Chapter VI
Existence and Reality

There is a potential conflict between the spare taste of modern conceptions of logic and the ancient philosophical concern to exclude nothing from our ken that has the least claim to be said "to be."^[1] Between Parmenides and Quine the tradition raises a remarkably constant question about "what there is." Quine and Parmenides answer in the slimmest of ways. Parmenides says: what is, is; and what is not, is not; and that is necessarily so. Of what is not, nothing (more) can be said. Quine says: what is is "the value of a bound variable"; we discern, in what one says, what one says "is."

Parmenides's view has been nearly universally construed as a disaster, since it appears to exclude from "what is" (or "what there is") whatever may be said to change (for, on the argument, what changes "is not"). If so, then all the sciences of nature would be swept out as meaningless or incoherent. There is the sticking point. The entire Greek world, including the Presocratics who were familiar with Parmenides's thesis, and Plato and Aristotle, were obsessed with reconciling the world of change with what appeared to be the ineluctable truth of Parmenides's dictum. The supposed elegance of that dictum obliges us, it was held, to admit that to affirm that "what is not, is" (which the atomists tried to defend) is contradictory; hence, that what "is not" is also impossible to treat as a suitable object for the constative discourse by which we make truth-claims about what genuinely "is."

But there are grave difficulties with Parmenides's teaching. It forces a philosophical concession from us that appears to collide, although in

a very different way, with the intended economy of Quine's formula. Quine's resolution is similarly open to challenge. One is inclined to ask of both Parmenides and Quine: When you speak of "what is," would you please explain what you have in mind? "What is what? " You don't understand, we may suppose each to reply: I am speaking only of "what is "!

The truth is that Quine is quite clear that when he speaks of "what is" he is speaking only of the individuatable things (things capable of individuation) about which we utter and confirm certain (favored kinds of) truth-claims in certain suitably formal paraphrases of what we ordinarily say. In the current jargon linking philosophy and logic, it is said that Quine uses "is" in its "existential" sense: the sense governed by the canonical use of the "existential quantifier." The implication is—and it seems quite correct—that Parmenides failed to grasp the difference between that existential sense of "is" (or something like it) and its predicative sense—that is, the sense in which the question I put a moment ago is pertinent, namely, "What is what? "—the sense of "is" in predicative position ("being red," "being round," and the like).

Parmenides seems to have misled himself into thinking (i) that "what is" ("existentially") cannot support any form of ("predicative") discourse about "it" that affirms change ("what is not"), and (ii) that "what is not" ("existentially") cannot be spoken of at all (either "existentially" or "predicatively"). I say Parmenides is wrong on both counts. Not everyone agrees. The philosophical tradition has struggled since that day to distinguish between at least the existential and the predicative senses of "is." Some would say—I certainly would—that Sherlock Holmes was ("is") a fictional character, "something" that does not and never did exist, but that, nevertheless, I can (counterfactually imagining Sherlock Holmes to exist) talk about him, mention him, and even say what is true of him (that he never married, for instance). If so, then, (i) it is entirely possible to speak (in the existential sense) of what does not exist, and (ii) it is also entirely possible to affirm (in the predicative sense) what is true of "it": without confusing what is actual and what is not actual and what changes and what does not change—and without producing paradox as a result. If so, then Parmenides's stern dictum is either false (in supposing that one cannot speak of what "is not" [existentially] or say anything of "it" [predicatively]), or false (in supposing that one cannot say of what "is" [existentially] that "it" changes [predicatively]), or preposterous (in supposing that one cannot ever say what is false—either existentially or predicatively).

Part of what is needed may be supplied by distinguishing between what "exists de re " and what "exists de dicto ." (These are meant as terms of art with respect to the existential sense of "exists.") Let us say that

(6.1) the existential sense of "exists" is a purely formal sense, indifferent to the distinction between "de re existence" and "de dicto existence."

(The "existential sense" of "exists" is a misnomer.) I suggest we treat (6.1) as no more than a terminological recommendation. The point of offering it, however, is this:

(6.2) formal or syntactic analyses of sentences entail no de re consequences; de re import is a function only of "interpreted" sentences,

where, by interpreted, I mean only: that feature of sentences (apart from their syntax) in virtue of which they are construed, when uttered, as conveying information about the actual, or some imagined, world.

On that reading, "exists de dicto " signifies, trivially, that what "exists" is no more than the grammatical referent of a given discourse ((6.1)), suited for predication—in the abstract space of that discourse —whereas "exists de re " (usually) signifies that what "exists" (de dicto ) may also, in some further (ontic and epistemic) sense, be discernible in the actual world . Clearly, there is no logical compulsion to concede that what "exists" de dicto also "exists" (because of that) de re —as if to say (as Searle seems to say)^[2] that fictitious "entities" are a part (de re: if only a peculiar part) of the actual world. Nor is there any logical compulsion to say that whatever "exists" de re also "exists" de dicto . That might suggest the preposterous view that there is nothing that is actual about which we do not already know enough to have made determinate referential provision for, or that what is actual is made such by being spoken of "existentially."

But if these corrections are conceded, then they fall afoul of Quine's thesis. For, if I can speak of Sherlock Holmes without supposing that Holmes exists de re (is real: "is," in the sense Quine seem to favor), then, either (i) Quine is wrong to suppose that the "existential" sense of "is" (that he favors) must (for reasons beyond his own logical tastes) concern what actually exists (or is thereby taken to exist) de re, or (ii) in speaking of "any thing" in the de dicto sense intended, we are necessarily com-

mitted to the entailed claim that "it is" (also) de re (that it actually exists). That is a plain non sequitur . The existential sense of "exists " (or "is") is a purely grammatical sense, signifying "that about which" one is speaking—alternatively, the intentional sense of our discourse —is sometimes captured (grammatically) by the denotata of the sentences in use or the referents of our speech acts.

Quine never explains what the sense is, relative to (ii), to which in making predications of what we are speaking "about" (de dicto ) we necessarily, for purely syntactic reasons, commit ourselves, de re, as well. Is it a recommendation about how to view the canonical (syntactic) analysis of so-called "existential generalizations"? For instance: if I say "Some cats are fierce"—and if I agree with Quine about the standard formal representation of what is thus said, so that I am, in effect, committed to the truth of "($x ) (Cat x & Fierce x )"—is it also true that I am (must be) thereby committed (de re ) to there "being" at least one actual cat? Am I committed "existentially" in the de dicto sense alone (grammatically)? Or am I also committed to the "de re existence" of cats (their actual existence in the world)? And if I am committed in either way, on what grounds am I thus obligated? Is it contradictory or incoherent to say (in ordinary English), "Some unicorns are fierce" and believe (in so saying), or (even) actually say, that there are no unicorns (that no unicorns actually exist)? It certainly seems possible. Or, am I committed to unicorns in the de dicto sense (alone) when I predicate fierceness of "some" of "them "? The latter seems a ponderously worded but utterly vacuous consequence; the former seems arbitrarily strong—and false. (Clearly, Quine is bent on obviating any idiom in which we may be said to "intend" to be speaking "about" this or that—which might then claim to be able to serve as the value of a bound variable, although not because of the natural-language grammar by which the logical clarification may be standardly endorsed.)

