There is no more suspect definitional cop-out in the history of linguistics than the notorious description of the so-called copuletic variant of the indicant *is* ( and its conjugates) as a special kind of verb to join two parts of a sentence and to express either that the two parts denote the same thing or that the first has the property denoted by the second. This definition manqué is mirrored by the failed attempts of various philosophers to puzzle out the ontological purpose and effects of such a definition (among them Aquinas and Heidegger) who threw up their hands in despair following their unproductive efforts to understand the linguistic operation involved. One curious and maybe significant piece of verified information about so-called *copular verbs* is that they are followed by adjectives - not adverbs.

More light is thrown upon this historic definitional cock-up by examining the other so-called common *copula verbs:* seem, look, turn, become, appear, sound, smell, taste, feel and get in relation to the adjectivality with which they are uniquely associated. Now such a fact is of great importance, for if copula verbs are syntactically confined to indicating adjectival predication which DESCRIBES a subject - then this means that they are concerned with a restrictive function which confines them to pointing only to representations of THE WAY, MANNER OR MODE of existing subjects and NOT the FACT that they exist as a way of introducing or acknowledging their simple existence or presence in the world

Because theological and transcendental proofs rely on the assumption that *is* is a viable verb which is completely meaningful by itself,  this new discovery, highlighting as it does the give-away adjectival connection, surely puts in jeopardy and exposes the distorted religious version of this rule, where, in an effort to evade, conceal, cover-up and obfuscate the logico-linguistic significance of the dianoetic consistency of the rule, aberrant forms like *God is* and other examples of the orphanic *is* are employed.

Other embarrassing adjectiveless descriptive predication is also cynically elided in the hope that the covert descriptive predication *filled-in* or completed by the believer, replete with the necessary and mandatory adjectival content inherent in any employment of a copula, will not clash with the crude existential claim of *pure existence* and that the subsequent illogicality of the claim that God exists will go unnoticed.

Thus is the predicational and ontological guilt off-loaded onto the naive believer leaving the clergy and philosophers like Heidegger with what they have formerly believed to have had - hands and consciences clean of the sin or ignorance, gross illogicality and communicative vandalism.

One further curious fact leaps off the page the minute one examines the so-called *group of copulas* and that is that the words adjectivally describe not the existential state of the subject - but rather that they also provide an example of   the existential state of the observer, commentator, or the author of such descriptive sentences, who attempt to characterise the subject. This means that the classical claim of copularity by the tradition that: *the two parts denote the same thing, or that the first has the property denoted by the second* is utter rubbish. Some explanatory examples:

1. *She seems happy.* This is obviously an existential modality of the observer - not the observed, for here a judgement is being made by the commentator or *in the eye of the beholder* that the subject is seemingly happy not in the eye of the beheld. The beheld is either happy or unhappy.  (*Seem* is a copular verb.)

2. *The stew smells good.* Here again the fact that the stew smells good is an existential mode of the smeller - not the smelled. (*Smell* is a copular verb.)

3. *It is getting late.* It is obvious here that *time* is getting late for the existential modality of the utterer of this statement - it is not *getting late* for time itself.* (*Get* is a copular verb.)

4. *Marjorie is my girlfriend.* The nominalisations *Marjorie* and girlfriend* are attribution of identity assigned by one set of humans to another, therefore the attributing of such labels is again an existential mode of the attributing boyfriend - not Marjorie his girlfriend. (*is* is a copular verb.)
5. *Jack is British.* This sentence is an assertion regarding the attribution of the existential modality of *Britishness* to Jack. As such it is an assertive existential modality of the attributor - not the attributant. (*is* is a copular verb.)

6. *Marjorie looks intelligent.* Intelligent is an adjective in predicative position. It is an existential modality of the opinion of the observer - not the person herself. (*Look* is a copular verb.)

As far as /be/ is concerned there are only predicational descriptions of already existing subjects. Mostly this predication is all above board and overt - but sometimes it is in the archaic form adopted historically because *religion depends on *is* as an existentialiser.

