Existence and Correspondence-to-Fact

Abstract

In the early portions of this paper I review the central teaching of modern analytic philosophy on existence, whose negative doctrine derives from Kant and whose positive doctrine derives from Frege. I show how Frege’s view, that existence is a property of concepts, is inhospitable to the classically realist conception of truth as correspondence to reality. I proceed to examine the principal argument for judging the idea of correspondence-to-fact to be ‘an idea without content’, pointing out that this judgment is an illegitimate extension of Kant’s thesis that predications of existence are otiose and without content. I present a theory of fact based on a classical (non Fregean) conception of existence as a property of reality and argue that facts, so construed, serve for the ontological relatum of traditional correspondence theories of truth. Later sections compare the theory presented with several theories popular in Anglo-American philosophy on such topics as demonstratives, belief and the role of context in determining propositional content.

I am grateful to George Englebretsen, Eddy Zemach, Palle Yourgrau, Ted Denise, David Kelley and Glenn Branch for comments that led to improvements on earlier drafts.