It clearly won't help to say, "Some unicorns (although imaginary as far as our world is concerned) are fierce," because "they" exist in some "possible world" (other than our own), in virtue of which (somehow) we refer to them in our world. This looks very much like a Rube Goldberg device for referring to what we should otherwise say, tout court, was imaginary. (And what of "possible worlds"? Do they exist or are they real, or are they merely imagined to be real? Which, thus uttered, duplicates the original puzzle.)

My own recommendation is this. When introduced referringly, possible worlds^[3] only "existde dicto, " that is, trivially: they "exist" in the

"existential sense" of "exists" ((6.1)) that I just assigned Quine's account (against his own interpretation). Thus I recommend that

(6.3) there are no "possible worlds," other than the actual world, that exist de re .

Some philosophers (Goodman, notably) insist that there are many actual worlds (though Goodman neglects to tell us how to individuate and identify them). Others (Kuhn, for instance) worry that, within the (one) actual world, there are many "different worlds" that may be demarcated (according to Kuhn: Priestley's "world" and Lavoisier's "world" at least, which Kuhn has no intention of construing in Gadamer's way). Still others (Lewis, for instance) hold that "possible worlds" are in some sense "real" (or at least not imaginary). As far as I can see, what is possible signifies what, (i) for predicative purposes, (ii) is (on independent grounds) actual, exists, or is real, or (iii), relative to what is (thus) actual, might exist or be real, or (iv) is (in accord with some idiom projected from the conceptual resources of constative discourse) conceptually compossible, that is, coherent and free of internal contradiction, paradox, or the like (in effect: relative to whatever is admitted to "exist de dicto ").

I cannot see how to prove, in any nontrivial or nonarbitrary way, that (6.3) is true or false: it seems to me to be no more than a prudent philosophical recommendation, an economy. I cannot see how, otherwise, to avoid the endless paradoxes that "possible-worlds" discourse generates. I regard such discourse as a conceptually dependent idiom, therefore. That is, I cannot see how "possible-worlds" talk can be detached, in any interpretively robust sense, from talk of what is "possible" relative to the actual world. I take this to be implied in imagining "possible worlds" counterfactually close to the actual world or closer than others—for instance, in adhering to the causal laws of our world but not to certain admitted facts about it (thinking of how, say, the moon might have been produced).

There seems to be no discernible syntactic difference between "Some cats are fierce" and "Some unicorns are fierce." It cannot (then) be said straightforwardly that (for "purely logical reasons") the first is true and the second false. Because, it may well be that "Some unicorns are fierce" is true, either (i) because (surprisingly) James Thurber knew something about the actual world the rest of us do not, or (ii) because, in spite of there not being any actual unicorns, "they" (the ones being referred to)

are fierce (de dicto ). It seems reasonable to say that we should not want the logical form of "Some unicorns are fierce" to change, magically, as a result of contingently discovering unicorns in the garden. It also seems reasonable to say that we can talk about imaginary unicorns, if we are careful.

This is obviously an overly busy way of speaking. Two findings are clear. For one:

(6.4) there is no incoherence or paradox in predications made of referents we suppose do not actually exist,

as in a deliberate fiction or in imagining something to exist that we believe does not.

We may recommend against notationally "entrenching" (in some supposedly "canonical" way), in the logical structure of sentences like "Some unicorns are fierce" but not like "Some cats are fierce," the familiar natural-language assumption (or intention) that, in speaking of fictitious things, we do not ever mean to commit ourselves to their actually existing. But our policy about formal notation need not affect or alter our ordinary linguistic habits—or the actual world, for that matter. If we suppose (with Quine) that the logical notation I've loosely employed for "Some unicorns are fierce" (involving "quantification," as Quine would say) should (or must ) be construed as entailing an "ontic commitment" (as he also says) to unicorns—one that expressly signifies that at least one unicorn actually exists (de re ) because (and, here, the weight of that "because" is quite uncertain) we have agreed to use a particular term (designating a member of a would-be set of things called unicorns) to designate a "value" (or a variable to which a set of "values" correspond) "bound" (as we say, with Quine) by the existential quantifier ("$ "), now taken to range over our representation of the sense of the ordinary English sentence "Some unicorns are fierce"—then (and here's the second finding):

(6.5) the syntactic representation of "ontic commitment" cannot be more than conventional.

This fits very nicely with what I have already shown, in chapter 2, regarding (2.4) and (2.5), and in chapter 3, regarding (3.10), which, taken together, argue that, although alethic and ontic considerations are inseparable, prioritizing the one over the other (epistemically) amounts

to advocating a form of cognitive privilege. (Quine might then be accused of an excessive zeal—of just the sort I claim to have found in Dummett.) We see, therefore, the potential danger of reading Quine's analysis of ontic commitment in too sanguine a way. I say it is a purely verbal and formal device, utterly lacking in ontic import by itself, or simply obscure regarding the import it acquires as a result of the larger philosophy in which it is embedded. It may be true that we cannot resist admitting (in general) that "something (or other) exists" (actually exists in the real world), but that is hardly because of a choice of logical notation; also, that hardly commits us to some unicorn existing (as opposed to something existing ). Quine has moved too quickly. The utterance "Something exists" strikes me as belonging to that set of informationally degenerate utterances , of which "Cogito ergo sum " is the most famous: those, that is, whose content never exceeds the information entailed by their being uttered.

I don't deny that we presuppose that something or other exists, but I cannot see that we are necessarily committed to the entailment (that some unicorns exist) as a consequence of employing (as in my illustration) the "existential" sense of "exists" ((6.5)). Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the supposed assertion "Something (or other actually) exists" cannot but be logically derivative from the more robust (epistemically and ontically freighted) assertions and commitments of actual life. Singular assertions dominate market life, you see. (That was just the point of worrying Gettier-like counterexamples in the last chapter.)

This helps to confirm that

(6.6) we cannot determine what is actual, or what we take to be actual, solely from the syntax of what we utter;

and, as a consequence,

(6.7) ontic commitment, effected by the use of any canonical notation—for example, by uttering the existential quantifier ("$ ")—is equivocal: as between (i) conforming with the mere de dicto use of that notation and (ii) intending, by its use, to represent accurately, de re, some real-world belief.

