Mind Association

Is Existence a Predicate?
Author(s): Murray Kiteley
Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 73, No. 291 (Jul., 1964), pp. 364-373
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251942 .
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IV.-IS

EXISTENCE

A PREDICATE?

BY MURRAYKITELEY
KANT'Slaconic observation that existence is not a predicate has
enjoyed an almost spotless reputation. Few philosophical dicta
have been this fortunate. The fortunes of this dictum may rest
on the incontestability of the arguments which have been given
for it and there are several of them.
I should like to look at four of these arguments. I think they
all fail, some more seriously than others. Their failure is, however, instructive.
1. The First Argument
Professor Malcolm has recently made this observation about
existence again, being careful all the while to disengage simple
from necessary existence, so that the latter might not be touched
with the impredicative taint of the former. He cannot, he laments, find a rigorous proof of the doctrine that existence is not a
predicate, but Kant's reasoning should, he hopes, be sufficient
to convince.' The Kant-Malcolm argument is of the you'll-seeit-to-be-quite-obvious-if-you-just-look-at-it-from-this-angle type.
Kant's angle is got by the comparison of 100 existing with 100
non-existent Thalers ; 2 Malcolm's by the king's specifications
of the desired qualities to be sought in a chancellor, existence
occurring last on the list (pp. 43 and 44). Kant wants us to ask,
" Are there more Thalers in the first than in the second ? "
and Malcolm wants us to ask, " Can qualifications for ministerial
appointment include existence ? " (" No non-existent candidates
need apply.") To both questions we can only answer " No ".
But what do these cases show ? Consider the following two.
Say that you were ordering a shipping box for books from a
carpenter and among the specifications, size, wood, strength, you
included non-emptiness. "I don't want a non-empty box
delivered, is that clear ? " "But what," the inarticulate carpenter might ask, " has that got to do with making boxes ?
Non-emptiness, he might have said, is not a real predicate.
Consider a candy manufacturer. Does he, make two kinds of
chocolates, packaged and unpackaged ? Packagedness, Kant1 Norman Malcolm, " Anselm's Ontological Arguments ", Philosophical
Review, lxix (1960), 42-44.
2 The Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (London,
1929), p. 505.
364

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IS EXISTENCE

A PREDICATE

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Malcolm might say, is not a real predicate. Only size, filling

and topping make a difference among chocolates; packages are
coverings not characteristics.
If you look at existence from these angles, you are likely to
agree with the orthodox opinion that existence is not a predicate.
But if you look at it from other angles, you are liable to entertain
doubts. You can imagine all sorts of cases where what is wanted
is to know whether or not some thing does exist. There are many
times where the important thing is to find out, not whether it has
a short or long snout, but whether or not it is extinct or extant.
You do not ask the White Hunter to lead you to the habitat of
an existent wildebeest, but you might instruct a research assistant
to track down Greek opinions on existent (rather than mythical)
animals.
Kant's 100 real Thalers add up to no more, of course, than
100 imaginary Thalers. Existence and non-existence make no
difference in counting. But that does not mean that they make
no difference. You cannot, e.g. deposit imaginary Thalers in
your bank account.
I do not wish to deny that there is something in this line of
reasoning. It does have, as Malcolm indicates, a certain intuitive
appeal, but this appeal rests on looking at the right examples
and drawing the right conclusion from these examples. There
are other examples which might have just the opposite effect.
2. The Second Argument
This argument goes as follows: (1) If existence is a predicate,
then all positive existential claims are analytic and all negative
ones self-contradictory. This is so because the ascription of a
predicate to a thing implies the existence of the thing. The
ascription of the predicate existence would, thus, already imply
the existence of the thing asserted to exist, so making the ascription analytic.1 And mutatis mutandis, one may show the selfcontradictory character of negative existential claims. (2) It is,
however, false that all existential claims are either analytic or
self-contradictory. So, (3) it is false that existence is a predicate.
This efficient little argument can perhaps be traced back to
Kant. Its recent versions, at any rate, have been sharply
1 Ayer, Wisdom and Broad, use respectively the three words " tautologous " " silly " and " platitudinous " to describe positive existential
claims in their statements of this argument. See " 'Exists' as a Predicate "
by George Nakhnikian and Wesley C. Salmon, PhilosophicalReview, lxvi
(1957), 535, where their arguments are cited.

