According to a thesis which Alvin Plantinga has dubbed 'existentialism'l, states of affairs along with propositions and properties depend for their existence on the existence of the entities they 'involve'. Existentialists of this ilk believe that Socrates' being snubnosed, for example, includes Socrates as a constituent in somewhat the same way as sets include their members as constituents, with the intuitive consequence that the non-existence in a world w of Socrates implies the non-existence in w of Socrates" being snubnosed. The same goes for the property of being Socrates and the proposition that Socrates is snubnosed. Existentialism thus combines the belief that singular states of affairs (propositions, properties) have individuals as constituents with the following constituent principle: if x is a constituent of A, then, necessarily, if x doesn't exist A doesn't exist either.
Existentialism has recently been attacked by both Plantinga and Pollock. 2 Plantinga's argument has already been effectively criticised by Pollock himself 3, and I shall say nothing more about it. What I shall do instead is show that Pollock's own argument against existentialism is no more successful.
Pollock's argument concentrates on existentialism concerning states of affairs, including possible worlds (the latter being maximal states of affairs according to both Plantinga and Pollock). The argument proceeds in two stages. Pollock first argues that (A) existentialists are committed to a distinction between a possible world's obtaining and its being actual and secondly that 03) this distinction harbours an inconsistency. Pollock's argument for (A) involves determining what the existentialist