On the fairest reading of Quine's notion, ontic commitment is (still contrary to Quine's own proposal) properly given by (ii); in (6.7) it does

not encumber the actual world or our actual commitment, but even that signifies only an intention to convey what one supposes to be actual. I can put this more provocatively:

(6.8) "ontic commitment," in sense (ii) of (6.7), is "intentional" and cannot be captured by the resources of sense (i), which is "informationally degenerate,"

in the sense of "intentional" in which one deliberately acts to satisfy sense (ii). (Effectively, this is the import of (3.10).) I take it that Quine's usage is itself "intentionally" motivated in this sense (although, of course, Quine's avowed intention—in his program for formulating a canonical notation—was to retire all the intentional constructions [in a different sense of "intentional"] of natural-language discourse of the sort Brentano thought he had captured).^[4]

Logic, abstracted from the context of the normal use of natural language, in which language first acquires its "ontic commitment," has no ontic import of its own. This accords completely with the sense of (2.4), linking language and world indissolubly, but it also confirms (6.2). Hence,

(6.9) there is no uninterpreted syntactic relationship between natural languages and logic that determines ontic commitment.

The negation of (6.9) contradicts (6.8) and is incompatible with (3.1), which affirms that language is not an autonomous domain, as well as with (4.21), which makes ontic commitment—in fact, all truth-claims—interpretive.

Hence,

(6.10) no logical canon said to represent the "ontic commitments" of a natural language is more than an abstraction from natural-language use, just as the analysis of a natural language is no more than an abstraction from larger lingual practices.

This—theorem (6.10) or something close to it—is what I took Dummett to have arbitrarily opposed. Theorem (6.10) is, I believe, the master theme of Wittgenstein's conception of "forms of life" (Lebensformen ) of the post-Tractarian manuscripts. (It has taken a bit of labor to isolate that fact.) It is a specimen of the most profound modern analogue of

Aristotle's refusal to separate the forms of argument from the practices of natural-language rhetoric, except that Aristotle, as we have seen, opposes (2.1), the denial that reality necessarily has an invariant structure. Wittgenstein's thesis is: (i) the minimal doctrine consistent with (2.1) and (6.6); and (ii) a doctrine specifically in accord with the claims of symbiosis and holism and intransparency that are central to my own argument. Wittgenstein's notion is also the natural replacement for Kant's "constructed" picture of phenomena, under the condition just mentioned (the "post-Kantian" orientation), so long as we still lack an account of historicity. (Wittgenstein has almost nothing to say about history and, truth to tell, little to say about Lebensformen .)

These considerations bear, of course, on the resolution of the Gettier problem that surfaced in the previous chapter: there is no transparent, purely syntactic rendering of any of our(or commitments) about existence or reality or truth or knowledge. The Gettier problem is a genuinely profound problem if it is taken to embody and legitimate a philosophical policy, for

(6.11) logic, construed as an autonomous and uninterpreted discipline, sets no prior constraints on—indeed, has no particular relevance for—the analysis of lebensformlich discourse.

We see, therefore, that we have been proceeding by quite small steps toward the following straightforward finding:

(6.12) attributions of existence and reality are not merely alethic, logical, syntactic, or formal in any sense at all; they are inseparable from our constative powers intransparently "entrenched" in our Lebensformen .

By entrenched, I mean (adding to an earlier recommendation): (i) tacit, incompletely fathomable, within the practices of our Lebensformen ; (ii) made manifest by exercising our linguistic and lingual powers; (iii) judged in a "holist" sense to contribute to our society's continuing survival; (iv) hospitable, therefore, to determinate realist claims within that same holist space; and (v) rendered determinate only by reflexive interpretation (naturans: by "parsing"). (I seize the occasion to insist on the following usage as well: I say [entirely without argument] that any philosophy that is (i) an-archic, (ii) committed to symbiosis and intransparency, and (iii) disposed to construe our epistemic powers as "en-

trenched" in the sense just given, is [in my usage] an expression of [philosophical] pragmatism. Dewey is the exemplar.)^[5]

I should perhaps take an additional moment to make a few further distinctions clear that bear on what has already been said. The distinction between de re and de dicto discourse (that is, discourse about reality and language) makes instant sense for anyone who thinks along Aristotle's lines or for anyone who accepts an externalism or a strong form of the correspondence theory of truth. For a theorist like Quine, there is really no way of distinguishing in principle between the two: any attempt to do so would violate Quine's treatment of the analytic/synthetic dogma (although there are always contingent uses that may be needed). Furthermore, the de re/de dicto issue is not the same as that regarding the distinction between the "material mode " and the "formal mode " of discourse, which both Quine and Carnap entertain.^[6] The second is merely a difference in a "style" of discourse, a difference in two different ways of making the same assertions (regarding which both suppose the "formal mode" to be the more perspicuous). On the second view, to speak as if we were speaking of the parts of language or the parts of the real world ("semantics" and "metaphysics," say) is a façon de parler that does not affect the substance of what we say. When, therefore, Dummett prioritizes semantics over metaphysics, it looks as if he favors the first distinction (de re/de dicto ) rather than the second. Furthermore, the de re/de dicto distinction is usually invoked in speaking of necessity, or natures or essences, or existence, or in some related way. Quine clearly subordinates the first distinction to his preference for the "formal mode" regarding the second: hence, he speaks only of "ontic commitment." Theorists like (the later) Goodman and Lewis cannot concur, since the first admits many actual worlds and the second, many (robust) "possible worlds" of which the actual world is but one. I see no way of denying that "is" or "exists" is used, constatively, equivocally, in a way natural-language does not capture syntactically—which, as I've tried to show, Quine obscures unnecessarily. I think this signifies that there is a point to holding to the de re/de dicto distinction—in intentional terms. When, however, we speak of "natures" or "essences" in accord with that distinction, we usually mean to speak, respectively, of real essences and nominal essences in a sense akin to what, in their very different ways, Locke and Leibniz intended. There, too, the distinction has a use.

Let me now return to the original issue raised about the existential sense of "to be": Parmenides's confusion is now easier to resolve. For,

if Parmenides did not merely confuse external and internal negation (negation accommodating, respectively, the existential sense of "exists" and negation in the predicative sense: as, respectively, in the sentences, "it is not true that there are fierce cats" and "it is true that some cats are not fierce"), then Parmenides's doctrine must be entirely arbitrary, since it denies the very possibility of coherent discourse about change; or, if he had indeed confused the two, concluding (somehow) that "what is not" (does not exist) is tantamount to "what is not this or that or thus and so" (for instance, is not round, red, just, beloved—for any range of changeable predicables), then he has unnecessarily impoverished discourse in the deepest possible way. We owe it to Aristotle to have cleared up Parmenides's mistake: being-not-fierce (the "complement" of being-fierce ), for instance, is not the same as not existing at all (the denial that there is [there exists] a certain "a "); the difference is not a mere difference of predicates. It is entirely possible "to be" and "to be non-fierce"—without risking contradiction or incoherence. Parmenides was confused.

As Aristotle puts it, there's a world of difference between "being not this or that" (round, red, just, beloved) and "not being anything at all," that is, "not existing." There must be a third way between Parmenides's "two ways" (Truth and Opinion). That is what Aristotle means by hyle (matter), that in virtue of which what exists undergoes change, without ceasing to exist and without ceasing to be real while undergoing change. (Hyle, however, is a confused notion: it tries to treat an epistemic or grammatical matter as if it were entirely an ontic one.)

