What Do Negative Existential Claims Tell?

Abstract

How to read negative existential claims? This question has been intensively dis­cussed in philosophy. The problem of these propositions is that under standard reading they say something contradictory, i.e. that something that somehow ex­ists does not exist. If so, then all such propositions must be false or having no truth value. But intuitively many of them are true. In this article different so­lutions to the problem of negative existential propositions are critically observed: for instance, the solution consisting in the acceptance of double existence, exis­tence of abstract entities along with material objects, events, states etc., or the so­lution of W.V.O. Quine who treats names as predicates. The author aligns with situationism, the position based on the idea of relativity of existence. From this point of view any existence is an existence in some situation – spacio-temporal section of some world. Situationism presupposes that entities denoted by names like “Pegasus” belong to reality (or the world in question) like normal objects with spatio-temporal features.