Such antique covert predicative forms look clumsy and gawky and the average English speaker simply slackens his jaw - allows his puzzled eyes to glaze over and asks:
*is... what...?*

If the grammatical constituent about which something is predicated is not ALREADY conceptually instantiated or existentialised as the subject of the sentence it cannot be ontologically available for the attribution of any predicative description. In other words ALL sentential are ALREADY IN PLACE ( conceptually instanced) and as such do not need any redundant pseudo-existentialising be-operators like *is*.

When a writer wishes to introduce a subject which he or she feels that readers are almost certain not to have heard of before - then he must insert the *exists* word into the senternce to make clear his meaning and intent. Otherwise the reader will encounter such as word as a new, unfamiliar sentential subject and cannot conceptually existentialise in accordance with the writer's wishes.

Thus, rather than make a statement such as: *The Monastery of Zagorsk is.* he writes: *The Monastery of Sergiev Posad exists... and adds ... near Moscow.* A critical feature of the so-called swinging copula (covert predication) which is yet another proof of the essentially non-existerntial functioning of /be/ and its conjugates, is the fact that the: *God is.* Christian ontological instantiational reductio-ad-necessitum only works with known subjects with have been previously conceptually instantiated proving that *is* only ever points to existential modality and does not fuction as an introducer to pure existence or worldly presence.

Whilst it is possible to be understood when using a covert copula in the case of God - it is only possible because EVERYONE knows about the notion of a creator and can fill in something on the empty dotted line from their own favourite neurological depository of snippets of predication about God, such as: *God is the creator of the universe* or *God is a creation of the human mind* etc.

But readers/addressees CANNOT be expected to conceptually instantiate of existentialise unknown subjects like *exists* can do.

Language is all about clear communication - and the term *God is.* is not such an example. Notice by the way that the millions of Muslim members of the most sucessful, rapidly growing religion in the world are always careful when speaking English to add the predicate: *Allah... is great!*

The observance that sentences consist of a subject and a predicate can be traced back to Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Historically the Aristotelian term predicate had the sense of consisting of what remains of a sentential or clausal string when its subject is removed. Metaphorically in this filleted Aristotelian version of predication, the predicate is defined as what is left of the eel-like sentence after the subject (head) has been removed. In this sense the subject is separate from the Aristotelian predicate and combines with it independently of what propositional semantic significations may come its way regarding what may be claimed of it  - or attributed to it.  

Descriptively, for the purposes of parsing,  the subject is independent of the Aristotelian predicate (of which there are countless possible variations)  with which it combines independently of semantic considerations.


Unfortunately for ontology Frege wrongfully recognised be as a verb and included be and its conjugates  as members of his elect band of lexical licentiates.

1. a subject +  2. what is licensed by *is * 3.  to be predicationally said of that subject

For Frege, Aristotle's simple put-and-take-subject and predicational leftover type of analysis is too simplistic, and is no more that a basic division of a latently more sophisticated series of  syntactical divergency. For Frege, not only can we strip away the subject leaving the Aristotelian predicate, it is also possible to go further and disinvest more predicative arguments from the Aristotelian predicate until one is left with a single lexical item, the core Fregean predicate.  But although Frege?s conceptual notation includes an radical revaluation of the grammatical role of the indicant  (copula) he  unwisely continued to accept and define *exist* and *there are*  as natural language intransitive verbs.

 

WHATEVER Predicate Type is involved. 1. *The tree (indicator-is) -- fill in desired predicate. 2. *The tree (indicator-is) -- in the garden. 3. *The tree (indicator-is) -- standing in the garden. 4. *The tree (indicator-is -- known as:  *Robin's Oak.* 5. *The tree (indicator-is) -- in the far corner of the field.