Aristotle has his own complex metaphysics, of course (which I have already sought to undermine by advancing (2.1), the denial of invariance). But if, with Aristotle, we concede that "primary substances" (ousiai, particular things) manifest "being" insofar as they have an invariant structure (are, say, instances of fixed natural kinds or species), and if such things manifest "nonbeing" (as well ), since they may be subject to change (kinesis or energeia )—for instance, in the way of generation and birth—then existing things may be real with regard both to "being" and "nonbeing"; for, as Aristotle says, "nonbeing" is not tantamount to "not being at all." Parmenides, he supposes, had thought they were the same.

We may treat Aristotle's recovery of this strategic distinction as an ancestral version of the distinction we require. But I warn you as well that we are not obliged to follow Aristotle (and could not now justify doing so) if we tried to construe our sense of "exists" and "is real" in

tandem with his notion of potentiality and actuality. The latter notion is clearly tied to the doctrine of the necessarily invariant structure of what is real (the denial of (2.1) and the affirmation of the "teleologism" of the natural).

Here, I must intrude a strenuous aside. By teleologism, I mean that theory of change according to which either (i) a "final cause, " the telos or end-state of a finite process, brings about that end-state because it is "actual" and real and effective as such through the entire potentiated process, or (ii) there is a continuum of novel and evolving "necessitations" serially effectuated through each and every (fully) actual phase of that (real) process, proceeding from any stage (of it) to the temporally next neighboring stage, without there being any final cause assignable (prospectively) to the entire continuum or to its aggregated stages.

The formula offered in (i), as by Aristotle (in Metaphysics and Physics ), presupposes a changeless "actual" nature by which the potencies of individual things (sharing that nature) are normally actualized. The formula offered in (ii) applies sui generis to the process of history, to (all the "parts" of) reality insofar as it (they) forms (form) an inclusive (actual) history. This is as close as I can come to fathoming what Hegel may have intended in the Phenomenology . The necessity it posits is historicized, ontically emergent, not lawlike (in the usual inductive sense), not analytic (in the logical sense), but such that, retrospectively and only retrospectively, viewed holistically from the vantage of each evolving stage (hence, "actual" or "actualized") and only thus, the continuous process is, in reality, one of self-realization—as of rationality or freedom—but not by way of prior potencies (in Aristotle's sense). Hegel's account is not "constative," I think, but "mythic" in a sense I introduce later.

I take the trouble to isolate the formula of (ii) because it is the master theme of nearly all twentieth-century teleologized forms of rational optimism and progress. (I find it for instance in Peirce, Popper, Habermas, and Putnam. I suggest that, without confirming the necessity posited, such optimisms are no more than arbitrary. That's to say, they are arbitrary ((2.1)).) Their rejection lays the ground for a robust form of relativism. Heidegger believes that Hegel's notion is an enormous sham, an ahistorical pretense to the effect that he (Hegel) subscribes to genuine historicity.^[7] I think Heidegger is mistaken in this. But I admit I cannot find a plausible sense in which Hegel's thesis could be shown to be true or could be tested. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think Hegel may have offered what he took to be a conceptual model irresistible to human

reason reflecting on the phenomenal world under the form of an inclusive and real history. (I take Hegel's model to be heuristically intended. The would-be potentialities are the actualities of a new stage of history read back, teleologically, into the past.) History, for Hegel, is a certain contingent temporal change narratized under the guise of necessity and mythically assigned as the evolving reflection of an all-encompassing "subject" (Geist ). If Hegel means to speak literally of "historical necessity," I confess I cannot see his argument.

In any case, a better account of existence and reality (than Aristotle's) is offered by Peirce, although, for my present purpose, I must (in the same spirit) detach it from the details of Peirce's complex philosophy (which is also teleologized). (I am attracted to part of it, and I am strongly opposed to part of it; but that is neither here nor there.) What Peirce isolates in an extraordinarily clear way is the sense the notion of existence conveys of the brute "resistance" or "opposition" of the things of (and in) the actual world: their causal, affective, effective, reactive, resistant powers vis-à-vis us or other things. "Resistance" is not a criterion of what exists, but it fixes the primitive idea underlying every fruitful theory or criterion of what does exist ("what there is"—the de re "existential" sense I was worrying in Quine's company a moment ago). Quine's view seems tepid alongside Peirce's, although Peirce's does not quite settle the deeper question of precisely what, distributively, does exist. That is, on Peirce's view, existence is "attributed" to the "brute" world, but what is "brute" is not discerned in any privileged way, it is interpretively encumbered.

On Peirce's view, it's clear that numbers and universals don't exist. (Nor do "possible worlds.") They don't "resist" us in the unyielding way a wall does, say. That hardly settles the question of whether numbers or universals are real . They may be real (according to one theory or another), but it would take a version of what Peirce calls "Platonic nominalism" to support the strenuous claim that numbers and universals are not only real but existent as well. The expression "as well" signifies a possible equivocation on the meaning of "is" ("what is," "what there is").

Quine does not equivocate in this regard. He answers the question "what there is" solely in the "existential" sense, the sense of the existential quantifier, although he is not clear (he is downright equivocal, even vague) about whether the "existential" should be construed de re or de dicto —or what that means. His analytic strategy is always de dicto, but his philosophical intent is clearly de re . (That is the point of

his speaking of ontic "commitment" rather than of "what there is" simpliciter .)

Peirce's idea, if I understand it rightly, is that, granted we exist, whatever else exists in the world resists us (or other things), or would resist us (or other things), in the "brute" sense sketched. The intuition is that we would not be able to ignore what exists, as we moved through the world, but that sense may be easily extended. (Think of the micro-theoretical world.) Peirce calls this Secondness: a brute feature of things, taken dyadically, that cannot be reduced to anything else. Existence, for Peirce, is, therefore, the manifesting of "Secondness," ascribed, epistemically, on our awareness of "resisting" (or being "resisted" by) other things (bumping into them, moving them). Cannily, Peirce isolates the distinction of Secondness from "Thirdness, " which signifies primarily the interpreted, "constituted" nature of the intelligible world, but he never fails to acknowledge that Secondness is itself discerned only within the space of Thirdness. I regard this as a much-enriched analogue of Berkeley's robust sense that there is a "brute" aspect of the world we perceive when we open our eyes, in spite of the fact that what is "externally" real is, in some sense, an idea in God's mind.^[8]

I like the idea. I find it compelling, sensible, uncluttered, hospitable to indefinitely many alternative ontologies of "what there is." Peirce clarifies what we should mean by saying that something exists, without thereby settling the question of what actually exists. Hence, I recommend we combine the main force of Aristotle's and Peirce's separate views (while avoiding commitment to their special philosophies: invariance, in Aristotle's case; cosmic mind, in Peirce's).

