Surely (right?) one can meaningfully say that ‘unicorn’ means ‘horse-like creature with a single horn protruding from its forehead, often possessing magical powers’ even if one is prepared to deny the existence of unicorns. It is, on this understanding, strictly meaningless, because it fails to assert anything in particular.īut this is to adopt an impoverished view of meaning. Thus, to assert that unicorns do not exist is (in his view) not true. If Parmenides thought (only implicitly, since such distinctions were not explicitly drawn in his time) that the only legitimate variety of meaning is extensional (or referential/denotational), he could insist that terms like ‘unicorn’ have no meaning at all, since there are no unicorns. The intension(or sense or connotation) of the word ‘cat’ is ‘furry, four-legged mammal that meows, chases mice, likes milk (etc.)’Įxtensional meaning connects words with objects (nonlinguistic objects, typically) intensional meaning connects words with other words. The extension (or reference or denotation) of the word ‘cat’ is just all the cats that there are (and, perhaps, ever have been, will be, etc.). Why would he make this claim? I conjecture that Parmenides might have had a peculiar view about the nature of meaning. But that’s hardly surprising! So this crucial stage of the argument fails.Īnswer (b): The premise at line 7 stands in need of justification. So what really follows from premises 2 and 3 in Parmenides’ argument is that x (whatever you chose) doesn’t in fact not exist – i.e., that it does in fact exist. What follows is that B doesn’t in fact obtain, not that it’s impossible that it should obtain. This is a bad inference, and those of us inclined to use the jargon call it a “modal scope fallacy”. So it’s impossible that condition B should obtain. It’s impossible that conditions A and B should jointly obtain. Compare:Ģ.’ It’s impossible that any door should be both closed and open.Ĥ.’ It’s impossible that x should be open. Question #1: is Parmenides’s argument in the first stage of the Way of Truth sound?Īnswer (a): No. In short, it is a timeless, unmoving, homogeneous sphere, and it is all that exists! (Parmenides’s “it” comes to be known as “the One” by subsequent philosophers.) It is homogeneous – “of a single kind” (ln.It is ugenerated and imperishable (CCR passage #8, ln.However, the second stage of the Way of Truth seeks to establish the consequences of the thesis, and these are substantive: The first stage of the Way of Truth seeks to establish Parmenides’s thesis that “it is, and it is not possible for it not to be.” Within that context, the referent of ‘it’ is indeterminate: ‘it’ can pick out anything you like (witness premise 3 in the argument above). Therefore, everything necessarily exists – “It is, and it is not possible for it not to be.”.So any sentence of the form ‘ x doesn’t exist’ is meaningless.Thus, everything that exists necessarily exists.Consider any one of the things that exist, x.It’s impossible that anything should both exist and not exist.Necessarily: anything one cares to consider either exists or doesn’t exist (but not both).
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