Talk:Empty name

Should be better integrated with the definite description article (which currently doesn't link to this one). AnonMoos (talk) 12:10, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Two senses of "to be"

Lots of languages make a narrow and wide distinction in "to be," just not English, apparently.--Levalley (talk) 00:09, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

That is, the 'is' of identification, and the 'is' of predication.

Canberra is the capital of Australia (identification - these are two names for the same thing)

The sky is cloudy (using 'is <adjective>' to construct a predicate)

203.13.3.94 (talk) 01:09, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Pegasus ????

My brain locked up. In what sense does Pegasus not exist?? We have a whole WP article on something that doesn't exist? There's something very fundamentally flawed with this article... it needs some major re-write.

The entire first section, about Pegasus, Odysseus and Aristotle, is utter blarny-stone, some kind of crapola written by someone high on pot. WTF!? This whole thing stinks of a put-on or forgery or a test to see if wikipedia is full-of-crap type experiment...

Just to be clear: although Pegasus was never composed of physical, quantum-mechanical atoms, clearly, Pegasus exists in the noosphere, as otherwise we would not have an article on him. The name "Pegasus" is a referent to the vast network of writing containing the word "Pegasus". Thus, clearly, the "name" Pegasus clearly refers to something. So is this article about:

• The meaning of the word "exist", as a theory of the quantum-mechanical assemblage of atoms at some point in time?
• Is it about the trustworthiness of archeological evidence, viz. whether we have good reason to believe that Aristotle once walked the earth?
• Is it about fraud in naming: viz the attribution of texts to Aristotle that may not have been written by him?
• Is this article about a linguistic problem of "naming things"? viz a linguistic problem of determining whether two different uses of the word "Aristotle" refer to the same historical figure, or whether one of the uses refers to my dog, named "Aristotle"?
• Is this article about a philosophical problem of "naming things", such as naming universals such as "chair", "tree", etc?
• Is it about sense perception? I have direct, sensory experience of things that generalize to "chair", "tree" (which also "are named" but "don't exist"??) whereas my sensory experience of Pegasus is limited to Hollywood films and children's books? If you are Platonic, then "chair", "tree" and "Pegasus" all exist. If you are not Platonic, but are a linguist or "knowledge engineer", then you know of the existence of texts that contain these words...
• Is it about something else?

I strongly suspect this article is about the latter option, about "something else", but the confounding factors of what it means to "exist" and to "name", means that most of this article is an un-interperable word salad of vague, undefined terms; some poetic allusion to some vague concept... linas (talk) 16:37, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

It's about exactly what it says it's about: "Names for things that don't exist, WTF even is that?" 203.13.3.89 (talk) 01:12, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Wrap it in a monad

One way not mentioned in the main article is to take the position that the referent of a proper name X is "the element of the set of things named X".

So "Pegasus has two wings" becomes

$\forall x\in {\text{ThingsNamedPegasus}},{\text{HasTwoWings}}(x)$

or

${\text{ThingsNamedPegasus}}\subseteq {\text{HasTwoWings}}$

and "Pegaus does not exist" becomes

$\forall x\in {\text{ThingsNamedPegasus}},\bot$

or more simply

${\text{ThingsNamedPegasus}}=\emptyset$

Not adding this to the article because it's just me talking here. If someone important has proposed this one, would be good to add it. 203.13.3.89 (talk) 01:15, 8 October 2024 (UTC)