Causality and agency surely count among our best intuitions here. There is no need for greater precision, simply because we are not looking for an invariant or indubitable criterion of existence, merely a clue regarding the plausibility of competing views. Let me put some reasonable theorems before you, therefore. For one,

(6.13) ascriptions of existence are validated and legitimated on the strength of interpretations of what "resists" us and other things in the world.

Peirce speaks here of Thirdness; Davidson and Rorty, derogatorily, of tertia . Putnam, as a Peircean of sorts, defends tertia .

Paradigmatically, existence is a dyadic notion, as Peirce remarks. Nothing is said to "exist" tout court, except, derivatively, in the context

of some interpreted "resistant" space. To say that God exists, for instance, is (apparently) to say that he created the world in which "resistant" things obtain, or that Lucifer "resisted" him, or some such thing; to deny God's existence is to deny all such putative facts. Hence, it is reasonable to hold:

(6.14) causality and effective agency obtain only among existent things;

and:

(6.15) being legitimative, terms like "exists," "is real," "is actual," "is imaginary," "is fictional," "is," and the like cannot be first-order predicates, but they can and do function as predicates in first-order discourse .^[9]

Theorem (6.15) will require further scrutiny. Keep it in mind. I hasten to add that I have not, of course, defined "causality" or "agency." Here, what is important to emphasize is that causality and agency "implicate" existent (real) things, are dyadic notions in the sense in which they involve brute resistance (Secondness, in Peirce's idiom). Nevertheless, dyadic relations, Secondness, causal relations, and effective agency are all, like the executive notion of the "external" (of which they are instances), ontically located in some more complex ("internal") symbiotized space (4.11). (I shall return to Peirce's notion of Thirdness in a moment.)

In the sense being developed, we are easily led to concede that

(6.16) individual things exist: ourselves preeminently, that is, individuatable, resistant "things."

The sense of (6.16) plainly favors what Aristotle calls "primary substances" (ousiai ), without having to adopt Aristotle's theories about ousiai: that they possess invariant structures or essences, for instance, that the processes of change they exhibit accord with the logic of "potentiality" and "actuality," that they are inherently directed teleologically to actualizing their essential natures. It also favors Peirce's notion of Secondness, without obliging us to adopt Peirce's full-scale ontology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, or the brooding notion of cosmic "thinking" apart from human agency. One is certainly tempted to say that it follows from (6.16) that

(6.17) existent things = material things.

Theorem (6.17) is tautological, if we understand material to signify (as I suggest we should) no more than "capable of resistance." Even Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is "material" in this sense. So is the biblical God. (I shall contrast the "material" and the "physical" in a moment.)

Resistance, then, is the putative brute power of existent things contingently encountered as such in the world: derivatively, it is simply our sense of what is undeniably in the same world we inhabit (along the lines, as I say, of Berkeley's sense of opening our eyes and being unable to construe as imaginary what strikes us as palpable and present and cannot be ignored).^[10] It is a primitive notion, certainly not criterial, basically pretheoretical, yet theoretically posited; it explains the sense in which the world, although "artifactual" (symbiotized), is also the gathering of those things that we find ("indicatively") the existence of impossible to deny—the things that cannot be swept out by mere inventive interpretation. Resistance is brute, (i) in the epistemic ("phenomenal" or even "phenomenological") sense of being palpably encountered, resistant to the possibility of being denied existence, being explained away (although that, of course, is not a suitable criterion of what does exist), and (ii) in the ontic sense that existence itself (as dyadic) cannot be entirely subsumed as a mere posit within some interpretive scheme of the world ("triadic," as Peirce would say: a mere form of Thirdness). (But I see this as exposing the extraordinarily limp sense in which Quine speaks of existence.) In fact, these distinctions catch up the dialectical connections between naturalism and phenomenology and realism and idealism explored in the previous chapter. (It is for this reason that causality need not be "nomological," lawful or lawlike; causality implicates what exists, whereas nomologicality implicates the interpretation of what is real.) The "brute," I must emphasize, has no evidentiary force, no power to confirm or disconfirm. (It certainly has no "originary" role.)

I am prepared to consider strengthening or extending (6.16), but no ground has been given for doing so. For instance, I see no reason for supposing that an ontology of events, replacing an ontology of material things, something like ousiai, must be ruled out a priori .^[11] Such an ontology has its inconveniences, but some philosophers have explored the possibility. Theorem (6.17) certainly does not mean that what exists possesses only physical properties. Physicalism —at least the strongest version of what, in the current philosophical literature, is meant by "physicalism" (that which exists are only physical things possessing only

physical properties)—does not follow from (6.17). Characterized thus, physicalism remains an open question. Correspondingly, "material" (or, "material thing") signifies only that existent things are formed, insofar as they are complex or composed of parts, in a way that involves "matter" (in a sense akin to that of Aristotle's hyle and Peirce's Secondness, except for the caveats noted).

This, as we now understand matters, usually means that existent things do have physical properties, although not necessarily only physical properties. There's the straightforward reason for opposing any idiom that declares that numbers and universals exist (except in accord with our term of art—"exists de dicto, " which is to say, do not, as such, exist de re at all). Lacking "matter," they cannot be located spatiotemporally, they cannot enter into causal relations, they cannot "behave" in the resistant way (in the same world in which we exist). The same may (perhaps) be said of God, in the biblical sense. This points to the clever reason the biblical God is "supernatural." (He makes himself felt through his creation.) So, too, are Frege's numbers! In any case, it is not conceptually impossible to extend the claim of existence to numbers, classes, kinds, universals, or God, but it is (I think) uneconomical and philosophically unnecessary. I see no reason to press the point further.

Conceding this much, we may go on to consider reality . First of all, surely,

(6.18) what exists is real.

"Reality" must be a more inclusive category than "existence." It would be anomalous to deny that what exists is real. But it is also clear that the real cannot be confined to what exists—if, for instance, we oppose saying that the properties of existent things also exist. Propertied things, not properties (whatever that may now mean), manifest resistance and are individuatable. Part of Parmenides's difficulty seems to have depended on failing to keep these distinctions clear. For reasons akin to (6.18), we should then not deny that

(6.19) the "properties" of existent things are real.

Of course, just as the definition of "exists" says nothing about what exists, so, too, the definition of "real" says nothing about the "nature" of real properties. Nevertheless, theorems (6.18) and (6.19) specify what is "real."

That question returns us to the "problem of universals." In Peirce's hands, it obliges us to consider (i) whether there are "real generals," whether the fact that general predicates may in principle apply to plural things (existent things, even fictional things, depending on how we treat "ontic commitment") signifies that the real predicables they designate are, in reality, general, or whether they may or must be construed in an altogether different way, and (ii) whether, if "generality" is real, it is also true that "real generals" exist (that is, whether universals exist de re ).

