Existence And Being

We need alternatives to the words, "exist," "exists" and "existence" and maybe also to "is," "are" and "being."

(i) Sometimes we say that fictional characters do not exist and sometimes that they exist only in our imagination. We know what we mean but another word might help.

(ii) I explain to people that gods and Buddhas coexist, then remember that I do not believe that either of these kinds of "beings" literally exists. We can say that they coexist in the mythology but practitioners of ritual and meditation interact with them in ways that go beyond the recitation of mythical stories.

(iii) We say that Nicholas van Rijn is a fictional character but this use of "is" does not entail that he is in the sense of existing.

(iv) I argue that Poul Anderson's Time Patrollers contradict themselves when they acknowledge that they are in a timeline, thus that it exists, but then say that it might turn out to be the case that this timeline does not exist and has never existed in any sense whatsoever. I think that the contradiction is resolved by saying that the timeline exists and might cease to exist along a second temporal dimension. However, given that the Patrollers persist in their way of talking about the issue, we have to find a way of discussing the relationships between timelines while, at least temporarily, shelving the question of whether or in what sense they exist. More on this later.