Apart from changing its form to accommodate the number and tense of the subject (*is* to *are* etc) The  copular (indicant)   *is* (in all conjugal forms) remains EXACTLY the same

The gerund has been absorbed into the language of philosophy - one might even say that there has been a philosophicalisation of the gerund 21 and the abstract noun over the centuries. This is not surprising, for much of philosophy is precisely engaged with the employment of reification and abstraction as a useful tool in search of truth. When the concept of a given abstraction is made external or objective, or given token existential reality, then that is an example of reification. Though material-object status is not always claimed, the nominalised reified abstraction is referred to conceptually and treated grammatically, syntactically, semantically and sententially as if it did in fact exist.

The three main grammatical constituents of natural language which are responsible for most of the reification and subsequent ontological confusion we find in philosophy are

Leibniz wrote:

At first glance what Leibniz says here sounds fine, but he could also be interpreted as supporting the tendency to create reification in order to dispel problems bristling with difficulties. If by the word concretes he did mean material objects, then he is in good company with Parmenides, who also wished to dispel the ontological difficulty of to mae on (that which is not) by banning all talk of it and brushing it under the ontological carpet. But philosophers do not want to dispel difficulties, they wish to engage with them, interrogate them, and if possible solve them to the best of our ability.

There are many forms of reification. James. W. Woodard in his Intellectual Realism and Culture Change 1935, identified six main types, which may be classified as follows:

Woodard mentions a piece that appeared in American Popular Science Monthly, which exemplified the word reification in the following manner:

As Woodard makes clear, to reify means taking as perceptual what is only conceptual, or taking as a thing what is only conceptual, or even taking as an impersonal thing what is personal. That is, the distortion at the hands of reification is in the conferring of an exaggerated concreteness or tangibility upon what is only conceptual, comparative, or functional.

Einstein's refutation of the generality of the above "supported waves" axiom - is not a refutation of my axiom, that waves and waving do not exist. I do not postulate a need for any support either. I simply state that it is: whatever waves that exists, and not the metaphysical reification: waving.

See my Waving Goodbye where I claim that whilst the ideating embrained human exists, his ideas do not exist at all - no more that the movement of a waver's hand exists.
   

Furthermore to attribute existential autonomy  to a wave and postulate the physical existence (observability) of autonomous waves, existing and propagating without any additional support is a perfectly well known ontological switch going back as far as Parmenides. The One versus the Many . It is a mereological questiion of identity,  like looking up at the millions of stars above and seeing them either as individuate entities, or pushing the mereological onto-switch and comprehending them as: The Milky Way. Is a lone white cloud above in the sky, or a volume of gas or a gas cloud below in a chamber a seething complexity of individual water or gas particulates, or is it a singular entity? Are you and I multi-cellular conglomerates of cells - or are we Jack or Jill? Plainly from an identity point of view - we are BOTH.

Is a sea-wave or a light-wave a waving crowd of individuals entities or is it a single object.
Answer? - It is a question or an identicative decision regarding descriptive, ontological horses for courses.

I have no argument at all on that mereo-identicative score with Einstein. Where I DO challenge him (and everybody else) is my denial that the metaphysical concept of waving exists, and my contention that it is no more than an existential modality of the particulates who are travelling in that existential modality and it is THE SCIENTIST who exists in a neurological modality of attributing and existentialising the notion of waving (or dancing or collecting postal stamps, or bombing Iraq or whatever.

My axioms, such as they are, are not the creations or inventions of traditionalist philosophical chatter divorced from the real world of science and the natural world within some isolated ivory tower - they constitute a new and important (first time) completely formalised ontological challenge to the whole tradition of ontological interpretation, classification and attribution of existential status.

The word for reification in German Verdinglichung 22 which means thingification, a word which when it is mentioned most philosophers immediately associate with Karl Marx in general and György Szegedy von Lukács 23 in particular. The Hungarian born philosopher is most well known for his famous treatise : Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. According to Pitkin, neither Hegel nor Marx used the word reification. It was introduced into Marxism by Lukacs himself who claimed that the idea of reification is central to Marx's thought.

In discussing modern rationalism in his: History and Class Consciousness; The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought, (section IV.) Lukacs refers to bourgeois thought as

In Reification and Proletarian Consciousness Lukacs addresses the section of Capital in which Marx discusses the fetishistic character of commodities. He argues that,

They take the social relations of producers to the sum total of their labour to be a social relation of things existing outside them. In other words, a social relation between men has taken on the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.