Peirce says that real generals exhibit Thirdness, which relates predicates to his attractive theory of signs (the exemplars of "Thirdness"); but we may, more neutrally, see in Peirce's Thirdness an acceptance of something very much like the doctrine of symbiosis (or the inherent interpretability of what is symbiotized) introduced earlier, for instance at (4.8)–(4.9): that is, the thesis that language and world, and cognizing subjects and cognized objects, are indissolubly united to form the space within which constative discourse alone obtains and has point ((4.11)). That is, the ubiquity of Thirdness (in Peirce's sense) corresponds (at least in part) to what I have been calling "symbiosis." (I adopt it as a term of art, in that sense.) But I hasten to add that Peirce construes Thirdness as operative in nature apart from human interpretation (or interpretive "constitution")—hence, as somehow the work of a very shadowy cosmic mind. In this sense, Peirce is not entirely a "Kantian" and not entirely wedded to what I am calling symbiosis.

Peirce's extraordinarily clever point (which he offers against Hegel) is that the distinction of Secondness cannot be merely absorbed within the terms of Thirdness (as Peirce thinks—I believe wrongly—Hegel believed),^[12] but that Secondness, which accommodates the requisite "external" relationship between subject and object (hence, the individuation of existent things) also constrains Thirdness. "Real" Thirds manifest Secondness, Peirce thinks, and "existent" Seconds, Thirdness. Extraordinary economy! But what does all that mean for us? I think it means at least that symbiosis must yield, somewhere, a working distinction between Secondness and Thirdness. To fail in that is to lose our grip on "objectivity." But so saying is merely to admit the ineliminability of the "brute" world: it says nothing about "it" in any determinate ontic or epistemic sense.

The history of philosophy amply confirms that the principal objection to admitting "real generals" has been the following worry: if they are admitted to be real, must they also (or something on which they depend)

be conceded to exist? Peirce shows quite elegantly that that consequence need not follow. The trick is this. We must be prepared to affirm:

(6.20) what is real, but does not exist, cannot be real apart from what does exist.

That leaves but one option:

(6.21) except for what exists, what is real are the properties, relations, states, and the like of existent things: only what is predicable of existent things can be real.

One imagines it is merely a prejudice of contemporary nominalists that they resist admitting (as existents) "abstract particulars"—numbers, for instance. But there are excellent reasons for insisting on such a policy, without addressing predication, namely: (i) what exists must be "material" ((6.17)), must "resist" other things in the world; (ii) what is real cannot be real apart from what exists ((6.20)); (iii) numbers (and other would-be abstract particulars) would have to be admitted to exist if we acknowledged that they were real (in their separate world, as Frege and Popper concede); and (iv) no systematic advantage thought to be gained by admitting numbers to be real (as well as other abstract "entities") is lost by insisting that their "reality" is conceptually bound to the existence of something else —the material world (or the achievements of science). This, I believe, is the undeveloped motivation of Mill's and Quine's "empiricist" treatment of mathematics and logic. It leads to the powerful finding:

(6.22) logic and mathematics ultimately address a radically abstracted subset of the real predicables ascribed to what exist.

Theorem (6.22), like (6.21), conveys no epistemic import at all: it serves only to distinguish (in the ontic sense) the difference between the use of "exists" and the use of "real." (Notice, by the way, that the mention of "a subset" of [mathematical] predicables no longer conveys, as it would for Quine, more than a façon de parler; for "ontic commitment" now means "commitment" in the benign de dicto sense.) Furthermore, there is an oddity among the dominant natural languages that easily misleads us: we nominalize what we predicate of existent things—as properties, attributes, qualities, predicables. But if we see matters thus, we need not

suppose that properties are more than the (grammatically) nominalized denotata of whatever we predicate of what exists (or of other suitably specified referents). Thus, we say that red is a property (perhaps redness, then, is a "universal"), when we merely (mean to) affirm that Peter's balloon is red. Here you have another reason for retaining the de re/de dicto distinction.

It should be clear that the denial of the existence of numbers in no way settles the question of whether there are "real generals" (whether generality itself is real )—a fortiori, whether numerical properties are real. The nominalist has missed the import of his own intervention.^[13] He confuses the matter of the existence of numbers with that of the reality of general attributes —including (of course) attributes of the numerical kind. Strange to say: the nominalist's thesis is a muddle that cannot fail to remind us of Parmenides's muddle.

The contemporary nominalist (Goodman, preeminently), holding that numbers "are not" (do not exist), somehow supposes that that settles the question of whether numerical properties also "are not" (are not real)! Obviously, there is a gap in the argument. Contemporary nominalists (like Goodman and the early Quine) worry, it is true, primarily about whether abstract entities (numbers, classes, kinds) exist . (Quine worries much less than Goodman.) But there are also the ancient nominalists (Ockham, preeminently), who worry rather about whether "generals" (general predicables) are either real or exist . The first kind of nominalist does not address the questions of the second, but the reverse is not true.

If you now recall what was offered in chapter 3 regarding predication—in particular (3.12)–(3.14), which affirm that predication depends upon, is embedded or entrenched in, and manifests, the consensual practices of linguistically apt societies—then one sees that it is not necessary and not reasonable to deny that, in some sense, there are "real generals." There must be : given the spontaneous flow of successful linguistic exchange that extends general predicates beyond any conceivable initial paradigms, nominalism cannot but be bankrupt. (That was a part of chapter 3's argument.) Put very simply: you cannot explain linguistic behavior without explaining predication; you cannot explain predication without explaining the apt use of general predicates; you cannot explain general predicates without admitting real generality; you cannot account for real generals without admitting what we (now) mean by "exists" and "real"; and you cannot account for such linguistic behavior without attention to the enabling Lebensformen, by conforming to which referential and predicative success is vouchsafed.

"Real generals" (the phrase is Peirce's) means, I suggest, that generality is real. By that, I mean no more than that predicates, used in valid predications, regarding what exists, designate what is real. But (real) generality is itself nothing but the joint or multiple predicability of what a predicate rightly predicates (in constative discourse) of plural (existent) things. It is not, as such, explanatory in any epistemically relevant sense. Various and many things, we say, are red, but there is nothing (existing apart, denumerable) that particular things somehow "share," "participate in" (as the usual account of Plato's Forms has it), when it is true that this and that are red.

The linguistic clue—namely, that "is red" is no more than a "part" of a sentence, something that is not even such except in its functional role within a well-formed sentence—confirms that what predicates "designate" (properties ) are no more than the nominalizations of what, in the real world, answers to true predications. The best we seem to be able to say is this: it is existing things' being F that true predications signify: as in, "Those balloons are red, but these are not." There is no F -ness, but things (really) are and can be F . For the same reason, things cannot have "being" or "reality," though they can of course be real—in the predicative sense. Being is not a first-order predicable, as I have said; even in being a predicable, there is nothing that exists or is real, apart from a predicable's predicable function, which we invoke in predicative discourse and thought. (This answers, I believe, both Strawson's subtle questions about subjects and predicates and the medieval puzzles about universals.)^[14]

The modern nominalist is wrong on two counts: first, in supposing that the admission of real generals commits us to their existence; second, in supposing that there is a viable way of denying that predicative generality is real. If, then, we introduce the (old) term universals as a term of art, as signifying "abstract particulars" or "nonindividual existents"—those would-be entities nominalized from what otherwise may be predicated of what exists, but are now themselves candidates for existence—we may concede (as a direct consequence of the gathering argument) that

(6.23) universals do not, and cannot, exist.