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M. KITELEY:

criticized by Nakhnikian and Salmon; I shall discuss their

criticism shortly.
In the justification of the major premise (1) of this argument
it is said that predicate-ascription implies existence. " For,"
says Ayer, " when we ascribe an attribute to a thing, we covertly
assert that it exists (Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 43)." It is,
no doubt, hard to see how one could ascribe anything to what is
non-existent, how one could ever successfully apply a predicate
to nothing at all. Even more generally, it is hard to see how one
could, not only predicate of or ascribe to, but make mention of,
talk about, refer to, speak of, or make statements about that
which fails to exist. Yet that we do such unlikely things seems
manifest. Examples are easy to find: " He spoke at length of
the advanced characteristics of the building which Le Corbusier
designed for the . . . competition." " The only right thing he
said about Coriolanuswas that he was a Roman general." All the
familiar examples from fiction, legend and myth come to mind.
I should like to say just two things about the doctrine that
predication entails existence. First, it must be restricted to
successful, true or correct predications. A predication might
fail just because of subject failure. To a non-Canadian who
thought the city of Saskatchewan to be the home of the University
of Saskatchewan, the helpful correction would point out the nonexistence of such a city not the actual location of the University
-his mistake was one of misnaming rather than mislocating.
Second, the doctrine, even thus restricted, is meretricious. Its
false appeal comes from the inability to distinguish the truistic
observation " If you are going to talk [predicate, refer, state], you
have got to talk about something " from the quite erroneous
statement " Whatever you talk about [predicate of, refer to, make
statements about] must exist ". The first of these statements,
when a statement, is genuinely truistic. It comes to little more
than a gratuitous observation on the fundamentally subjectpredicate character of our talk. When not a statement but, e.g.
a piece of advice to a pronoun-ridden conversationalist, it is a
sound warning against dangling reference and topic-neutral
chatter. The second of these statements is a false observation
on what we can talk about, an observation which cannot, I should
think, be corrected by the expedient of giving everything honorary
existence, in intellectu or elsewhere. We sometimes gentlv
reprove a child's fancy with something like, " That is just a makebelieve lion that chewed up your shirt, isn't it Brian? " But
such gentleness is a mask for the hard truth: the child is a
victim of fancy, his shirt is not a victim of a fanciful lion.

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?
IS EXISTENCEA PREDICATE

367

There may yet be one false charm of this doctrine unexposed.

Ryle, while arguing the necessarily general character of statements about the future, says that particular, future episodes
cannot be got to make statements about (Dilemmas, p. 27). I
am not at all sure that Ryle is right, but there is this point I must
concede: if what you are talking about is non-existent, it must
at least be a conversation piece in some body of legend, fable or
fiction, or some passe scientific hypothesis. You must be able
to make, if challenged, identifying references-" you know,
Bellerephon'shorse "-, and you must be able to say if challenged,
why just those predicates apply-" see Bullfinch 7-, neither of
which you could do without at least the existence of the Pegasus
legend, if not the legendary Pegasus.
The major premise of this argument is, then, faulty. There
is no reason to believe that even were existence a predicate,
all affirmative, existential assertions would have to be tautologous. It does not follow, of course, that existence is a
predicate.
Nakhnikian and Salmon reach the same conclusion by a different, and I think wrong, line of argument (pp. 536 ff). They
argue that " Horses exist ", when elliptical for " Some horses
exist ", can be logically transcribed with " E " the existential
predicate as " (3x) (Hx . Ex) " which is not a tautologous form.
They further argue that even when the predicate " E " is, as
they claim, plausibly defined by the trivial property of selfidentity, the foregoing statement is not a tautology. The
trivial property of existence just drops out.
This is true enough for general existence claims, but what about
singular ones ? " Pegasus exists ", by their definition of " E ",
becomes " Pegasus is self-identical ", which is patently trivial.
They have, thus, only undercut half of what the major premise
claims. The rest stands; singular existential statements remain trivial, and, we would have to suppose, singular existence
is not a predicate.
3. The Third Argument
The third argument says that if existence is a predicate, then
you should be able to affirm it universally and deny it particularly. You can, however, do neither of these. It is equally
nonsensical to say either " All tame tigers exist " or " Some tame
tigers do not exist". The square of opposition for existencestatements is fearfully truncated, indeed to the point of losing a
dimension. Thus, existence cannot be a predicate.

