existence

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

Leaving _lo_ aside as a confusing factor, I see the question of the
range of quantifiers thusly.  In most languages I know about -- and in
logic -- quantifiers range over the "universe of discourse," the things
we want to talk about, the things we are willing to name or describe in
the present conversation (being named is a sufficient condition for
being in the range of a quantifier usually).  This universal has no
fixed relation to the real-only world (assuming that even that is fixed
-- or to any of the real-only universes, if not):  it may be wholly
included in that universe (as it usually is for hard sciences), wholly
outside it (as at a trekky convention) or overlap it in any number of
ways (as usual in casual conversation).  We have in most languages a
number of expressions which we apply to things in our universe of
discourse to indicate that they are not in the(a) real-only world:
nonexistent, unreal, imaginary, fictional, mythological, and so on.  Yet
we can often say of any of these categories that there is something in
it, showing that the limits of the existent/real/literal/etc. is not the
limits of the quantifiers.  Although, occasionally, we may use one of
these terms explicitly to put something outside the universe of
discourse as well.  The various categories of unreal are probably also
different from one another, although it is not always clear what these
differences are.