Quantifiers and existence

Abstract

There are some sentences that include expressions that refer to entities that do not exist. One example is this: Mary is in terror of werewolves. Some argue that this sentence cannot be translated into predicate logic. This may be seen as flaw in predicate logic. Against this, I argue in this paper that the problem is not predicate logic, but rather our commitments with the existence and nature of certain things. By revising some of these commitments, we can see that predicate logic is perfectly capable to deal with the problematic sentences.

Keywords

• Quantifiers
• Scope
• Formalisation
• Existence
• Ontology