---
title: Existence and Being
sort: 100
section-id: metaphysics
description: Ontology basics, Quine's criterion of ontological commitment, existence as a predicate, and Meinong's jungle.
language: en
---

# Existence and Being

Metaphysics is the study of the most fundamental features of reality — what exists, what kinds of things exist, and what it is for something to exist at all. Ontology, its central division, addresses the question: *what is there?*

The question sounds trivially answerable: there is everything there is, and nothing else. Quine gave this answer in a sentence: "To be is to be the value of a variable" ^[Quine, W.V.O., "On What There Is", *Review of Metaphysics* 2, 1948]. But behind this slogan lies a substantial and contested philosophical methodology.

## Quine's Criterion of Ontological Commitment

Quine argued that the ontological commitments of a theory are revealed by *regimentation* — translating the theory into first-order predicate logic and examining what the variables in the existential quantifiers must range over ^[Quine, W.V.O., "On What There Is"; see also *Word and Object*, MIT Press, 1960, ch.7].

If a true theory says "There are prime numbers between 10 and 20," and the best regimentation of this claim quantifies over numbers, then the theory is committed to the existence of numbers. One cannot simultaneously assert a theory and deny the existence of entities the theory quantifies over.

The Quinean approach transformed ontology from a speculative metaphysical exercise into a semi-technical discipline: the question "Does X exist?" becomes "Does our best overall theory of the world require quantifying over Xs?" This is ontology anchored to science.

**The criterion of ontological commitment** is: a theory is ontologically committed to those entities that, when the theory is put in canonical notation, the bound variables must range over if the theory is true.

## Existence as a Predicate

Can existence be predicated of individuals? Kant famously argued that existence is not a real predicate — it adds nothing to the concept of a thing ^[Kant, I., *Critique of Pure Reason*, A598/B626]. "God is omnipotent" attributes a property; "God exists" does not attribute a property but rather asserts that the concept of God is instantiated.

This view is embedded in the standard logical treatment: in first-order predicate logic, existence is expressed by the existential quantifier (∃x), not by a predicate. "Tigers exist" becomes "there is at least one thing that is a tiger," not "tigers have the property of existence."

If existence is not a predicate, the ontological argument for God's existence — which treats existence as a perfection that maximally great beings must have — fails at the point of treating existence as a property that can be possessed in greater or lesser degree.

## Meinong and Non-Existent Objects

Alexius Meinong argued that the domain of objects is wider than the domain of existents ^[Meinong, A., "On the Theory of Objects", 1904]. There are objects — the golden mountain, the round square, Sherlock Holmes — that do not exist. These non-existent objects nonetheless have properties: the golden mountain is golden and mountainous; the round square is both round and square (and therefore impossible); Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street.

Meinong's *Theory of Objects* distinguishes *existence* (the mode of being of concrete things), *subsistence* (the mode of being of abstract objects like numbers and propositions), and mere *Sosein* (having a nature, without any mode of being). Non-existent objects have Sosein without existence.

Russell objected vigorously to this "Meinongian jungle" of non-existent objects, calling it "a failure of that robust sense of reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies" ^[Russell, B., "Review of Meinong", *Mind* 14, 1905, p.533]. His theory of definite descriptions was designed to handle sentences about non-existents without ontological commitment to them.

## Russell's Theory of Descriptions

Russell's theory of descriptions analyses sentences of the form "The F is G" as: there is exactly one F, and that F is G ^[Russell, B., "On Denoting", *Mind* 14, 1905, pp.479-493]. "The present King of France is bald" is false because there is no present King of France — the uniqueness condition fails. We do not need to posit a non-existent King of France; we only need to recognise that the sentence has a false existential presupposition.

This "logical paraphrase" strategy — finding analyses of problematic sentences that avoid commitment to suspect entities — became a central tool of analytic philosophy. Ockham's razor ("Do not multiply entities beyond necessity") is the methodological principle: ontological economy is a theoretical virtue.

## Contemporary Debates

**Metaontology** — the study of what ontological questions mean and how they should be answered — has become a major area. Carnap distinguished *internal* questions (do numbers exist, within the mathematical framework?) from *external* questions (does the mathematical framework correspond to reality?) and argued that external questions are pragmatic, not factual ^[Carnap, R., "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology", *Revue Internationale de Philosophie* 4, 1950]. Quine rejected this distinction; contemporary metaontologists debate whether it can be rehabilitated.

**Ontological pluralism** — the view that existence itself is not univocal, but that there are different "modes of being" — has been defended by Kris McDaniel and others, reviving something like the Meinongian project with better tools ^[McDaniel, K., *The Fragmentation of Being*, Oxford UP, 2017].

**Truthmaker theory** holds that truths are made true by features of reality, and asks what those features are for different classes of truths — mathematical truths, modal truths, moral truths ^[Armstrong, D.M., *Truth and Truthmakers*, Cambridge UP, 2004].

Existence and being may seem like the most abstract possible questions. But they have concrete implications: whether numbers exist bears on the foundations of mathematics; whether moral properties exist bears on the nature of moral knowledge; whether merely possible objects exist bears on modal semantics. Ontology is, as Quine put it, where logic and the world meet.
