Curt Jaimungal: What is Existence, Exactly?

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**Curt Jaimungal** (0:30)
When you say that you exist, what is it exactly that you're claiming?
That there is a physical body at a particular location? That there is a continuous stream of consciousness? Well presumably you'd still be you with a prosthetic arm, and also the stream that you think of as continuous gets continually interrupted every night when you sleep. We're confident about our own existence, yet we can't articulate exactly what we're so confident about other than some unspecific reference to patterns. Today, let's take on the frightening task of analyzing existence. To make this more palatable and less psychiatric hospital inducing, let's distance this from the analysis of the first person that can lead you to the dark night of the soul, and let's just talk about the dark night.
Batman doesn't exist. Firstly, sorry to break it to you. Secondly, this is such an elementary sentence with penetrating and wide implications not just for philosophy but for your existence. That Batman sentence is the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero. It seems to crash the system that we use to make sense. So why?
After all, clearly Batman's just pixels and ink and a character in a story, the fictional vigilante who fights crime in a made up city, etc. There's no controversy here. Well, let's think about it. If Batman doesn't exist, then who exactly are we talking about? What is this Batman that we're so assuredly declaring is non-existent? It's like saying this sentence is or I'm not thinking about how zoomed in Kurt is on every single video.
Here's the problem in logical form. When you utter what philosophers call a negative singular existential, which is a sentence that denies some particular individual exists, you appear to be either number one, using a singular term, so a word that purports to pick out one specific individual, like Batman or Santa, to refer to something, or two, you're predicating the non-existence of the referent of that term. So predicating just means to attribute a property to something. For instance, the apple is red, predicates the redness of the apple, a referent is what that term points to. For example, what Batman is supposed to pick out, that person, that character. But just a moment. So how can a singular term successfully refer if there's nothing to refer to?
It's like successfully pointing at nothing. If you point at nothing, are you pointing at something? What would that even mean?
So let's consider these negative singular existentials. Santa Claus doesn't exist. Pegasus doesn't exist. Your Canadian girlfriend doesn't exist. I know she does. She's traveling. I get it. The proof that I'm the most sagacious philosopher alive doesn't exist. Now that one's clearly false. If these sentences are meaningful and true, then language has a superpower, like the ability to talk about nothing as if it were something.
That's either incredibly impressive or considerably broken. Of course, there is the alternate view that language doesn't even refer to anything, but that's just not the route that we're going to take here. If you want to explore that topic more, then there's this podcast with Elan Barenholtz, about language as a cognitive parasite, which refers without reference.
Bertrand Russell had a solution that's so dexterous that it dominated philosophy for 60 years. Russell said that existence isn't a property of individuals at all. Existence is a second order property. Well, what is a second order property? The way that I think about it is like this. First order properties are those being red, being tall, being happy. So properties that an individual can have.
A second order property is like being instantiated, being widespread, being rare. These are properties that properties have. That's the way that I think about it is it's properties of properties, and it's not precisely this, but it'll suffice for the sake of the uninvolved task of understanding mere existence. By the way, instantiated just means you have at least one instance. So for instance, being a ballerina is instantiated because you can find a ballerina, but being a unicorn is not instantiated because it seems like unicorns don't exist. Now according to Russell, when you say dragons exist, you're decidedly not saying that certain individuals have the property of existence, even though you think you are. Instead, you're saying that the property of being a dragon has the second-order property of being instantiated. In logical notation, we incorrectly believe that we mean the following, so there exists an X such that X is a dragon, and then we'll put this negation here to say that this doesn't hold. Okay, now what about names like Batman? Russell would say that they're not genuine singular terms. They're disguised definite descriptions. That is, phrases of the form the so-and-so that pick out a unique individual by description. Batman is shorthand for something like the Caped Crusader of Gotham. This means that the sentence Batman doesn't exist has a completely different logical form, so an underlying logical structure, than its grammatical form, so how it appears in English. To Russell, Batman doesn't exist is just shorthand for this hairy formula on screen here, which translates to that it's not the case that there exists exactly one caped crusader.