The implication of an “actual” form of this property spawned controversy surrounding the Barcan formula. An essay titled for this property discusses the “spatio-temporal connotations” of the word “Pegasus” in a sentence by a philosopher dubbed “McX” and features an argument named after “Plato’s beard” for dulling Occam’s razor by ascribing it too often. The Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis supports a stance sometimes referred to as Platonism that assigns this property to mathematical objects. The logical operator written as a backward capital E quantifies this property, which is the subject of study in ontology. For 10 points, name this property given to matter by materialists and to numbers by mathematical realists. ■END■
ANSWER: existence [or word forms like existing; accept actual existence; accept being; accept being real or mathematical realism until read] (The paper in the second sentence is W. V. O. Quine’s “On What There Is.”)
<Editors, Philosophy>
= Average correct buzz position