899. The rules relating concepts to reality...

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The rules relating concepts to reality in "real-world language" (Brümmer) require that a concept, to be meaningful, must refer to something real. But, then, if a concept refers neither to a producible positive entity nor to the ultimate productive power (or some inherent aspect thereof), it simply does not refer and is therefore devoid of clear and coherent meaning. If, on the contrary, its referent is producible, the referent may or may not have been produced, i.e., exist or be actual, whereas if its referent is the ultimate productive power, then either the concept misconceives that power and so is logically incoherent or else it correctly conceives the power, which then cannot not exist.

Therefore, "there is no such thing as a significant premise that does not imply existence in some form. All thought occurs in a real experience, and that experience has given to it a real world (even in dreams). We cannot get out of reality as such and then seek to regain contact with it. We are always thinking existence and always have it. The only question is, in what form?" ("John Hick on Logical and Ontological Necessity": 158). "[L]ogical modalities, and by implication, all concepts whatever, have essential reference to creativity or becoming," in every case of which "classical determinism is in some way and degree violated, and an element of chance or randomness enters because becoming in principle is free creation" (162 f).

Why is creative synthesizing bound to occur? Because it is "the referent of any and every significant expression, and is presupposed by any and every kind of truth or reality" ("The Philosophy of Creative Synthesis": 951 f). In this sense, creativity is the "indispensable referent of all meaning." "The indispensable referent of what thought is about is creative becoming," "the creativity, other than which, and its manifestations, there is nothing for thought to think, whether as actual or as possible" ("Foreword" to Goodwin: xiv). "[Creativity is] the presupposition of all thought and all objects of thought, the beginningless and endless 'creative advance' that (as Bergson said) 'is reality itself" (ClAP: 107).

26 February 2006; rev. 23 June 2008