Clarification/Follow-up by Jon1667 on 02/22/03 3:36 pm:
Jeffrey:

Tell that to Dan.
But the question is, what (who) am I talking about when I say anything about Santa Claus?
Surely not the idea or concept or thought of Santa, since I am surely not saying those do not exist. So, what is the "it" you say is a notion in the mind? What it "it" that I am asserting does not exist? And how can I do that?
Or, when I assert that Santa Claus lives in the North Pole, and owns reindeer, is that true or false?
What it comes down to is the meaning of proper names.

Clarification/Follow-up by babthrower on 02/23/03 5:50 pm:
In a private response to my post, Jon says

"Since you do not explain what "using conventionally" means, I can only guess. Surely you cannot mean, "uses it to refer to an elf" since there is no such elf. So how can the person refer to him?"

Yes. That is the conventional use. The person who uses the term is, as I said, someone who believes the being exists. The person refers to him as simply as I do when I say 'John is a postman.'

Suppose you and I talk about George W. Bush. There is no quibble there, is there? Unless I know that he is a holograph created by the Republicans, because the real G.W.B. was assassinated and the pundits believed that if this knowledge became public it would affect national morale, and you do not know this fact.

Clarification/Follow-up by JeffreyBryson on 02/24/03 2:40 am:
To be grammatically careful, the question is simply *what* is the referent of the phrase or name "Santa Claus." As I already said, the conspicuous referent of this phrase is the *notion* of Santa Claus just as the referent of the word "unicorn" is the *notion* of a unicorn. This is elementary. To say what I just said does not at all imply or confer existence (that is, existence in the external world) to the notion. It only indicates that there exists the notion within one or more minds of such a figure. In human communication the first and fundamental function of words is simply to refer to notions and then to their possible existence in the external world. It seems that, based on previous conversations with you and on some things I've read here between you and Dan, that you sometimes trip up on people's usages of the word "exist." For me to say that Santa Claus at least exists as a notion in a mind is not to say that Santa Claus himself somehow exists within a mind but only that the *notion* of such a figure exists in that mind. You understand this.