Document Type : Research

Authors

• Kamran Ghayoomzadeh ¹
• Alireza Dastafshan ²

¹ Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Logic, Azarbaijan University of Tarbiat Moallem

² Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The problem of existential commitment is how and to what extent we are committed to accept the existence of certain objects in the world and especially the objects we talk about because of our use of language. “Geach’s Puzzle” which is an interesting and famous problem in existential commitment induced by an anaphoric text is a general problem about the existential commitments of the third speaker (narrator) in a discourse with more than two speakers. The solution defended in this dissertation is that if the first two speakers speak of an object which didn’t initially exist, they have actually created it as an abstract mythical object. Now, the third speaker can commit himself to accept the existence of that object while reporting what those two speakers had said without any need to agree with the properties they had ascribed to that object. The object indeed exists, because it was created in a myth.

Keywords

• existential commitment
• mythical objects
• Geach’s puzzle