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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

There's this old maths joke about the proof that Santa exists:

We will prove a stronger statement, namely that existing Santa exists. There are two mutually exclusive possibilities:

1. Existing Santa exists. 2. Existing Santa does not exist.

2. Is self-contradictory, therefore Santa exists.

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> And that is why modern readers typically do not understand the argument. For example, they often think it is an attempt to “define God into existence,” as if Anselm believed that arbitrarily attaching certain meanings to certain words could tell us something about objective reality. But this is to confuse what Scholastics call a nominal definition – an explanation of the meaning of a word – with what they call a real definition – an explanation of the nature or essence of the objective reality a word refers to. Anselm is ultimately concerned with the latter, not the former. While he no doubt thinks that any reflective language user will agree that the notion of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is implicit in his use of the word “God,” the more important point he is driving at is that being that than which nothing greater can be conceived must as a matter of objective fact be of the essence or nature of being divine, just as (to use a stock modern example) being a compound of hydrogen and oxygen is of the essence of water.

* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/anselms-ontological...

Which also has the stronger critique of the argument:

> The lesson is not that Anselm’s argument is unsound so much as that it presupposes knowledge (i.e. of God’s essence) that we cannot have. Moreover, the idea that reason points us to the existence of that than which there can be nothing greater is something Aquinas himself endorses as long as it is developed in an a posteriori fashion, as it is in Aquinas’s Fourth Way.

* Ibid

Clever and clear formulation. Why isn't this seen as a rebuttal of the ontological argument?

I think this joke is covered by the "existence is not a property" line of critique.

Of course it's a property, but we shouldn't omit the assumption "assume an existing santa exists" when starting an argument. If you make that explicit, it becomes clearer that you assume the thing you're trying to prove. There is nothing magical or non-property like about existing afaik.

I believe consensus for a long time has been that existence is not a property. I am inclined to view existence as being the possessor of a property.

Can you briefly explain what the definition is of a 'property' and why 'existing' doesn't fit in it? The way I use the word property I don't see how it wouldn't apply to 'existing' or any other adjective for that matter

So what exactly a property is would also naturally be up for debate, but an example property would be say having a mass of 13kg. Or being pink. Most adjectives presumably are corresponding to properties, some would word my formulation as to exist is to be the subject of a predicate.

There are also relational properties, like being ten meters away from the Eiffel tower.

Some would call existence a second order property.

The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy gives s good overview of the issues around existence. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/

Thanks for the link. It would seem to me that it's all a matter of how you define the word property. Since words are part of a natural language, there is no one given true definition, so one has to be chosen before starting an argument, like an axiom if you are mathematically inclined. But still, it doesn't feel relevant for the question at hand, which is, how to prove an existing Santa exists? This clearly is an instance of assuming the thesis before proving it. The same can be done for any property, like proving that a blue santa is blue. I suppose that the premise of proving that an "existing santa exists" is not really a stronger statement after all than the original question of whether just "santa exists".

> Existence exists. — Ayn Rand

> Existence does not exist. — Thomas Cajetan

* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/01/does-existence-exis...

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