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More on Moore on ‘Existence’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
Extract
G.E. Moore divided his well-known essay, “Is Existence a Predicate?” into two parts. The first has become famous as an early example of “ordinary language” analysis, while the second (a mere 2½ pages) has been universally neglected, for what appear to be several obvious reasons:
(1) Moore's arguments in Part I are forthright and seem decisive. He deploys grammar and logic to show how the sentence ‘Tame tigers exist’ differs from ‘Tame tigers growl’, and thus to answer convincingly the question posed by the essay's title. By contrast, the arguments of Part II are compressed, tentative and obscure. It seems neither an obvious nor a needed sequel to Part I.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 546 - 555
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1980
References
NOTES
1 Moore, G.E., “Is Existence a Predicate?”, Philosophical Papers, pp. 115–126 (London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 1959)Google Scholar. The essay, written for an Aristotelian Society Symposium with William Kneale, was first published in 1936.
2 Throughout Moore's essay, logical contradictions are labelled as “meaningless” or “nonesense”. Surprisingly, the denial of a logical contradiction is treated in the same way.
3 In the course of his discussion, Moore offers some petty objections to Russell's doctrine which are of no consequence here.
4 Curiously, though Moore does not explicitly acknowledge it, ‘exist’ does appear to stand for one attribute or another when it occurs in such negative particular existentials. He interprets ‘Some tame tigers do not exist’ to mean “that either some real people have written stories about imaginary tigers, or are having … hallucinations of tame tigers, or, perhaps, are dreaming … of particular tame tigers” (cf. p. 120).
5 Published in 1953 as some Main Problems in Philosophy.
6 cf. Philosophical Papers, pp. 32–59. The phrase quoted appears on p. 57. I have discussed this paper in my “Moore's Defence of Common Sense: A Reappraisal After Fifty Years”, Philosophy, 51 (1976), pp. 289–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 I have elaborated this interpretation of sense-datum statements, with some reference to Moore, in “Sense-data and Common Knowledge” (Ratio, December, 1978).
8 Philosophical Papers, p. 53 (Moore's italics).