Summary Of Quine's Essay 'Pegasus'

In his essay, on what there is, W.V.O. Quine initially discusses the ontological disposition of a being, Pegasus, through the exploitation of two interlocutors, McX and Wyman, both of which support the existence of Pegasus. The interlocutor’s arguments center on a paradox, which Quine labels Plato’s beard. In essence this paradox states:
1) If a being X does not exist, then we would have no knowledge of X.
2) We have knowledge of X.
3) Therefore, X is.
Quine believes the above argument is unsound; thus, he opposes McX and Wyman’s arguments throughout his essay, defending the position that Pegasus does not exist. Additionally, Quine examines problems within language--the way, which we should differentiate between naming and meaning—suggesting

He suggests, it would be unintelligible to say an unactualized impossibility is, such as “the Round Square cupola at Berkeley College”, because unactualized impossibilities are lacking of meaning. Quine, at this point, believes he has adequately silenced the initial arguments of McX and Wyman; therefore, he answers Wyman’s new claim of meaninglessness, by introducing Russell’s “theory of descriptions” in order to enlighten his predecessors, so they won’t commit the same mistakes twice. McX and Wyman’s error, according to Quine, is the fact they fail to assign a statement meaningfulness unless its descriptive phrase refers to an object. Russell devised a theory regarding meaningfulness, which did not rely on objectification based on a single word, but instead generalizing the descriptive phrase of a sentence using quantifiable variables. Let us take the sentence, “The author of Romeo and Juliet is a playwright,” for example, if we utilize bound variables in place of the subject ‘the author’ the sentence can be restated as, “Something wrote Romeo and Juliet, and was a playwright.” For Quine, this is an pivotal linguistic achievement, as we are now able to analyze and ascribe meaningfulness to a statement without reflecting upon or presupposing the existence of any entity it regards because, “…quantificational words or bound variables are, of course a basic part of

I liked the utilization of Russell’s theory to purport the solution for the paradox; however, there are some issues that I found in it. First, I did not understand why denying a description was different from denying a name, because the way I see it, a name is merely a description (as Quine said). Thus, I find myself agreeing with wyman. I believe, if there exists a world, which meets the conditions where a being such as Pegasus could live, and then Pegasus ought to be, regardless of his actualized existence. Pegasus is, then, as an unactualized possibility. Of course, I do not have an adequate response to the bald-fat man problem,