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368

M. KITELEY:

The " tame tigers " example is taken from G. E. Moore's

discussion of this argument in his contribution to the Aristotelian
Society symposium on whether existence is a predicate (1936).
Moore compares " All tame tigers exist " with " All tame tigers
growl"; and he also compares " Some tame tigers don't exist"
with " Some tame tigers don't growl ". The twofold comparison
shows, he thinks, an important difference between the usage of
exists " in the one case, and the usage of " growls " in the other.
"All tame tigers exist" and " Some tame tigers don't exist"
are, says Moore, " queer and puzzling expressions ". He does
not outright say that they are nonsensical, but they do not, he
says, carry their meaning, if they have any, on the face of
them.
This argument turns on the queerness or nonsensicality of
statements of the form " All ----s exist " and " Some ----s do not
The queerness comes out well enough with " tame
exist".
tigers " in the blanks. But other fillings seem to give quite
natural expression, e.g. " All the stamps in this issue still exist,
but some in this one do not ". And even " All tame tigers exist "
can be given a setting that makes it come to life. If a zoological
survey team were compiling a directory of all tame tigers, they
might first assign number-designationsto all those known to have
been brought into the country after such and such a date. Say
that they have fifty number-designations. They check these
off to see which, if any, have survived. Then, at the end of their
tally they say " Extraordinary, they all exist ".
What do these examples show ? They seem to show that the
verb " exists " does have uses, perhaps predicative uses, that go
easily and naturally through all the quantifier changes from none
to all in the schedule of generality. Moore was not unaware of
this. He found a use of "not exists ", viz. being imaginary,
that went through the schedule. The examples do not, however,
show the argument to be faulty. They only show that there are
some uses of " exists" which, since they do not make nonsense
out of statements of the form " All ---s exist ", might be predicative; they do not rule out the possibility of there being other
uses of this verb which, by making nonsense out of such statements,
would be non-predicative. If then, one use of " exists " can be
found which does make nonsense out of universal affirmative
statements in which it appears, then the concept of existence
associated with this use of the verb would not be a predicate.
There is, I think, such a use of " exists ". It is the most
exiguous use of it, the use which most closely corresponds to the
non-locative use of the " there is " idiom. The oddness of " All

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IS EXISTENCE

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tame tigers exist" is the same, thus, as the oddness of " There
are all tame tigers ".1 The oddness is somewhere in the same
family with " The warmth of the temperature was . . . " and,
more closely, " All the cars on the freeway were numerous ".
" Exists," when employed exiguously, tells you something about
tame tigers but nothing about each and every tame tiger; it tells
you something about the membership, but nothing about the
members. Existence, here, is something like full strength of a
regiment: the regiment can be at full strength, but none of the
members can be.
The non-exiguous uses of " exists " (where one can say, e.g.
that all tame tigers exist) might be called, following Hall, excluder uses. Excluders, he says, " serve to rule out something
without adding anything, and ambiguously rule out different
things according to the context." 2 Thus, when the tigercanvassers exclaimed " Extraordinary, they all exist ! " they
did so because they had ruled out death in captivity, escape and
shipment back to India. The force of their exclamation is not
the absurd " None of them do not exist ", but rather the intelligible " None of them have died, nor escaped, nor been shipped
back to India ". You can, then, say that all A's exist when by
so saying you are denying for all the A's that thereare that they
are, e.g. extinct, out of production, destroyed, hallucinatory,
mythical, fabulous, or fictional. Each item in this list is an
attribute and as an attribute can be affirmed universally or
denied particularly.
I am tempted to think that if you state existence using the
formula " There are ---s " rather than " ---s exist ", the excluder business would never crop up. I cannot imagine, and
here is the source of my temptation, " There are all ---s " ever
making sense. I have italicized above, however, a form of this
idiom which might be thought to be universal, viz. " all the A's
that there are ". I am uncertain about it, but I suspect that it
would demand the same kind of excluder-analysis as " exists ".
Before drawing the moral from all this, there is an old puzzle
which I should like to exorcise. If, so the puzzle goes, " Horses
exist" and " There are horses" come to the same thing, then
you would expect the statement " There are horses which exist "
to be redundant, and the statement " There are non-existent
horses" to be self-contradictory. The logical transcription of
1 Jesperson calls this use of " there " existential, as contrasted with its
use as a " local adverb ", e.g. " There are all the tame tigers ", Modern
Englishi Grammar, vii (Copenhagen, 1949), 107.
2 Roland Hall, " Excluders ", Analysis, xx (1959), 1.