Between the admission of (3.12)–(3.14) and the grounds for advancing (6.23), all the classical parties to the dispute about universals can be defeated: nominalists and conceptualists, because they suppose either

that there are no real generals since universals don't exist (the thesis of the "nominalists") or that, although there are universals, they exist only in the mind (the thesis of the "conceptualists"), and so-called realists as well, who simply hold that universals do exist ante rem (the "Platonists"), in re (the "Aristotelians"), or post rem (the "conceptualists" again). (Conceptualism is a somewhat labile category, as a comparison of Abelard and Duns Scotus confirms.) Peirce, I should say, failed to grasp satisfactorily that the defeat of nominalism and conceptualism (on his reading) had nothing to do with denying that a proper answer to the question of real generals could (and would) concede an essential role to the way the human mind functions—not some cosmic mind functioning as a deus ex machina invoked to ensure the independent reality of "generals." (Peirce clearly confuses the epistemic and ontic aspects of "generals.") Also, of course, conceptualism is incompatible with symbiosis.

Finally, along related lines, we may take note of the fact that, in the philosophical jargon from Parmenides to the present, one hears it said that what "exists," or is "real," "has being ." It was in fact Parmenides's haste in theorizing about "being" that misled him about the distinction between "exists" and "is real"—which, of course, Aristotle corrected by distinguishing (in effect) between nonbeing (the state of being subject, as such, to change, or the continuing condition of whatever continues to exist as it changes) and not being (the mere absence of existent things). It now turns out (if we insist on the term, inasmuch as its use is widespread) that:

(6.24) what exists is a being —one among a plurality of denumerable beings.

This means that "being" (or "beings") is, as a term of art, used only distributively.

It is worth remarking that "nonbeing" also bears on the ancient distinction between complementary properties (whatever, inclusively, is, as a property, merely other than whatever a determinate predicate designates: "nonred" as opposed to "red," say) and contrary properties (whatever, within some theoretically specified set of alternative properties—in respect of color, say—is other than a given determinate property but is itself similarly determinate: "blue," say, within the range of the "nonred," as opposed to "red"). Greek philosophy seems to have favored contraries where, as with Plato and the Presocratics, it introduces schemes of "opposites" in order to understand change ("Hot"

and "Cold," for instance, or "Moist" and "Dry") as articulations of nonbeing. The Buddhists, by contrast, if I understand them rightly, introduce (not altogether unlike the Taoists) some predicatively undifferentiated source (sunyatta:not a void in the sense of "not being" and not expressible either in complementary or contrary terms) within the holist (undifferentiated) space of which complementaries and contraries play their transient role.^[15]

It is also just barely possible, of course, to conjecture about what might be meant by "being," taking the term without any qualification whatsoever—"Being" (as the typographical convention has it), as Heidegger's enormous effort in Being and Time claims to explore. The answer (against Heidegger) is this: whatever we say about "Being" will be derivative from whatever we say about plural "beings." At best, Being (Sein )—lacking number, lacking attributes, lacking a determinate "nature"—cannot, except metaphorically or by abstraction, be said (as Heidegger does say) to be "the ground" of "beings" (Seiende ). Remember: on the argument given just above, what is real is real only relative to (what may be rightly predicated of) what exists. Otherwise, the assignment is patently a form of privilege. Actually, Heidegger's program does involve prioritizing (what he calls) "ontological" inquiry over "ontic" inquiry, that is, discerning the "internal relation" between "Being" and "beings" as distinct from making "objective" truth-claims among ("externally related") beings. There is a curious sense (which the Kyoto Buddhists have pursued) in which Heidegger's Sein has been assimilated to sunyatta, or vice versa. (I cannot pursue the matter further. But I turn, in chapter 8, to a larger issue that bears on Heidegger's extravagance.) In any case, it is conceptually incoherent to treat the "relation" between "Being" and "beings" as epistemically prior to distinctions regarding plural "beings"—"ontic" and "ontological" distinctions, for instance, as Heidegger has it. The result is that, contrary to what Heidegger clearly intends, there can be no principled distinction between the usual discursive properties attributed to individual things ("ontic") and those properties attributed to the same things "in virtue of" their first manifesting (in some sense) the more primordial "relation" of Sein and Dasein ("ontological").

One final question may be ventured. (I have touched on it briefly.) It is nearly canonical to say, with Kant (as in his discussion of the proofs for the existence of God), that "existence" is not a predicate.^[16] Kant's charge is certainly justified in a way, but in a way it is not. For instance, it is entirely natural to say (usually in a way meant to be emphatic):

"There are coelacanth. They were thought to be extinct, but live specimens were discovered in 1938. They exist ." Now, there is no way to treat the sentence "There are coelacanth" as ill-formed, but then it does seem reasonable to construe the "are" in that sentence as at least a predicative use of "exists": viz. "($x ) (Coelacanth x & Existent x )." This shows again how unsatisfactory Quine's formal treatment of "ontic commitment" is. Notice, please, that if we elect to construe Quine's "existential" use of quantifiers as having only de dicto import, then we are pretty well obliged to concede that "exists"—in the de re sense, in natural-language contexts—is fairly construed as predicative. (Refusing that possibility, I suggest, leads to worse extravagances.)

A moment's reflection should convince the reader that the quantificational paraphrase of "exists" (Quine's option) obscures rather than informs the criterial question. Certainly, Quine nowhere explains in a sustained way just how alternative schemes of "ontic commitment" are to be appraised. Quine actually obscures the fact that prioritizing "holophrastic" sentences over "parsed" terms violates the doctrine of the "indeterminacy of translation." The truth is, Quine is "ontically committed" by that disjunction, though he denies it.

Construing "exists" predicatively confirms that the pertinent judgment is essentially "interpretive" and that the would-be raw data are "intransparent." But it is also true that the question of "real generals" (as with first-order perceptual discrimination) does not directly arise with the use of any of the "ontic" predicates. That is, mere "ontic" predicates are not descriptive. Oddly, then, these terms appear to fit both the quantificational and the predicative reading. Something is being missed.

Our formal paraphrase clearly raises the paradox Kant had in mind in asking us to distinguish between an imaginary hundred Thaler and a real hundred Thaler . It can't be the case that there "are" two numerically distinct things—both, hundred dollar bills—indistinguishable in all general respects except that one happens "to be" real and the other happens "to be" imaginary! That would oblige us to think of real and imaginary hundred dollar bills as distinct species within a common genus. That won't do at all. (It would mean that an "imaginary" hundred dollar bill did exist—but only as imaginary!)

