does not want to say that we can really succeed in referring
to such a world, because she does not accept that such a world exists. However, it certainly
FO

is part of the fiction of possible worlds that reference to such a possible world is within our
capabilities; thus, if the ‘existence’ of a possible world is existence (according to the
fiction), then it is entirely plausible that the ‘existence’ of a possible world is our ability to
refer to it (according to the fiction). It follows that the current account of existence is also
compatible with a modal fictionalist account of possible worlds.
What about a third kind of approach to the metaphysics of possible worlds—the
‘ersatz’ one (Lewis 1986, p. 136) which takes the ‘there is’ of (NL**) as a genuine
existential claim, but alleges that the ‘possible world’ is not really a world in the same
sense as our own? Here, it is claimed that a possible world is some other kind of
existing thing—for example an existing but non-actual ‘State of Affairs’ (Plantinga
1976), or a maximally consistent set of propositions describing how the world could be
(a ‘world story’ in Adams (1974) phrase). Fortunately for the existential theorist, there
is no need to engage in the debate about what kind of entity a ‘possible world’ really
is—for as long as the claim that such a ‘world’ exists is held to be literally true, the
 H. Peacock

current theory can accommodate it. Let a possible world be any kind of entity
whatsoever (a Ψ, schematically). Then, the claim (NL**) that there is a possible world
containing objects but no language users will be the claim

(NL-Ψ) There is a Ψ containing objects but no language-users.

And if Ψs are held by the theorist to exist, as they are by the ‘state of affairs’ and
‘world story’ theorists, then surely they are among the things to which we can refer. In
that case, there is nothing wrong with applying the proposed analysis of existential
claims here also, and understanding (NL-Ψ) as the claim

(NL-Ψ*) we can refer to a Ψ containing objects but no language-users

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VA
Since any ersatzist account of possible worlds that correctly tracks our judgements
about modality will recognise the existence of such a ‘possible world’ (such a Ψ,
whatever a Ψ really is) as the one described in (NL-Ψ*), it seems that any such account
of ersatz possible worlds is compatible with the current theory of existence, even
granted the stipulation that there could have been objects but no language users.
O
A final response on behalf of the objector: isn’t this a hostage to fortune? What if the
correct account of possible worlds turns out to be something different from the accounts
considered here, and is in fact incompatible with the current account of existential
R
claims? To this, we can offer a dilemma: any rival account of possible worlds must say
either (i) that the ‘there is’ of (NL**) is not a literal existence-claim (for, really, there
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are no such things as possible worlds), or (ii) that (although possible worlds exist) they
are not the kind of thing we thought they are. Any version of lemma (ii) will fall under
the strategy outlined for the ‘ersatzist’ programme; on the other hand, lemma (i) is not a
real problem for the theory of existential claims: if, in claiming that ‘there is’ a possible
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world of such and such a kind, we in fact make no existential claim at all, then it is no
business of the current theory to deal with such an assertion; in that case the current
theory should not be judged on whether it has an adequate account of the ‘there is’,
since this ‘there is’ is not making an existential claim at all. Thus, it seems that,
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provided we accept that the claim (NL*) that there could have been objects but no
language users should somehow be understood in terms of possible worlds, it follows
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that we can maintain the current account of existence as the possibility of reference
while avowing the truth of (NL*)—which is to say that we can maintain the current
account of existence without being forced to say that existence is dependent on
language in the sense that nothing could have existed unless there were language users.

5 Conclusion

Quine said that ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’ (1948, p. 15). Later, this was
amended by Susan Haack and others, substituting ‘to be said to be is to be the value of
a variable’ (Haack 1978, p. 49). This adjustment was undoubtedly needed: the first
question the ontologist should consider is not ‘What exists?’, but rather, ‘What is it to
claim that something exists?’ Here, I have sketched the beginnings of a defence of one
answer to that question: to claim that something exists is to assert that we can refer to
Existence as the Possibility of Reference

it—that we have it in our power to achieve reference to it, whether using the same term
as in the original existence-claim, or by using another which shares the same referent. I
have suggested that this account gives an explanation of the way existence-claims
function in debate, licensing some ways of speaking and ruling others unsuitable for
literal-minded discourse; it also enables us to explain the most important formal
features of existence-claims in ordinary language. Finally, I have tried to show how
this account can begin to deal with the most pressing objections to it. At the very least,
it seems, this is an account worthy of further serious consideration.

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VA
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