On what there is not — a vindication of reism

Jan Czerniawski

pp. 313-317

in: Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Jan Woleński (eds), The Lvov-Warsaw school and contemporary philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

There are many well-known objections to reism, and therefore the doctrine is widely held to be untenable. Indeed, for various reasons it is not easy to defend it as stated by Kotarbiński himself. First, so-called semantical reism is of doubtful use. It was invented in order to give support to ontological reism, but it does not adequately serve that purpose.¹ Even its main concept, that of an onomatoid, or apparent name, cannot be applied without knowing in advance whether the referent of the word in question exists or not. Thus, ontological reism needs some independent justification. Second, the positive thesis of ontological reism, stating that only things exist, implies the need to define the concept of thing. Otherwise, its non-tautological character may be called into question.² Moreover, even if some satisfactory definition of this concept were to be supplied, which is not the case as yet, the philosophical importance of the positive thesis is due to the negative theses which result from it and are suitable for eliminating several pseudoproblems. This strongly suggests concentrating on those negative theses rather than troubling with the positive one.