On 21 Apr., 12:32, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

I can't think of a sentence involving "the present king of France"
that _is_ true. And we all agree that there is no such thing
as the present king of France. Given all that, why in the world
would we want to speak of the present king of France as some
sort of object that just happens not to exist?

Because we cognitively do treat him as some object.

On 21 Apr., 12:43, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

Whatever an "object of thought" is, it is not an object. One's
thoughts "about" an "object of thought" are objects.

1. To be an object of thought is not to be a nonobject or to be
unreal, or to be nonexistent. Many objects of thought are real, do
exist. Anyway, nothing is a nonobject, everything is an object (as
Meinong held). Once again, whatever has a name is an object.

So,
nonobjects are unnameable!

2. Thoughts are indeed objects as well. But when I think the thought
that Pegasus is a lfying horse, my /primary/ object of thought is
Pegasus itself, not the my thought about it.

Seems to me that the unwarranted assumption that if one has a
thought that seems to be "about" something then there must in
some sense _be_ something that the thought is actually about
may be the source of the problem.

"For the noneist to exist and to be are exactly the same thing. Holmes
does not exist; Holmes is not. There exists/is nothing that is
Sherlock Holmes."
(p. 108)

(Priest, Graham. /Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metayphysics of
Intentionality/.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 108)

That is, Priest does /not/ claim that an object such as Sherlock
Holmes is, exists, or is there. Holmes has no existence and no being
whatsoever!

David C. Ullrich <dullrich@sprynet.com> writes:

But I still say that everything exists - nothing anyone's said
here has seemed to me to be anything like a valid refutation
of that.

Ullrich believes in Santa Claus! Ha ha!

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:01:11 -0400, "Jesse F. Hughes"
jesse@phiwumbda.org> wrote:

David C. Ullrich <dullrich@sprynet.com> writes:

But I still say that everything exists - nothing anyone's said
here has seemed to me to be anything like a valid refutation
of that.

Ullrich believes in Santa Claus! Ha ha!

Erm, you haven't been paying attention...

Ok, never mind. You got me. What I meant to say was that
everything except Santa Claus exists.

On 22 Apr., 13:44, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:16:31 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach

Fine, if that's what we mean by "object of thought". But it strikes
me as fallacious to conclude on the basis of the structure of the
phrase "object of thought" that an object of thought is in fact
an object of some sort.

But it doesn't make anything important uninteresting. We
can still talk about Sherlock Holmes - one of us takes this
discussion as a discussion about a non-existent object and
the other says that while the structure of the sentence makes
it appear to be a discussion about a non-existent object
that's not what it is - it's a discussion about _existent_
Ideas, or existent bits of literature, or existent assertions
about what an entity satisfying the definition _would_
do if only there were such a thing...

I don't think we're going to settle this (big surprise). I'm aware
that those are often _cited_ as examples, but it seems incoherent
to me to cite Zeus as an example of something when there is no
such thing as Zeus.

Curiously this strikes me as exactly right - in fact it's occurred
to me that reading the quantifier as "there exists x..." is a source
of the confusion about whether it makes sense to talk about
things which do not exist.

"The noneist strategy is a very natural one. Thus, for example, when
one fears something, one has a direct phenomenological experience of a
relation to the object of the fear. And the phenomenology is quite
independent of whether or not the object actually exists.

No, expressing it that way, in the context of a discussion like this,
is misleading. The phrase "object of fear" seems to commit us to
a possible nonexistent object that _is_ the object of fear. That
may be a _convenient_ way of thinking about the situation,
but it's not the only possible way (so that the example doesn't
_prove_ anything about the _necessity_ of admitting non-existent
objects). If I'm afraid of dragons then instead of saying that
possibly non-existent dragons are the object of my fear one
could just as well say that I am afraid because if some x is
such that x is a dragon then unpleasant consequences may
result. My fear certainly exists. It is a fear caused by my
mental image of a dragon, which also exists. Except that
again, "image of a dragon" seems to require possibly
non-existent dragons for the image to be an image of.
It doesn't, in actuality, the language just makes it seem that
way.

