Talk:Nonexistent objects

Philosophy: Logic / Language / Analytic Mid‑importance

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Poorly written article

This article is one of the most poorly written articles i've come accross on wikipedia. In a lot of ways it seems that the person making major contributitons to it tried to accomplish too much with the space he was given. As a result, things which probably would have been better placed in other sections were merged in with sections that they shouldn't have been, and hence, led to the overall deterioration of the page.

I might try to fix this page up a bit if i can do so. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to join in, or leave some comments on my talk page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xenfreak (talk • contribs) 00:23, 13 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know this comment is from 2011 but I have to agree and add an extremely frustrating point: the word "copula" is spelt wrong. In Quine (On What There Is 1948), he references a "round square cupola" on Berkeley College. A cupola is an architectural idea as opposed to the linguistic idea of a copula. I am going to make the correct changes and learn how to code more significant references, and to better explain the concepts involved. Please note the first reference which is made to the "Ernst Mally" article on Zalta's Research Lab (again, frustratingly) does not anywhere reference the cupola example.

This is a terrible page.

I would like to proceed with the correction but I plan on transplanting this stub on Round square cupola to the stub of Abstract Object Theory, especially considering their references to each other and Zalta's involvement. Non-pegasus (talk) 19:58, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent) The word is https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/copula (see also https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/ ). Please do not blank the article without consulting other editors. Quine's article seems to be using the wrong word, which is why we rely on secondary literature. If we are to merge this article, let us merge it with Nonexistent object. --Omnipaedista (talk) 20:10, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So I doubled checked my sources and I'm going to agree with you with two caveats. After looking back at what Quine was talking about, he was indeed referring to a cupola (architecture) and was not using the wrong word in context (that's caveat #1). However, it occurs to me that I must have been confused when I first encountered this article because I've read about Quine's article (On What There Is) but I hadn't been as exposed to the other writings as much (like Frege/Russell correspondence and Meinong, etc.). So when I saw "round square copula" I assumed the creator of this article must have meant "round square cupola." But you've made it more clear to me that the intention of this article was to report on the Frege/Russell idea of the "round square" and it's relation to the dual copula strategy which was hard to see when I was at first convinced the article was making a simple spelling error.

In any case (here's caveat #2), this is a poorly written article not only because it's hard to follow and there's no direct explanation of the dual copula strategy (that I can see), but also because the Mally citation I talked about really doesn't reference anything which backs up this article. Additionally, the only academic source which directly addresses the round square copula outside our primary sources (that I can locate) is a paper from '96 called "The Roundsquare Copula: A Semantic Internalist's Rejoinder" by Tappenden, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Published by OUP, and this paper is not mentioned or referenced which feels like a big oversight. Poor writing/prose, missing ideas/explanations, bad references, and absent references to important secondary literature all contribute to this mess.

So while you're right that the redirect deserved more thought (it was the first major edit I've ever asked for, I was a newbie trying to be bold please forgive me this trespass), I'm hoping you'll either add the redirect to Nonexistent objects or share your ideas on how we might improve this article. Non-pegasus (talk) 01:14, 1 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Redirecting to Nonexistent objects is the best strategy. I will do it soon. --Omnipaedista (talk) 11:25, 10 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]