Marx finds an analogy in religion, where the products of the human mind appeared to the believer as independent objects. This is what Marx calls the fetishistic character of commodities. Marx's account of this according to Lukacs is a description of the basic phenomenon of reification.

For Parkinson, Lukacs, like other Marxists: The concept of reification is used by Marx to describe a form of social consciousness in which human relations come to be identified with the physical properties of things, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness and inevitability. [28] (Burris. 1988 p. 22)

In industrial relations the thoughtless use of particular reifications, (such as the thingification of factory workers) or when metaphorical economic concepts are nonchalantly glossed as an assumed underlying element of reality, often leads to the rigidification and polarisation of long established antagonistic dogmas.

Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness not only applies to philosophy, but to the sciences, to politics, to industrial and foreign relations, for the error of representing mental constructs of whole social groups, aggregations, systems, organisations etc., as conjectural physical entities is also a characteristic of general systems theory, sociology, computerology, politics, literary criticism logic and even mathematics.

Zerzan quoting Peter Sloterdijk finds that:

There have been such outstanding men of discernment, and it is to such thinkers endowed with the sagacity and mental ability to understand and discriminate between good philosophy and false semantic relations that we turn to in the following pages.

Over the centuries many thinkers have challenged the more obvious ontological abuses of language, such as the use of universals. We have to wait until the twentieth century for a philosopher to carry out a rigorous anti-reificational analysis of ontological language abuse and construct a completely alternative system. Tadeusz Kotarbinski, (1886-1981) was President of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1957-1962), and one of the leading members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. He introduced the term reism to denote the philosophical view that the category of things (objects) is the sole ontological category. In other words, reism reduces all categories to that of objects.

Reism also has a semantic dimension, for it recommends that only singular names, that is, names referring to concrete things, (nominata) should be used, and (going even further than Parmenides) abstract words totally avoided. Eventually, one can use sentences with abstract words provided that they have translations into statements with singular terms.

Kotarbinski's most important contribution to Western thinking was Elementy Teorii Poznania, Logiki formalnej i Metodologii Nauk, 24 published in Lwów, in 1929.

His influence upon Polish philosophical culture was enormous, and many consider him to be the greatest philosopher that Poland has ever produced. Reism is the ontological position that only things (objects) exist. In ancient Greek of course there was no word for things, which, like the word exist was a Latin invention. Etymologically the word Reism which Kotarbinski chose to name his system by is derived from the Latin noun res (thing) from which we derive the word reification.

Kotarbinski calls reificatory pseudo-names and apparent-names or abstractives onomatoids. From this point of view, in the expression: the departure of the train was delayed, the term departure is an apparent name as it has no designatum: the departure does not exist, but only a train that is departing. Kotarbinski's case is interesting in that whilst his atheistic, materialistic reism or pan-somatism, which holds to an all-concretist universe could in no way be characterised as dilettante or bourgeois, it was criticised by Polish Marxists, who, under the tutelage of their Soviet neighbour, dominated the Polish homeland. Whilst these comrades were able to agree (and they dared not disagree) with Karl Marx's analysis of the notorious reificational activities of the capitalist class in relation to the toiling masses, they were rather abashed when they realised that the professor's condemnation of the reification of the unreal was also laid at their own communist doorstep.

Marxism positively drips with all of the reificational sins which the great thinker attributed to his class enemies. Having discussed the phenomena of reification in theme one in some depth, it is time to attempt an account of reification from the standpoint of natural selection. Theme Two, which follows, addresses the possibility that in the same way that human morality might be bio-genetically selected as a survival mechanism, the linguistic indicatory codes and semiotics we use to interact with our social environment may also be influenced by Darwinian dispositions.