Maybe the whole debate is just over what the definition of the word
"object" should be.

On 22 Apr., 13:53, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

So maybe then it does come down to the question of the
appropriate definition of "object" being dependent on
what we're trying to accomplish. If we're studying the way
people think and talk about things then disallowing nonexistent
objects would make such discussion difficult. On the other
hand if we're talking about how things really are that
seems different to me.

On 22 Apr., 14:12, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

Yes, of course whatever has a name is an object. Except I suspect
that what I mean when I agree with that is not at all the same
as what you mean in asserting it. Whatever has a name is an
object. It doesn't follow that every name is the name of an
object - _if_ "Pegasus" is a name it, um, is not the case that
some x is such that "Pegasus" is the name of x.

But when we talk about Pegasus (or rather when we pronounce
sentences that a priori appear to be statments about
Pegasus) it does not follow that "Pegasus" is actually the
name of something.

If we're talking about the things which would typically be described as
"you thoughts about Pegasus" then it may well be that we
should admit nonexistent objects - the awkward circumlocutions
I've been forced into this morning explsin why.

But if we're talking about how things really are (where of course
the definition of "how things really are" is "how they seem to
me") then I think that while you _think_ your primary object
of thought is Pegasus, I find the whole notion of "object of
thought" somewhat confusing when I think about it - I think
that regardless of what you think you're thinking about,
the actual object of thought is just your thoughts about
Pegasus.

Um. "your thoughts about Pegasus" is not exactly what I mean there.
The object of your thought is certainly not your conscious thoughts
about Pegasus. But the object of your thought is in fact something
inside your brain. I think.

Half-seriously: So Holmes does not exist, but he can nonetheless
be an object of thought. Hence "objects of thought" do not exist,
explaining my confusion over the concept.

On 23 Apr., 03:21, Paul Holbach <paulholbachDELETETHEN...@freenet.de> wrote:
On 22 Apr., 14:12, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

Half-seriously: So Holmes does not exist, but he can nonetheless
be an object of thought. Hence "objects of thought" do not exist,
explaining my confusion over the concept.

Priest would say: Holmes is an object of thought, a /mere/ or /pure/
object of thought; and that's why he doesn't exist.

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach
paulholbachDELETETHENAME@freenet.de> wrote:
...
"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

Just out of curiosity, is that actually Quine's view?

By the way, what is the meaning of the (first-order) predicate "to
exist"?

Curious question, given where the thread started.

Regardless of whether existence is a predicate (I'd want a careful
definition of "is a predicate" before tackling that again) there _is_
no such predicate in the standard formalizations of first-order logic,
so I'm a little puzzled when you specify "first-order". If we do add
such a predicate then, in first-order logic (which of course is not
adequate for discussing various things we've been discussing) it's
true of everything; if the "meaning" of a predicate is its
interpretation in a model then "exists" would be special, just like
equality in fol-with-equality, and the interpretation would be
required to be the universe of the model.

(Which of course has little to do with what you meant to ask...)

On 23 Apr., 13:22, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach
paulholbachDELETETHEN...@freenet.de> wrote:

"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

Just out of curiosity, is that actually Quine's view? I'm just a
mathematician, those books on philosophy don't exist on
my shelf.

I can imagine a person writing that snippet who
did in fact mean that we can talk about things that do not
exist. I can also imagine a person writing that snippet and
then going on to give my preferred explication, that when
we say something that appears to say something about
something that does not exist what we really mean is
just that for every x, x does not satisfy a certain description.

Regardless of whether existence is a predicate (I'd want a careful
definition of "is a predicate" before tackling that again) there
_is_ no such predicate in the standard formalizations of
first-order logic, so I'm a little puzzled when you specify
"first-order".

If we do add such a predicate then, in first-order
logic (which of course is not adequate for discussing various
things we've been discussing) it's true of everything; if the
"meaning" of a predicate is its interpretation in a model then
"exists" would be special, just like equality in fol-with-equality,
and the interpretation would be required to be the universe
of the model.

