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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The word 'exists' is ambiguous between different senses corresponding to different ontological categories

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Frege and Russell established that 'exists' functions as a second-order predicate uniformly across all domains, expressing that a concept has instances.
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    • 2.Quine's criterion of ontological commitment treats 'there exists' as a single logical operator (the existential quantifier) that ranges over all entities without categorical restriction.
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    • 3.If 'exists' had distinct senses per category, existential quantification in formal logic would be systematically equivocal, yet it demonstrably preserves valid inference across mixed-domain statements.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The conjunction reduction test proves semantic difference only when predicates contribute distinct truth conditions, but categorial oddness can arise from pragmatic or sortal violations rather than lexical ambiguity.
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    • 2.Ryle's own category mistakes in 'The Concept of Mind' are explicable as violations of sortal presuppositions without positing ambiguity in the verbs involved, showing the inference from absurdity to ambiguity is invalid.
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    • 3.Zeugma-based arguments conflate context-sensitive modulation of a univocal term with genuine polysemy, a distinction Recanati and others have shown is empirically and theoretically significant.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.It would be a poor joke to say 'three things are rising: the tide, hopes, and the average age of death', because 'rising' has different senses in each context
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    • 2.Similarly, saying 'there exist both prime numbers and bodies' mixes ontological categories under a single word
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    • 3.The conjunction reduction test reveals that combining such uses sounds absurd, indicating distinct senses
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