"Real," in the sense of "exists" ((6.18)), cannot serve as a (first-order) predicate truly ascribed to things in addition to the usual first-order (descriptive) predicates ("round," "red," "just," "beloved"). Although "Coelacanth exist" is syntactically well-formed, it is not predicatively

informative about existent things (descriptive of them) by way of the mere use of "exists." It implies, in a fully predicative sense, only that there are as yet unspecified (real) properties that (existent) coelacanth possess. Hence,

(6.25) predicatively construed, "exists" and "real" and similar "ontic" expressions (or ontic predicates ) are descriptively vacuous (not predicatively informative in any first-order sense);

and

(6.26) the descriptive meaning of no first-order predicate is affected or altered in any way by the attribution (to the same referent) of any ontic predicate ("imaginary" or "real," for instance).

Alternatively put,

(6.27) predicatively construed, "exists" and "real" and similar "ontic" expressions cannot but be second-order predicates, even if they are uttered in first-order discourse.

(By descriptive, I mean no more than that feature of predicates in virtue of which they are confined to first-order discourse: are perceivable or suitably linked to what are perceivable, are subject to change for instance, are of a physical nature, and the like. The distinction will have another hearing in chapter 11, where I consider values as predicates.) For present purposes, it is enough to say that descriptive predicates = first-order predicates. Notice, by the way, that second-order predicates, which by definition are not descriptive—ontic predicates, for instance—may be coherently used in first-order discourse. The distinction is critical for the discussions of the final chapter. I suggest, for instance, that, as a second-order predicate, "exists" is evidentially supported by reference to first-order grounds regarding Secondness. The account is rather trim as a result.

Theorem (6.27) is an interesting finding, because it shows why questions of existence and reality and truth cannot be detached from the second-order legitimative concerns of philosophy . Hence, the arguments of the postmodernists are instantly rendered incoherent. Finally:

(6.28) inherently, natural-language discourse is philosophically encumbered.

We cannot, therefore, escape the philosophical import of our discourse ((1.5)). We cannot treat philosophy as "therapy," in Wittgenstein's sense. We cannot be coherent postmodernists. To speak of what exists and is real is already to implicate the lesson of (6.28). Observe as well that the foregoing argument is intended to show only that a heterodox reading of "exists" is both coherent and philosophically instructive and definitely not ruled out by the force of any would-be canon. On the contrary, it confirms the reasonableness of entertaining alternative philosophical strategies. For instance,

(6.29) the rigor of ontology is not weakened in any way by construing its truth-claims in accord with a relativistic logic.

A further question suggests itself, but I shall only mention it here. (I shall make a brief allusion to it later.) To say that particular things exist, in the sense I have favored, is to say that they are determinate (or determinable) with respect to number (read predicatively). But that, it should be said, does not ensure or entail or require (for the sake of coherence) that what (in first-order discourse) is predicable of them is also, in all cases, determinate . By number, read as a predicate, I understand (i) that predicate (or predicable) (ii) admissible in first-order discourse, (iii) that corresponds to the individuation of particular things—which, you remember, was not a matter that could be decided predicatively at all. That is to say:

(6.30) number, read as a predicate, signifies the determinate individuation of particular things; it sets no constraints on the determinateness or indeterminacy of (other) first-order predicables (for instance, "natures").

Theorem (6.30) will, as we shall see, have an important inning in speaking of cultural entities . It has a corresponding importance in Peirce's system, since, for Peirce, real predicables involve Thirdness—in effect: interpretability. It comes as a surprise, then, that

(6.31) the determinateness of individuation does not entail the determinateness of the "natures" of individuated things—nor, a fortiori, the determinateness of any of their properties.

I shall want to make considerable use of (6.31). For the moment, let me simply say that by determinateness I mean (i) the effective resolution of questions of individuation or of predication with respect to what is individuated, (ii) in accord with the principle of excluded middle. Indeterminacy, then, is similarly defined, except that, by (ii'), excluded middle is abandoned or restricted for cause. Hence, it is quite possible that the individuation of a thing be determinate, although the descriptive attributes predicated of what is determinately individuated may remain (relatively) indeterminate. Peirce effectively acknowledges a similar possibility by treating "real generals" as "triadic": hence, as made (increasingly) determinate only (as Peirce says) by interpretation; or (as I prefer to say) as open to being interpreted and continually reinterpreted because, in addition to being indeterminate, they signify what is culturally significant (Hamlet, for instance).

Peirce's idea is that what is interpreted becomes determinate, without thereby precluding residual or further indeterminacy. I agree, but I depart from Peirce here. For what is interpreted may (I say) be interpreted in an open-ended way, in alternative and emergent ways, and in "in-congruent" ways, and particular interpretations may themselves be reinterpreted in the same sense. Peirce also usefully admits that determinate things may not be determinate everywhere with respect to the application of the principle of noncontradiction; that is, determinate things may be objectively vague (e.g., as in being "bald"). It is easy to see that such a view is most plausible on the assumption of a symbiotized world in which interpretation (Thirdness, in Peirce's idiom) effectively forms ("constitutes") the real things of the world in ways that are of increased determinateness. The fruitfulness of these possibilities will be seen to best advantage among cultural entities. But Peirce also construes these processes (with respect to indeterminacy and vagueness) as irreversible and quite robust; that is, he was firmly committed to a kind of cosmic evolutionism (or teleologism) and did not distinguish in principle between physical and cultural worlds. We need not follow him in these regards. (But the matter bears decisively on Aristotle's archism.) In any case, a powerful consequence follows, namely,

(6.32) the reality of "generals" lies in the (symbiotized) fluency of natural-language predication, not separately, in the mind or in the world; that is, its reality is lebensformlich .

Hence,

(6.33) predicative generality is inherently informal, consensual, not criterial; alternatively put, predicative criteria themselves presuppose the fluency of our lebensformlich practice.

The ancient quarrel about universals is a great confusion; we need no more than "real generals" to secure objectivity. But then, "real generals" have no criterial function either; they are no more than a (nominalized) shadow thrown by objective discourse. That is, if we admit objective truth-claims, then predication must have a realist function. In that sense (alone), there are "real generals." But there are none that can be antecedently discerned, in virtue of which objectivity may be conferred. Given the ubiquity of predication, there is no way to deny "real generals." They have, however, no separable epistemic role. They are implicated in the lebensformlich viability of natural-language discourse.^[17] Put another way:

(6.34) real generality is entailed by the symbiotized condition of objective truth-claims; that is, it can be affirmed holistically or, if distributively, then only trivially and parasitically.

I hasten to assure you, in closing this particular chapter, that the analysis of "what is" has produced the greatest philosophical extravagances. Some confusing specimens have surfaced in my account—for instance, regarding Parmenides, Aristotle, the medievals, Hegel, Peirce, Frege, Heidegger, Quine, Goodman, and Lewis. I could easily have mentioned others. I recommend the sparest possible policy regarding the theorems concerned with the meaning of "exists" and "real."