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M. KITELEY:

these two statements shows this clearly enough. The first is

written " (3a) [Hxx. (3y) (y = x)] "; the second is written
"(3x)[Hx. - -(3y) (y = x)] ", where " x exists " is defined by
x) ". Since " (3y) (y = x) " is true of all x's, the
"(3y) (y
second conjunct of the first statement adds nothing to the conjunction, and the denial of the second conjunct of the second
statement, being contradictory, makes the conjunction selfcontradictory. But so long as " exists " is used in a non-exiguous
way neither redundancy nor self-contradiction will be incurred:
" There are non-existent horses, e.g. Pegasus " is quite consistent
because ccnon-existent " is used in the way of an excluder.
The argument under consideration, then, can only be used to
show that the verb to exist will fail, when used exiguously, to run
through the complete schedule of generality. Only this use of
the verb, then, is shown to be non-predicative. Other uses might
well be predicative.
4. The Fourth Argument
This argument is similar to the last one. It is as follows. If
existence is a predicate, then there are certain kinds of inferences
that should be valid. For example, the inference from " Donkeys
exist and Eeyore is a donkey " to " Eeyore exists " should be
valid. It is clearly not valid, so existence cannot be a predicate.
Russell spoke of such inferences as " pseudo-syllogisms " and
added that their fallaciousness was parallel to that of the
argument " Men are numerous, Socrates is a man, therefore
Socrates is numerous ". Russell did not conclude that the fallaciousness of these arguments rested on the predicative use of
" exists " and " numerous ", but rather on the predicative misuse
of them. They are predicates, but not predicates of particular
things. Thus, to say that Socrates exists is to say something
which is " a mere noise or shape, devoid of significance ". So
to say is to misapply a predicate which only rightly applies to
propositional functions.
It is the conclusions of these pseudo-syllogisms which Russell
marks as nonsensical. But if the conclusion of an inference is
nonsense, one of the premises must be also, and the one which is,
quite clearly, is the major. That premise says, in my example,
that donkeys exist. For the inference to be valid it must be
read " All donkeys exist ". But " All donkeys exist" may or
may not be nonsensical depending on whether " exists" is used
exiguously or as an excluder. If it is used as an excluder, then
the statement might just be the false claim that no donkeys

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occur in fiction, a statement from which you could infer, Eeyore

