Quine's Resolution to nonbeing In Quine's 'On What There is', he attempts to establish a way of resolving the problem of non-being. The problem, as Quine puts it, is that "in any ontological dispute the proponent of the negative side suffers the disadvantage of not being able to admit that his opponent disagrees with him" (21). In other words, admitting that there are no such objects the opponent is ontologically committed to seems to contradict the very position that there are no such things. This problem can be summed up as an issue with reference to nonexistent objects - how is it that one can speak of objects that don't exist, if in fact those terms do not refer to any actually existing thing? This is the conflict Quine seeks to resolve. He does this in two ways. First, he proposes that we accept Russell's theory of description. This theory acts to treat names as though they were identical to a definite description. For instance, to say that 'the present king of France is bald' is as much as to say 'there exists some x and x is the current king of France and x is bald'. At first, the original statement is at best unclear; it seems to be the case that there is no such king. But, given this analysis of it as a definite description, it becomes quite obvious that this statement is false: there is no such x which satisfies these. Thus, names are simply definite descriptions in a kind of disguise we must do our best to uncover. But Quine points out that there may be a problem with this analysis. What if we were to try to apply it to something that is primitive or unanalyzable? One that is "so obscure or so basic [a name] that no pat translation into a descriptive phrase had offered itself" (27)? If this were to be such the case, we could simply use what Quine names a "trivial-seeming device" (27): we can simply appeal to the notion of being that unanalyzable name. So suppose we had some object we did not want to allow in our ontology, perhaps Pegasus. Suppose that this term is a sort of basic one, or any kind of description we would offer up of Pegasus could be true of a kind of thing that actually exists, but isn't what we would mean by Pegasus. Then our analysis of Pegasus could go something like 'there exists an x such that x is pegasizing'. This resolves what seemed to be a necessary commitment to ontological beings in the case of declaring that they do not exist, as names no longer need to presuppose the existence of such entities under the Russellian analysis. My contention is that this argument seems to stand on ground it has no right to. Certainly, the Russellian analysis is fine here. That much I do not dispute. However, I take issue with the fact that Quine wishes to reject the existence of objects like Pegasus, but still wants to avail himself of what Pegasus _is_. By this I certainly do not mean something contradictory, that Quine would not be allowed to utilize the notion of Pegasus to then conclude that there is no such thing. What I am saying is that he _does_ do this, and so his acceptance of certain 'problem' names as being ex-hypothesi unanalyzable is untenable. For if it is the case that the name Pegasus is obscure and cannot be analyzed, then we can say that Pegasus is the thing which is being Pegasus. And when we are pressed to answer what exactly this thing being Pegasus is being _is_, we will either have to stop talking because we know not what it might be that it is doing, or we will allow ourselves to delve into the various properties of what it would be to be Pegasus. But the second option clearly violates our whole reason for the assumption in the first place; it is hard to take apart the essential properties of Pegasus from the accidental properties of Pegasus when you can't quite get at what Pegasus is because it's a primitive. The first option is what Quine seems to prefer we would do - we certainly can't discuss what these attributes of Pegasus would be, and so we would have to in some way know what it was to be Pegasus, what the thing being Pegasus is, in some sort of a priori way. Otherwise, what exactly are we saying when we say 'the thing pegasizing'? It doesn't seem to be a word of any sorts. It seems vacuous, empty or without any sort of meaning. It seems that Quine's analysis fails. ________________________________________________________________________________ Dilyn Corner (C) 2020-2022