1775.Language

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Language has many uses, and it mayor may not be used cognitively or intellectually. But if it is so used, it unavoidably makes reference to reality. Language so used, like the thought it formulates, is always about something other than just itself. It is about the process we call "nature," or "the creative advance," and the products that this process either has produced or is capable of producing. Take away all reference to the process and its actual or possible (conceivable) products, and there is no longer any reason to suppose that one is still thinking or speaking coherently, provided one's intention is to use language cognitively.

Meaning in science--and, arguably, in the extraordinary ontological science, metaphysics, as well--is a relation requiring a term; and, although the term need not, in ordinary cases, have the mode of actuality, it must in all cases have some mode of reality, the minimal mode, and the only alternative to actuality, being real, ontological possibility.

In the extraordinary cases relevant to metaphysics, the term that meaning requires is ontological necessity, understood as the least common denominator of all ontological possibilities simply as such, or as what must obtain no matter which possibility is actualized.

An idea about nothing is not an idea, unless the idea of "nothing" itself. But, then, to say that logical questions are "merely" logical and therefore "not about existence" is an anti-metaphysical dogma, not a self-evident truth

There is nothing for thought to think about other than reality, which is to say, creativity and/or its manifestations, actual or possible.

The real is that to which true affirmations refer---the object of correct affirmations, that which measures their truth. 

Logic in the broad sense, as the a priori theory of reasoning or rational inference, includes:

(1) an apriori theory of reality as such, of what it is to be thinkable and knowable; and

(2) an apriori theory of thinking and knowing as such, of what it is to think or know something.

Thus metaphysics, as comprising just these two kinds a priori theory, does what the logician would do were she or he to give serious thought to the a priori or strictly universal traits of her or his first-level entities and to what it is to think or know them.

Logic cannot deal with a simply empty universe. Therefore, properties universally instantiated cannot be uninstantiated. The widest possible class of entities cannot conceivably be null.

All pure determinables must be particularized and concretized somehow. But there cannot be any ultimate reason for just this, that, or the other particularization or concretization. Actualization is brute fact, capricious, undeducible.

Distinction must be made between "'pure,' or eternal possibilities," on the one hand, and "spatio-temporally located possibilities," or "what is possible in a given time and place," on the other.

In order to complete the unification of real and logical possibility, the final step is to regard even natural laws, so far as genuinely contingent or with thinkable alternatives, as themselves products of the creative---advance as themselves emergent aspects of reality

Logical possibility implies something about reality, as does logical necessity. The necessary is whatever is common to a set of possibilities. To be necessary is to be implied by the actualization of no matter which of the set of possibilities in question.

If the set is all possibilities whatever, all that is genuinely conceivable, or coherently thinkable, then what is common to the set is strictly, unconditionally necessary. If, on the contrary, the set is not all human possibilities--or all understanding existence, human or not--then what is common to the set is only broadly, conditionally necessary, i.e., necessary to any and all human possibilities, or to any and all possibilities of an existence that understands.

The modality of x is _x'_s classification according as its appropriate mode of exemplification in existence is either contingent or necessary---or, alternatively, according as whether its nonexistence is or not conceivable.

The conventional view of logicians is that existential statements can be true only contingently. But the more adequate view is that existential statements on lower logical levels--those mentioning definite particulars, or the special properties of such--can only be contingently true. But it's arguable that existential statements not mentioning definite particulars or the special properties therof are not contingently, but necessarily, true.

If this argument is sound, it is a mistake as to logical level to take the statement, "God exists," which mentions no definite particulars or the properties of such, as asserting a merely contingent truth. If this seems strange because "God" can be consistently construed only as designating an individual, the response is that the designatum of "God" is not a particular individual, even the greatest, but the one and only universal individual. If, then, "individual" is taken in the strict sense in which it is applied ordinarily to persons and things enduring and changing through time, it is to be distinguished from the still lower, indeed, lowest, logical level of events or