I am not mislead by the crude apologetics to magic away a pernicious symptom of the Heideggerian psychopathic personality disorder, which came to a head with his voluntary entry into an asylum in 1945 (conveniently to coincide with the arrival of the Allied Tanks into Marburg.) Although the Heideggerian ontological juvenilia does not claim that the gerund Being exists in the material sense (i. e., as an object or matergy) the Heideggerian system remains a 'one-or-two? question of a physical being and an additional  conceptually instantiated invisible doppelgänger-like  dualism (the Presence or Existence or the Being of the being) they still address it in the same sentential and pronominal language as if it did exist.

Furthermore they have quasi-existentialised it as the Being of a typical human of the type who constantly reminds himself he is going to die - that he is comporting towards death as Dasein.

Dasein is a verbal noun, or perhaps verbal phrase is better, for it is constituted of two words. Such a linguistic unit is usually called a gerund, which, because it has no definite nominatum (it does not refer to a particular Heideggerian aficionado) so one of the faithful will self-referentially apply the reification to himself.

In other words he will reify a part of Heidegger's speech as HIMSELF,(what is called negative reification or backward reification.) Thus when one of these enthusiasts of the transcendental reads a passage by Heidegger which says: Dasein thinks this... or Dasein does this etc., they identify with the idea of Dasein and assume the metaphysical mantle of Dasein and fantasise that THEY ARE DASEIN and that the Nazi's words apply to them - that the would-be personal philosopher to Hitler is speaking to them and of them.

The same thing happened with an earlier transcendentalist allegory told by a dreamer, much like certain medieval poems (Pearl is the clearest example) John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. [30] (Bunyan.1856)

Bunyan's reified religionist Christian, to which its seventeenth century religious precursor the gerundial device Dasein  bears such an uncanny resemblance, is a reified version of The Universal Christian Man as he comports himself towards death and a joyful reunion with God.

Christian (Dasein) like Heidegger has gone mad and wishes to escape from  The City of Destruction. (post WW. 1 Germany.) On the advice of Evangelist (his mentor Husserl) he begins a journey through a series of allegorical places: The Slough of Despond (Heideggerian angst), The House Beautiful, ( The House of Being - a future rural Volk paradise) The Valley of Humiliation,(The Versailles Treaty) The Valley of the Shadow of Death, (the terrible winter of 1917 when temperatures sank to minus 40F ) Vanity Fair, (the American abandonment of Being) and so on to The Celestial City  (Berlin reborn as New Athens.)

Each character and place in Bunyan's crude seventeenth century prescient version of Being and Time (which Heidegger might well have read in his Jesuit seminary) is given an appropriate name. In a similar fashion Heidegger reifies every abstract noun in sight, so Christian (Dasein) meets the goodly Hopeful and Faithful, the cheating Mr Legality and the evil Giant Despair, similar personifications and metaphors of which are to be found in B & T.

Both formats are not unlike that of Spenser's The Faerie Queene in the sense of a divinely inspired journey (comportment) - one towards a Celestial Heavenly Christian City - the other, a return in the form of a sacred movement to bring about a return of the Greek Incipience - a volkish Black Forest-like paradise where the guttural discordances of the German tongue ring through the forest clearings as the lingual successor of Hellas.

Of course schizophrenically, (as an alcoholic adopts deflection strategies) Heidegger's followers protest that the Nazi is not ALWAYS talking to them, or representing them via his own version of the Daseinic Everyman.

Later writing by Heidegger revealed the true mind behind the mask.  The true nature of the German Volkish version of Dasein  (Heidegger's personal, right wing anagoge of his own conception of Dasein) became apparent with public knowledge of  the Nazi philosopher's calls for the elimination of the Jews, his demands for the key to theFreiburg University library from his kindly, harmless old fool of a mentor Husserl and  his rants and writings entitled  Follow the Führer. If that was not enough  Heidegger insisted that the Nazi marching song: The Horst Wessel Leid be printed on University of Freiburg literature and invitation cards for his installation ceremony as rector at the institution's expense

Of course his apologist thurifers claimed that such abhorrent behaviour and beliefs should be detached from the their own adaptation of Dasein, as a gentlemanly, umbrella clutching or gum-chewing Anglo-Saxon rendering which they had interiorised from the pages of Being and Time, Basic Concepts and the other dualistic writings of Heidegger in which the transcendental, invisible, experiential presence of the grammatical gerund Dasein was filched.

