I hope everyone here has had a good, even slightly merry, Christmas. Just to say that to my mind the question ‘Did X exist?’ is, since existence is not a predicate, to be regarded as ‘what predicates - or about how many of what reasonable list of predicates - need to be true of some subject for that subject to have, in normal understanding, been X?’. Not all of us might draw up the same list and the normal understanding of what X refers to may be changeable - so there needs to be some discussion at that point. In respect of our list we then need evidence for each predicate which we assign and evidence is harder to evaluate, though not impossible to use, if it comes with a strong and visible ideological purpose. We should note the possibility that many of the predicates are true of more than one subject, that is that ‘X’ may be a composite character.
I hope everyone here has had a good, even slightly merry, Christmas. Just to say that to my mind the question ‘Did X exist?’ is, since existence is not a predicate, to be regarded as ‘what predicates - or about how many of what reasonable list of predicates - need to be true of some subject for that subject to have, in normal understanding, been X?’. Not all of us might draw up the same list and the normal understanding of what X refers to may be changeable - so there needs to be some discussion at that point. In respect of our list we then need evidence for each predicate which we assign and evidence is harder to evaluate, though not impossible to use, if it comes with a strong and visible ideological purpose. We should note the possibility that many of the predicates are true of more than one subject, that is that ‘X’ may be a composite character.