I was claiming that "the object of your thought"
when you "think about Pegasus" was something other than what
you take it to be.

On 22 Apr., 14:12, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:

Yes, of course whatever has a name is an object. Except I suspect
that what I mean when I agree with that is not at all the same
as what you mean in asserting it. Whatever has a name is an
object. It doesn't follow that every name is the name of an
object - _if_ "Pegasus" is a name it, um, is not the case that
some x is such that "Pegasus" is the name of x.

But when we talk about Pegasus (or rather when we pronounce
sentences that a priori appear to be statments about
Pegasus) it does not follow that "Pegasus" is actually the
name of something.

Isn't it most natural to say that "Pegasus" names something but
nothing existent, rather than to say that it names (literally)
nothing?

If we're talking about the things which would typically be described as
"you thoughts about Pegasus" then it may well be that we
should admit nonexistent objects - the awkward circumlocutions
I've been forced into this morning explsin why.

But if we're talking about how things really are (where of course
the definition of "how things really are" is "how they seem to
me") then I think that while you _think_ your primary object
of thought is Pegasus, I find the whole notion of "object of
thought" somewhat confusing when I think about it - I think
that regardless of what you think you're thinking about,
the actual object of thought is just your thoughts about
Pegasus.

I concede there is an ambiguity in the phrase "object of thought".
One could distinguish between intentional objects of thought and
psychological objects of thought.
For example, when I'm thinking the thought that Pegasus is a flying
horse, my intentional object of thought is Pegasus, while the
proposition that Pegasus is a flying horse is my psychological object
of thought. (The meaning of this proposition is certainly independent
of the existence of Pegasus.)

Another quote:

"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

But is a name of something that is not there a name of nothing?

By the way, what is the meaning of the (first-order) predicate "to
exist"?

I think "to exist" means "to be independent of being thought about".

The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach writes:

"Der Beweis, dass etwas ist, hat keinen andern Sinn, als dass etwas
nicht nur Gedachtes ist."

"The proof that something is [exists], has no other meaning than that
something is not only something thought."
[my transl.]

(In this sense, I regard "to exist" and "to be real" as synonymous.)
By this definition, nonexistent objects are (necessarily) dependent on
being thought (or talked) about.
But, of course, there are very many objects of thought which do not
depend on being thought (or talked) about. These are the real objects.

Um. "your thoughts about Pegasus" is not exactly what I mean there.
The object of your thought is certainly not your conscious thoughts
about Pegasus. But the object of your thought is in fact something
inside your brain. I think.

A nonexistent object exists /nowhere/, and so not inside my brain.

What really occurs in my mind/brain are sentence tokens, which
represent propositions.

Half-seriously: So Holmes does not exist, but he can nonetheless
be an object of thought. Hence "objects of thought" do not exist,
explaining my confusion over the concept.

Priest would say: Holmes is an object of thought, a /mere/ or /pure/
object of thought; and that's why he doesn't exist.

David C. Ullrich <dullrich@sprynet.com> writes:

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:01:11 -0400, "Jesse F. Hughes"
jesse@phiwumbda.org> wrote:

David C. Ullrich <dullrich@sprynet.com> writes:

But I still say that everything exists - nothing anyone's said
here has seemed to me to be anything like a valid refutation
of that.

Ullrich believes in Santa Claus! Ha ha!

Erm, you haven't been paying attention...

Ok, never mind. You got me. What I meant to say was that
everything except Santa Claus exists.

Wow. That's my first clear victory in a philosophical discussion
ever.

Pardon me while I savor this moment.

I am a winner! I am a winner! Ullrich is a loser! Ha ha ha ha!

Neener neener neener!

Mill is right. The intellectual pursuits *do* provide a higher
quality reward.

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:22:09 -0500, David C Ullrich
dullrich@sprynet.com> said:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach
paulholbachDELETETHENAME@freenet.de> wrote:
...
"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

Just out of curiosity, is that actually Quine's view?