For such ontological naifs, Being has replaced the transcendental invisible God and the abstraction life, or the experience of existing there/here in the world, has been replaced with the metaphysical universal responses of the manikin Dasein which is clutched to the breasts of the angst-brigade  as a fetish which they represent as themselves.

In other words they pick and choose which aspects of the late twenties German model of Dasein they think best fits them.  They view the  transcendental template which  is represented by Heidegger to be a universal model, is one that they can pick and match and apply to such a putative persona as themselves without taking on board the full implications of Heidegger's Hitlerite, residual Jesuitical and well known Black Forest Anti-Jewish Megalomania, with which the young Heidegger was infected as a youth.  Significantly, Goebbels followed his leader's philosophy religiously and is quoted as saying, "A lie repeated often enough is accepted as truth."

For Heidegger Jews and  the holocaust is hardly mentioned, and Heidegger's political activities are played down.  Heidegger's call for the elimination of the Jews ( exposed by a respected French Jewish academic) is either ignored, or cynically scoffed at as part of the researcher's imagination. [31]  (Faye. 2005)

The American writer, poet and philosopher Richard Sansom writes:

To prove Richard Sansom's insight about the exchangeability of Being with God (a factor I spotted too (as many will already be aware) - here is where Martin Heidegger gets dragged kicking and screaming out of the fetid religio-Nazi closet where he has been hiding all these years.

For the Eliminativist there is no such phenomena exists such as Heidegger's 'Being,' or 'consciousness,' or 'existenz,' or 'existence,' or 'Being There.' These and the similar variant names to be found throughout the primitive philosophy of this transcendentalist type simply describe the existential modes of humans that exist and are conscious, and are conscious of that awareness which they call their 'consciousness.' It goes without saying that for a Eliminativist 'awareness' itself doesn't exist either, but only that entitic embodied brain which is aware. It is a mistake however to assume that by Heidegger's removal of the 'soul-thing' from notions of being that one rids the Daseinic device of its metaphysicality, all that this achieves is to introduce a more sophisticated version of the metaphysical, for the notion that the 'act' of existing [existing in a certain way] is somehow different, [the ontological difference] from the material existent, is in itself an act of mystical metaphysicalisation or transcendentalism which is introduced by the Daseinic mechanism or gerundial function of 'Being There.' which constitutes the semantic sleight-of-hand.

In fact, looked at from the point of view of linguistic philosophy, the gerund 'Being There' is little different from: 'Fishing There' or 'Collecting Foreign Stamps There' or 'Eating Fish and Chips There' for they all describe existential modalities or entitic states and are not in themselves 'things' as they have certainly have no nominatum or describable designatum. Plainly the only thing that exists is the 'Be-er' the 'Fisher' and the 'Stamp Collector.

The actor acts, and the acting is the way that the actor exists [IS there - is BEING THERE if you like] but the acting is not something 'different' ontologically from the actor, and the only reason that in natural language we nominalise or convert ANY 'acting words' into abstract nouns and gerunds is for purposes of descriptive convenience, i. e., in order to quickly describe using just one word the ways that existents exist whilst they are in a certain temporal or relative existential spatial positionality, or the modality or state of being here or there, or engaged in modes of fishing, or stamp-collecting.

The very fact of initially existing [being born] could be described as an act - and indeed the process of birth is engendered and has its origin in the sexual act. The act of giving and experiencing birth is for the human baby an involuntary, unintentional act of being in the world, as indeed Heidegger himself suggests in his throwness, (Geworfenheit) which is a shared act between the thrower and the thrown, and which though it receives its momentum from the contracting womb of the thrower, is still an involuntary or passive act on the part of the thrown newborn.

