All Questions
Tagged with existence philosophy-of-language
15
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Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language
The existence of beginning. Origin/start/begin. All require something before. Are all just arbitrary measurements of traits we find of interest. Mapping how they change over time? The global Idea of ...
15
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15
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Can we know that something exists even if we can't explain or define it?
Can a person know that something like "free will" must exist even though an exact definition in words, using language, cannot be provided, and in the absence of a complete theory that ...
5
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1
answer
175
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How does the claim that existence is not a predicate of objects interact with abstract objects?
It's occured to me that Kant's famous argument that "existence" is not a predicate whatsoever, which eventually became the prevailing position on the subject due to Frege and Russell, seems ...
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4
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Question about Differences in Existential Quantification [closed]
Existent objects don't exist.
There are no existent object.
It seems 1 is inconsistent and 2 consistent. Both propositions seem to declare something exists, but is there a difference in these claims? ...
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4
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Why do some philosphers including Russell paraphrase this sentence?
To say “Pegasus doesn’t exist” is to say “it is not the case that there is exactly one
x
which is a flying horse of Greek mythology”.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
“Pegasus ...
6
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7
answers
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How can we denote objects that no longer exist?
This is a question more about how we can discuss about objects which no longer exist. For example, let's say that Socrates no longer exists (ignore any religious side of this and consider Socrates as ...
1
vote
1
answer
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A proposal for the meaning of life [closed]
I propose that the meaning of something is "all of the information related to it", and thus that the meaning of life is "all of the information related to life" - all of the causes ...
-1
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3
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119
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From what did we instantiated the concept of "Nothingness"
So as i understand according to Aristotle's theory of abstraction every abstract concept (i.e universal) is instantiated (or abstracted) from it particulars in the outside world if that so how can we ...
1
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1
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Can we make statements for persons/objects that cease to exist?
I am asking this question because I thought what truth value would have a have a quantifier over a set that contains persons that are dead. For example suppose I state:
"For every x that is ...
0
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1
answer
60
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A clarification of nonexistence
This is similar to a question I asked long ago, but there was a misinterpretation. People often say that, for instance, unicorns don't exist, but isn't it more correct to say that there are no ...
1
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1
answer
106
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What is it about the existence of some things that makes us right or wrong in describing their existence, while other things can change?
For example, if people used to believe the Earth was the center of the universe, and we discover it is not, we now say, "people used to falsely believe that the Earth was the center of the universe", ...
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200
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How to make sense of minds of others? [closed]
I've asked a question about the criteria for existence, but here I want to focus on a particular aspect. What does it mean If I say: Bob has a mind - Bob's mind exists - Bob is not a philosophical ...
9
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2
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215
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Does fictional discourse pose special difficulties for logic?
Natural language is context-dependent, like the statement “My uncle is a plumber”, which is true or false depending on who asserts it.
There has been lots of discussion about fictional entities and ...
2
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1
answer
232
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Are questions about existence purely semantic?
I was inspired by this question, and in particular this section of user259242's answer:
Type identity physicalism says mental states are identical with brain states. Eliminativism on the other hand ...
6
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3
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706
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Why does the philosophy concerned with the problem of negative existential statements not make use of mental representations to solve it?
Meinong, Frege, Russel and Kripke all seem to accept the principle, that for a statement to be true, its singular terms must denote an object. This leads to the problem, that a sentence like 'The ...