It seems fine to have categories that are necessarily empty. Such as “numbers that are both odd and even”. “Non-ontologizable thing” may be such a set. Or it may be more vague than that, I’m not sure.
Alright, cool. 👌In general I think reference needs to be treated as a vague object to handle paradoxes (something along the lines of Hartry Field’s theory of vague semantics, although I may prefer something closer to linear logic rather than his non-classical logic) -- and also just to be more true to actual use.
I am not able to think of any argument why the set of un-referenceable entities should be paradoxical rather than empty, at the moment. But it seems somehow appropriate that the domain of quantification for our language be vague, and further could be that we don’t assert that nothing lies outside of it. (Only that there is not some thing definitely outside of it.)
Also—it may not come across in my other comments—the argument in the OP was novel to me (at least, if I had heard it before, I thought it was wrong at that time and didn’t update on it) and feels like a nontrivial observation about how reference has to work.
It seems fine to have categories that are necessarily empty. Such as “numbers that are both odd and even”. “Non-ontologizable thing” may be such a set. Or it may be more vague than that, I’m not sure.
Alright, cool. 👌In general I think reference needs to be treated as a vague object to handle paradoxes (something along the lines of Hartry Field’s theory of vague semantics, although I may prefer something closer to linear logic rather than his non-classical logic) -- and also just to be more true to actual use.
I am not able to think of any argument why the set of un-referenceable entities should be paradoxical rather than empty, at the moment. But it seems somehow appropriate that the domain of quantification for our language be vague, and further could be that we don’t assert that nothing lies outside of it. (Only that there is not some thing definitely outside of it.)
Also—it may not come across in my other comments—the argument in the OP was novel to me (at least, if I had heard it before, I thought it was wrong at that time and didn’t update on it) and feels like a nontrivial observation about how reference has to work.