Noneism or allism?
David Lewis · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1999
Some few entities - present, actual, particular, spatiotemporal, material, well-bounded things- exist uncontroversially. Scarcely any philosopher denies them. Other alleged entities are controversial: some say they exist, some say they do not. These controversial entities include past and future things, the dead who have ceased to be and those who are not yet even conceived; unactualized possibilia; universals, numbers, and classes; and Meinongian objects, incomplete or inconsistent or both. An expansive friend of the entities who says that all these entities exist may be called an allist . A tough desert-dweller who says that none of them exist may be called a noneist . In between come most of us, the pickers and choosers, some-but-only-someists . Richard Routley declares himself a noneist. If we may take him at his word, he holds that none of the controversial entities exist. But may we take him at his word? Sometimes it is wrong to take a philosopher at his word when he tells us what he believes to exist. For if we differ with the philosopher on some point of semantics, then we must make allowance for that difference if we want to report his position in our own words, in indirect quotation. Example. If someone seemingly tells us that God exists, and then goes on to tell us that ‘God’ denotes the evolutionaryhistorical process that has brought us into being, and if we ourselves think that this evolutionary-historical process is far from deserving the name he gives it, then we should count him an atheist.