It is misleadingly put. Quine very explicitly rejected the idea that
there are things that don't exist (the locus classicus here is his
early-1950s article "On What There Is"). However, he did argue that
talk about fictional and mythological entities and the like was
*meaningful*, just always literally false. For Quine (at least, in the
article indicated), sentences involving, say, the name "Pegasus" are to
be thought of (á la Russell) as truncated definite descriptions, e.g.,
"The winged horse of Greek mythology", sentences containing which, in
turn, are analyzable (á la Russell) in terms of quantification and
identity.

By the way, what is the meaning of the (first-order) predicate "to
exist"?

Curious question, given where the thread started.

Regardless of whether existence is a predicate (I'd want a careful
definition of "is a predicate" before tackling that again) there _is_
no such predicate in the standard formalizations of first-order logic,
so I'm a little puzzled when you specify "first-order". If we do add
such a predicate then, in first-order logic (which of course is not
adequate for discussing various things we've been discussing) it's
true of everything; if the "meaning" of a predicate is its
interpretation in a model then "exists" would be special, just like
equality in fol-with-equality, and the interpretation would be
required to be the universe of the model.

(Which of course has little to do with what you meant to ask...)

But which is surely the only sensible answer. First-order logic doesn't
answer Deep Philosophical Questions about the nature of existence

and is
certainly silent on such matters as whether:

... "to exist" means "to be independent of being thought about".

On 23 Apr., 13:22, David C. Ullrich <dullr...@sprynet.com> wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 -0700 (PDT), Paul Holbach
paulholbachDELETETHEN...@freenet.de> wrote:

"The mistaken view that the word 'Cerberus' must name something in
order to mean anything turns on confusion of naming with meaning. But
the view is encouraged also by another factor, viz., our habit of
thinking in terms of the misleading word 'about'. If there is no such
thing as Cerberus, then, it is asked, what are you talking about when
you use the word 'Cerberus' (even to say that there is no such thing)?
Actually this protest could be made with the same cogency (viz., none)
in countless cases where no would-be name such as 'Cerberus' occurs at
all: What are you talking about when you say that there are no
Bolivian battleships? The remedy here is simply to give up the
unwarranted notion that talking sense always necessitates there being
things talked about. The notion springs, no doubt, from essentially
the same confusion which was just previously railed against; then it
was confusion between meanings and objects named, and now it is
confusion between meanings and things talked about."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 265)

Quine is right, talking sense does not necessitate /there being/
things talked about.
We can and do talk perfectly meaningfully about things that are /not/
there, that do not exist.

Just out of curiosity, is that actually Quine's view? I'm just a
mathematician, those books on philosophy don't exist on
my shelf.

The quote above is from a book /on logic/.

I can imagine a person writing that snippet who
did in fact mean that we can talk about things that do not
exist. I can also imagine a person writing that snippet and
then going on to give my preferred explication, that when
we say something that appears to say something about
something that does not exist what we really mean is
just that for every x, x does not satisfy a certain description.

"It is surely a commonplace that some singular terms may, though
purporting to name, flatly fail to name anything at all. 'Cerberus' is
one example, and '0/0' is another."

(Quine, W. V. /Methods of Logic/. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. p. 263)

What Quine seems to mean is that to talk or think /about/ some object
x is to use sentences wherein a name of x and some predicate P occur
(e.g. "Pegasus is a flying horse"). The meaningfulness of such a
sentence is independent of whether that which the name /purports/ to
refer to exists.
A name "n" for which there is nothing x such that "n" names (or refers
to) x is but a pseudo-name.
In Quine's view such pseudo-names do not name nonexistent objects but
literally nothing—they just /purport/ to name something.
Correspondingly, Quine does not regard "'Pegasus' does not refer to
something (existent)" and "'Pegasus' refers to something nonexistent"
as synonymous.
For him pseudo-names such as "Pegasus" do not refer to some
nonexistent object but to absolutely nothing at all, i.e. nothing
plays the role of y in "'Pegasus' refers to y", not even a nonexistent
object. In this sense, singular terms such as "Pegasus" are /
irreferential/.

But of course, all this depends on the way the relation of reference
is interpreted.