being a donkey, that Eeyore does not occur in fiction, i.e. he
exists. This would, then, be a perfectly good argument with
one false premise.
But for the exiguous use of " exists " this argument, like the
last one, seems to be sound. Subsumption inferences, with
" exists " in the place of the predicate, are invalid. Surely they
would not be invalid unless it were improper for this verb to
occupy the predicate position; and this impropriety may be
what is heralded by the maxim that existence is not a real
predicate.
Only two of the four arguments have survived, and they not
completely intact. What exactly do they show ?
All four of the arguments advance in the same formation.
They start with a claim about the way bona fide predicates
behave; they continue with the observation that the putative
predicate, existence, does not so behave; and they end with the
conclusion that existence is not a real predicate. All the arguments claim to know what a real predicate is or does.
Each of the arguments, then, states certain requisites of all
predicate behaviour. Kant and Malcolmboth seem to think that
you can only be using an expression in the predicative way if,
by this use, you can add something to the subject, something new.
Their slogan might have been: existence is not news. The
other arguments have variously insisted on, as the tests of predicate behaviour: occasional occurrencein contingent assertions,
appearance in predicate position in universal affirmative statements, and appearancein predicate position of the major premises
of valid subsumption arguments. " Exists ", however, sometimes, meets all these tests. What, then, are we entitled to say ?
At best we are entitled to say that some of the ways we use this
verb are not predicative. And that modest entitlements rests
solely on the assumption that these tests or requisites accurately
bound the limits of predicate behaviour.
But do they ?
What are the marks of a genuine predicate ?
Webster says that a logical predicate is that which can be
affirmed or denied of a subject. But what kind of subject ? If
the subject is a pseudo-subject, then the predicate affirmed or
denied of it would be a pseudo-predicate. What, then, are the
marks of a real or logical subject ? Webster says two things.
He says, first, that the grammatical subject of a sentence need
not be the same as the logical subject, which is the real subject of
predication. For example, in " It is hard to do right ", " it)"

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M. KITELEY:

is the grammatical while to " do right" is the logical subject.

Then the logical or real subject, the entry goes on to say, " is the
term a proposition is about; also, what such a term denotes:
the topic of an affirmation or denial ".
This is not too helpful. What seems to be given as the mark
of a term which serves as the grammatical predicate is simply
appearance in the predicate position. Thus, in the example
above, " hard to do right " serves as the grammatical predicate.
But the mark of a logical predicate, the entry seems to imply,
is appearance in the predicate position of a standardsentence,i.e.
a sentence in normal word order. " It is hard to do right " is
not in normal word order; " To do right is hard " is. Thus the
logical predicate in both these sentences is " hard ", even though
it only occurs in the predicate position in one of them.
Before applying this test to our verb, I should at least acknowledge the difficulties. What is the predicate position ? How
do you know when a sentence is in normal word order ? The
first question can be answered if you allow the adequacy of a
grammar like Chomsky's. We need nothing more than his
schematised set of parsing rules, the first of which, " Sentence
NP + VP ", indicates the predicate position as that occupied
by the verb phrase (" VP "), or some part of it (Syntactic Structures, pp. 26 ff.). The second question is less easy. For example, are active constructions in normal word order while
passive are not ? We surely would not want to say this, implying
as it does that "loves wisdom " is the logical predicate of
" Socrates loves wisdom" in contrast to the merely grammatical
predicate " by Socrates" in " Wisdom is loved by Socrates ".
We want, that is, to make room for double-subject or relational
constructions, so that the second, logical subject might be either
the grammatical, direct object or the object of a prepositional
phrase.
The only sentences, then, with mixed-up word order, are those,
like the example " It is hard to do right ", in which a pronoun
serves as a dummy subject, what Jesperson calls the " preparatory
it ". We must say, then, that the sentence " Lions exist " is in
normal word order. And, since the verb " exists " occupies the
predicate position in this standard sentence, we must conclude
that this verb behaves predicatively, that it is the logical, not
just the grammatical, predicate of the sentence. Note also
that "lions " would be the logical as well as the grammatical
subject.
I argued above, however, for an assimilation of the exiguous
pse of to exist with the use of the " there is " idiom, i.e. where

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"there " is not a local adverb. For example,

(1) Tame tigers exist,
and
(2) There are tame tigers
come to the same thing. This assimilation must, of course, be
sharply restricted; it is wrong for any of the excluder uses of
" exists ". This wrongness comes out when it is recognized
that both " There are non-existent tigers " and " There are tigers
which exists " are neither contradictory nor redundant, as they
would have to be if the assimilation were bonafide,when " exists"
is used as an excluder.
But, for the exiguous use of " exists " the assimilation is alright.
And if the assimilation is alright, then clearly " tame tigers "
cannot be the logical subject of either (1) or (2) above, and
" exists " cannot be the logical predicate of (1).
This, it seems to me, is the substance of the slogan that existence is not a real predicate.
San Jose State College

25

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