Abstract
Is there such a thing as the null individual? Well, as an actual or concrete entity, certainly not. There is no such actual entity, there never has been, and there never will be. If this were the whole story one could end therewith. As a convenient technical fiction, as a useful notational device, however, introducing the null individual into the standard logical framework for truth-functions and quantifiers is not without interest. The null individual can be given important roles to perform and it can be made to perform them well, so well in fact as to lend strong support to regarding the theory of it as a suitable appendage to logic.
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Notes
R. Carnap Meaning and Necessity (University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1947): p. 36.
H.S. Leonard and N. Goodman, ‘The Calculus of Individuals and Its Uses,’ The Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (1940): 45–55.
See inter alia C. Lejewski, ‘Studies in the Axiomatic Foundations of Boolean Algebra I,’ Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 1 (1960): 23–47.
The Journal of Symbolic Logic 8 (1942): 1–27.
See especially N. Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1951; Reidel, Dordrecht: 1977).
R. Carnap, R. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1947), p. 36. Recall also Chapter V above.
See Intension and Decision and Belief, Existence, and Meaning, Chapter VII.
For a useful exposition see W.V. Quine, ‘Quantification and the Empty Domain,’ The Journal of Symbolic Logic 19 (1954): 180–182.
In Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1963–64 (The Antioch Press, Yellow Springs, Ohio: 1964), pp. 25–51.
See The Axiomatic Method in Biology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1937), pp. 56 ff. and The Technique of Theory Construction (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. II, No. 5, University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1939), pp. 32–33. Cf. also Intension and Decision, pp. 41–45.
Cf. the author’s The Notion of Analytic Truth (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: 1959) and ‘On Logical, Analytic, and Postulational Truth,’ Methodology and Logic (January, 1968): 31–41.
See Woodger, op. cit.
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Martin, R.M. (1966). Of Time and the Null Individual. In: Pragmatics, Truth, and Language. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9457-7_7
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