Filosofia

© MRA


It may be tempting to think that ‘Red exists’ means merely ‘Red is real’.

In fact, this could be distinctly appealing, for ‘real’ is what has been called an ‘excluder’ predicate, meaning thereby that it attributes nothing positive to Red, but operates in a purely negative fashion simply to exclude Red from being imaginary, mythical, fictional, and the like. To say that ‘exists’ meant ‘is real’ would be to say inter alia that it attributed nothing positive to Red; and that would do much to relieve our frustration at being so fluent in our use of ‘exists’ despite having no idea of its attributing anything positive to Red. It would be a relief to discover that ‘exists’ attributes nothing positive to him at all.

Unfortunately, this won't do; for among all the negatives that ‘is real’ might be applying to Red would be not only ‘not imaginary’, ‘not mythical’, etc., but also ‘not nonexistent’. Now, suppose a seer predicted that in two years that a son would be born to Green and Blue, and that he would be called 'Red'. When the prediction was finally fulfilled, we might imagine the seer announcing triumphantly ‘At last Red exists, exactly as I predicted he would’. If ‘exists’ were an excluder like ‘is real’, then the seer could only be understood as excluding something from Red; and in this case it would be non-existence. As said by the seer, therefore, ‘At last Red exists’ could only mean ‘At last Red is not-nonexistent’. And if he really were to mean that, we should be entitled to ask him just when Red could ever have been said to be nonexistent, i.e. never to have existed. In fact, before he existed Red could never even have been referred to, and hence at that time nothing at all could have been attributed to him, not even the property of being nonexistent. Promising as it may have seemed, therefore, ‘Redexists’ is not to be understood simply as ‘Red is real’.

"Adaptado de Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

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