背诵2-The example of unicorns

The way I approach these matters will be, in some ways,
quite different from what people are thinking today (though it also has some points of contact with what some people have been thinking and writing today, and if I leave people out in informal talks like this, I hope that I will be forgiven).° Some of the views that I have are views which may at first glance strike some as obviously wrong. My favorite example is this (which I probably won't defend in the lectures--for one thing it doesn't ever convince anyone): It is a common claim in contemporary philosophy that there are certain predicates which, though they are in fact empty~-have null extension--have it as a matter of contingent fact and not as a matter of any sort of necessity. Well, that I don't dispute; but an example which is usually given is the example of unicorn. So it is said that though we have all found out that there are no unicorns, of course there might have been unicorns. Under certain circumstances there would have been unicorns. And this is an example of something I think is not the case. Perhaps according to me the
truth should not be put in terms of saying that it is necessary that there should be no unicorns, but just that we can't say under what circumstances there would have been unicorns. Further, I think that even if archeologists or geologists were to discover tomorrow some fossils conclusively showing the existence of animals in the past satisfying everything we know about unicorns from the myth of the unicorn, that would not show that there were unicorns. Now I don't know if I'm going to have a chance to defend this particular view, but it's an example of a surprising one. (I actually gave a seminar in this institution where I talked about this view for a couple of
sessions.) So, some of my opinions are somewhat surprising; but let us start out with some area that is perhaps not as surprising and introduce the methodology and problems of these talks.