Semantics of empty names: could Vulcan have existed?

Abstract

Speaking of things that do not exist constitutes a significant part of our conversations. It happens when we talk about such things as the tenth planet, Phlogiston, the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti. When speaking of what doesn’t exist, we usually employ sentences containing empty proper names (i.e. proper names without referents) such as ‘Vulcan’ and we intuitively attribute truth value (i.e. truth or falsity) to such sentences. Many metaphysical and linguistic theories have difficulty in accounting for these intuitive attributions of truth value. In this thesis, I explore whether it is possible to explain the intuitive truth attributions we make to existential modal sentences involving the operators of negation, possibility and contingency and containing empty names purely at a semantic level. Analyzing (S1) “Vulcan doesn’t exist”, (S2) “Vulcan could have existed” and (S3) “For any possible world P, if Vulcan exists in P, that Vulcan is causing perturbations in Mercury’s orbit is contingently true” within the framework of two semantic theories (i.e. the Theory of Direct Reference and the Theory of Descriptions) and in relation to the current debates on the Puzzle of Non-Existence, I argue that though it is possible to explain our intuitions in attributing truth to relatively simple (i.e. involving such modal operators as negation and possibility) existential modal sentences containing empty names [such as (S1) and (S2)] purely at a semantic level, it doesn’t seem possible to explain our intuitions in attributing truth to examples of more complex (i.e. involving such modal operators as contingency) existential modal sentences containing empty names [such as (S3)] exclusively within the framework of semantics.