The point of my original, brief post was that Williamson’s argument is not sound because premise (3) is false. A thing need not exist merely because it is an object referred to, according to the noneist.

I agree with you, some things DONT exist, Imm not trying to assert otherwise.

but if everything exists (as Williamson’s argument leads us to) then presumably the “actual world in which I am seeing red at time t” must exist just as much as the “actual world in which I am not seeing red at time t” does.
I would think this was pretty absurd, thus the Williamson’s argument must be flawed.

that is what i was trying to get at – not sure if it works though.

What do you think?

First, no world but the actual world need exist on the noneist view.

Second, why can’t you be perceiving red at time t at one (none-existent?) possible world and as well as not perceiving red at time t at the actual world? That is, it COULD have been the case that you perceived red at time t? The proposition that you are perceiving red at time t is true when assessed with respect to the merely possible world and false when assessed with respect to the actual world.

Last, why not even allow impossible worlds at which you do both percieve red at time t and do not?

‘Zeus incarnate’ must also exist, alongside ‘Zeus 2′, ’21st century Zeus’ and ‘Zeus the unzueisisable’.

lets think:

if the argument holds then, the world in which ‘I am percieving red at this moment and I am in it’ must exist, and the world in which ‘I am not percieving red at this moment and I am in it’ must also exist.
therefore the proposition ‘I am percieving red at this moment’ must be both true and false.

As to your broader points” (a) Would it not be a more productive theory that could explain both effects? (b) The conflicting attitudes are possible because they only apparently conflict. It is a purely verbal conflict. Pierre is talking about 2 distinct cities with 2 distinct sets of properties. Unbeknownst to Pierre, one of those sets does not include existence.

I guess that the broader points I was trying to make were (a) the solution to Frege’s and Kripke’s puzzles need not be the same – these may be quite distinct problems, and (b) in the case of belief, what is at issue is not which statement refers or is true, but how such conflicting attitudes are even possible. It wasn’t clear to me that your proposal represents an adequate solution to the latter problem.

As for symmetry, the Hesperus and Phosphorus case is a bad example, because both “stars” turned out to be Venus. Often there will be an asymmetry as to epistemological access in distinct contexts of naming. For example, Pierre arguably had better access to London when he lived there, as compared to his Londres when he lived in Paris.

In cases where these is true symmetry of epistemological access, I suppose that they will be like the Hesperus and Phosphorus case in that both referents do not exist and a further, existing referent is out their to be discovered.

I think it’s significant that Kripke frames this problem in terms of a puzzle about belief as it seems to count against the commonly held view that a belief is merely a relation to a proposition. If Kripke is right, Pierre cannot be accused of committing a logical error, and so must stand in contradictory relations to one and the same proposition. The obvious ’solution’ – that each locution has a different sense – threatens a proliferation of senses that makes the expression of the same thought across different languages impossible. The obvious conclusion to draw from this, which Kripke himself stops short of doing, is that there is more to belief than there first appears, but what?

To say that Hesperus exists whereas Phosphorus doesn’t is implausible on grounds of symmetry, and similarly for Kripke’s examples. What needs to be explained is how the subject can maintain conflicting beliefs concerning what is, by Frege’s lights, the same proposition. The case of informative identity statements (Frege’s puzzle) is already adequately explained by Frege’s notion of sense, and so needn’t have the same solution as the puzzle that Kripke is addressing.

Yet, I tend to think that there is a difference between the (torus-shaped) donut having a non-existent part and the fact that an infinite array of things do not exist in the space inside the middle of the donut. I think that there is a privileged non-existent volume of fried bread that is the only complete, non-existent part of the donut. That part is the hole.