Negative Existentials and Non-denoting Terms - Logic and Its Applications - page 193

incompatibility of the meanings involved. Appeal to the level of sense or intension
reveals that the description can perforce be satisfied by no object, and hence the pur-
ported individual is impossible. But the purely exclusionary mechanisms of the apoha
account are not sufficient to distinguish cases of contingent non-existence from the
analytically unsatisfiable, since the two are extensionally identical. To capture the
definitional impossibility of 'the son of a barren woman' would require the introduc-
tion of something like Carnap's 'meaning postulates' to specify the salient natural lan-
guage content carried by these terms.

2.3 Apoha Semantics and Free Logic

Siderits contrasts the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika view with Meinong's account, and argues
that the Buddhist view has all of the virtues of Meinongianism with none of its vices.
Assertions about nonexistent objects are given subjects and truth conditions in accord
with common sense (as in Meinong), but not at the price of an 'ontological slum',
bloated with subsistent but nonexistent objects. This latter claim is far from clear
however, since the objects of predication do exist qua 'conceptual constructions'. Thus
according to Dharmakīrti, 'Pegasus' does not refer to some attenuated individual resid-
ing in the nether world of abstract entities, but rather designates a private mental ob-
ject of some kind. Furthermore, there is now not just one salient object of reference
for the entire linguistic community, but instead there is one for every linguistic agent,
just as there is an idiosyncratic Kripke concept, Everest concept, Zeus concept, etc.
Thus the Buddhist view seems to constitute a type of psychologically instantiated
Meinongianism, where the objects of reference are multiplied rather than decreased.
This approach is perhaps more realistic than a logically idealized account with a sin-
gle semantical structure for an entire linguistic community, although the sense in
which it is genuinely 'nominalist' is in need of clarification. From an externalist point
of view it is nominalist, since terms do not refer to external, mind-independent enti-
ties. But from an internalist perspective, linguistics expressions are interpreted as
referring to conceptual constructs, which are the psychological analogues of ordinary,
everyday objects.
Hence, I would propose a dual-domain Free logic as an appropriate way to formal-
ly model the individual nominalistic ideolects. In contrast to the division between
existent and non-existent oblects underlying the Free logic domains, on the apoha
view all cognitive representations exist as mental structures and hence are ontologi-
cally commensurate as such. So the demarcation between actual and 'non-actual' must
be delineated as above ‒ the inner domain D i is comprised of the conceptual construc-
tions such as Kripke and Everest which are causally tied to the non-linguistic world of
ultimate particulars, while the outer domain D o is comprised of conceptual constructs
such as Pegasus and Zeus which are not directly tied to the world of particulars, and
where the rules governing their use are constrained purely by linguistic conventions.
On the apoha account, 'impossible objects' such as 'Devadatta' and Meinong's 'the
round square' are countenanced as well, and should be mapped to constructs inhabit-
ing the outer domain. As noted above, the constructs themselves do not possess the
incompatible attributes in question and hence are not themselves impossible. So it is
both fitting and necessary to block the deducibility of the aforementioned and see-
mingly innocuous notion that ϕ ( i x ϕ x ), which in fact is not benign and will lead to