ABSTRACT

One serious problem that faces Russellianism is the problem of non-referring names or empty names. What proposition, if any, is expressed by the sentence ‘Willow is a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ given that ‘Willow’ fails to refer and hence has no semantic content? On the view I favor, if the name ‘Willow’ really fails to refer, then the sentence in question expresses a gappy proposition.5 That is, it expresses a proposition that has a role which fails to be filled by anything. In particular, if ‘Willow’ fails to refer, then the sentence ‘Willow is a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ expresses a proposition that has a subject role that fails to be filled. Although gappy propositions have traditionally been used to deal with the problem of empty names, I will use them to solve the problems of contingent existence and contingent non-existence.