"[C]onsider a slogan almost synonymous with free logic in the minds of
many, namely the slogan that free logic is the logic of irreferential
singular terms. The slogan is a misleading way of expressing what /is/
true about free logic. The issue concerns the meaning of the word
'irreferential'—or its fellows, the words 'non-denoting', 'empty',
'vacuous', and so on. Most people use the expression 'irreferential'
as synonymous with 'does not refer to an existent object'. This usage
would not be so confusing were it not for the penchant of many free
logicians, following Russell, to equate the objects with the existent
objects. But there are free logicians of a distinctly Meinongian
inclination who, rejecting the equation of the objects with the
existents, thus are left asserting that the word 'Heimdal' is
irreferential. For the Meinongian 'referential' has a broader meaning,
and 'Heimdal', though not having existential import, nevertheless does
refer to a nonexistent object, namely, the nonexistent object whose
birth was nine times as virginal as Christ's. This confusing talk of
words and phrases that are referential in a broader (or weaker) sense
but not referential in a narrower (or stronger) sense should simply be
dropped, and 'irreferential' and its synonyms be reserved to mean
'does not refer to anything at all existent or nonexistent'. A free
logician whose ontic proclivities are Meinongian is simply mis-
characterized as one who admits irreferential singular terms in his
logical language. But he, and his Russellian counterpart, still have
at hand the very useful traditional phrase 'does not have existential
import' to express agreement vis-à-vis singular terms such as
'Heimdal' and '1/0'. Not that there aren't persons who argue for the
plausibility of nonexistent objects but who also deny that every
singular term refers—Terence Parsons, for example. In free logics,
then, there may be expressions—'Vulcan' or 'the man born
simultaneously of nine jotun maidens' or '1/0', for instance—that are
singular terms (contra Russell), don't have existential import (contra
Frege), and may (Meinong) or may not refer to some variety of
nonexistent object (Parsons)."

(Lambert, Karel. "The Philosophical Foundations of Free logic." In
Karel Lambert, /Free Logic: Selected Essays/, 122-175. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 137+)

And to those who claim that the relation "x refers to y" could hold
only if both x and y exist, Priest replies that this was not true in
his theory of intentional reference, which doesn't demand that y be
existent too:

"It is not uncommon to find philosophers (not to mention any names!)
arguing that intentional relations are not really relations, since
relations require the existence of their relata, demonstrating this
last claim by taking an existence-entailing relation, such as 'x hit
y', and pointing out that if x hit y then x and y exist. The
invalidity of inferring a property of all relations from the fact that
one relation has it is staggering."

(Priest, Graham. /Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of
Intentionality/. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 60, fn. 7)

Regardless of whether existence is a predicate (I'd want a careful
definition of "is a predicate" before tackling that again) there
_is_ no such predicate in the standard formalizations of
first-order logic, so I'm a little puzzled when you specify
"first-order".

You're right, to call "exists" a first-order predicate is misleading
and, strictly speaking, false. For existence may be predicated of
anything, be it an object or a concept (in the Fregean sense of these
words). In other words, the (logical) property of existence may be
attributed both to particulars (individuals) and to universals, i.e.
both to things and to properties.

If we do add such a predicate then, in first-order
logic (which of course is not adequate for discussing various
things we've been discussing) it's true of everything; if the
"meaning" of a predicate is its interpretation in a model then
"exists" would be special, just like equality in fol-with-equality,
and the interpretation would be required to be the universe
of the model.

In classical FOL Ex(x = a) and AyEx(x = y) are theorems, i.e. therein
for every singular term (individual constant) a there is some existent
x such that a refers to x.
But, for example, in free logic, "~E!a", i.e. "~Ex(x = a)", may well
be true, and so a may well refer to nothing (or to something
nonexistent).

I was claiming that "the object of your thought"
when you "think about Pegasus" was something other than what
you take it to be.

So in your opinion "Paul is thinking about Pegasus" doesn't imply
"Paul's object of thought is some nonexistent object named 'Pegasus'"
but "Paul's object of thought is some (existent) proposition of the
form 'Pegasus is an X'". (?)