After birth - as the child grows, the existential acts become more and more voluntary, and less passive and involuntary, and of necessity the voluntary behaviour functions concomitantly and in accordance with the physiological acts of the bodily organs which are always reflexive (physiologically working without volition or conscious control,) in that the human body acts in a multiplicity of existential voluntary and involuntary acts or life- maintaining modalities other than perhaps defecation and other excretory functions, which is a combination of the voluntary and the involuntary with the involuntary dominating the voluntary eventually, that is they are controlled by the autonomic nervous system; without or in spite of conscious control.

The would-be suicide Hamlet, if he leaps from the battlements, does not put an end to his physical existence, for the body continues to exist after death. What the suicide does is to radically change the WAY the material of which the body-brain consists and is composed, which is then rearranged as it passes through the various involuntary acts of putrefaction or incineration. The modality of being conscious is eliminated as a result of these existential changes and neither the 'soul' nor Heidegger's version Dasein survives, because of course it wasn't THERE [or Being There] in the first place, other than as a reification of the existent's act of existing. It was the existent [Fred Jones] who was being there, as a human being known as Fred Jones and not 'his' 'Being There' nor the 'Being There' of the Mitsein that were there too whilst he was being there as the denotatum known as 'Fred Jones.'

Eliminativists, [contrary to the mistaken beliefs of some people] do not seek to bar or ban any words at all, including proper names, abstract nouns, universals or anything else. Eliminativists restrict themselves in ontological or philosophical discussion to pointing out the non-existence of existence, and all the rest of the abstract hypostatisations that do not exist in the fairy-tale world of Platonic idealism. This is no way bars Eliminativists from employing those word-types as descriptive verbal tools in order to point to their basic linguistic and semantic function, which is basically to save time and human effort in the uttering of the circumlocutionary or periphrastic sentence-strings which would be required to communicate the often complicated ideas involved in describing the activities of entities encapsulated in single abstract nouns, gerunds and universals. The trouble is that transcendentalists consistently confuse or deliberately employ these gerundial short-cuts for actual things and talk as if such a thing as 'Love' exists, when in fact it is the lover that exists in the existential mode of emotion and affection for another that we label with the signifier word: 'Love.'

Eliminativists such as I therefore are in no danger of 'falling into any ontological or communicative 'abyss' for no such 'abyss' exists. Eliminativists are aware that words are only significata [signs] which point to existents or to reificational notions, [shopping, dancing, stamp collecting, being there,etc.,] as the observable existential modalities of entities in order to identify them and employ them as conversational enablers, but they have no wish to proscribe or eradicate these words from our language, but only to de-confuse the notions of certain philosophies and ontologies as to the semantic dangers of such pitfalls.

At ground it is the Eliminativist love for words and ideas that lies at the very heart of Eliminativists - they don't like seeing either words or ideas abused and employed for base ontological purposes.

3. 7   Quine's: To Be is to Be the Value of a Variable [39]

Quine's obfuscative definition  is only definitive in that it defines Quine as being in this instance - mistaken. (though the general standard of his oeuvre is exemplary.)

My explanation here is that To be is NOT to be the value of a variable. And I offer this account as something which, as far as I know, is the first de-construction of Quine's famous axiom.

Professor Quine's definition is actually an ontologically committed claim which simply shift's the logico-ontological implication or existential significational burden of TO BE from (the possibility) of being some unstated object or a state of some unstated object, to that of BEING an unstated existential modality of a non-object.  

                                              Some Definitions of the term Variable

 In addition Quine assumes the layman's error that  to be is  the uninflected form of  the stem be  (used in the sense of be as an unspecified state of being something or other not mentioned) when in fact the to adds an inflectionality which can bestow to be with intentionality, futurity, locativity and a host of other psychological, occupational, biological abstractive possibilities in its sentential employment, as  in:

Bill is a father to be. Phyllis is going to be a mother.  John is studying to be a doctor. Jane is said to be suffering from cancer. I think its going to be raining by nightfall. Eric is said to be living in Tangiers.etc.

                                         LINK FOR NEXT SECTION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE