tood.Philosophically, this sort of objection has received a lot of praise, although it is uncommon in life to question whether it is proper to speak about the existence of something. Yet, this is just the kind of objection that has been raised by Kant and others since then. It fails to be a good objection because existence used as a predicate does not mean the same thing as it does in the "then x (exists)" part of the objection. Let me explain what I mean.The paradoxical position that I must defend, then, is that there is a sense in which something that does not exist exists. What I claim is that there is an equivocation of "exist" such that the two senses do not mean the same thing. In other words, "x exists" does not entail everything that "x does not exist" entails. What do I mean? I mean that "x exists" entails x as an object while "x does not exist" entails x relative to its opposite. There is no real x in the latter, but this statement does make reference to something else, namely what this something else is not.For example, "Martians do not exist" must have some type of existence in order to talk about the subjects involved, but certainly not the same type of existence involved in saying "Elephants exist." The former has no real object while the latter one does. The former, however, does exist in relation to an object—that being the set of all things which do exist. Notice the equivocation of the word "exist." In "Martians do not exist," "exist" means "is a real object." However, in "Martians exist in some sense," "exist" means "that which is in relation to real objects." As long as we are not talking about existence absolutely; that is, "Everything does not exist", there is a perfectly legitimate way of speaking about the non-existence of things as a kind of something, as a thing which is relative to what it is not.So, in response to the Kantian objection, existence can be a predicate of real objects because objects which ...
