That's not how I was using it, no. I was using it as a semantic concept.
We can conceptually divide propositions into four kinds:
- existentials, which say that a description refers ("there is some X for which it is true that Y")
- classificatories, which say that the referents of a description are members of a certain set ("X is a Z")
- identificatories, which say that a certain set is coreferential with another set ("Zs are As")
- predicatives, which ascribe descriptions to the members of sets ("for any A, it is true that Y")
Possessive clauses, like "this house is mine", "this horse belongs to John", are a type of predicating clause (where "A" is "houses I'm pointing at" and "Y" is "it's mine").
But clauses like "I have a dog", although syntactically in English they are expressed as normal predicating clauses, are semantically actually existentials ("there is some dog for which it is true that it is mine").
I think you may be thinking more of Anselm there. But in any case, you should be thinking of Meinong!I find existential clauses generally are semantically silly. If you can say something on X, it must exist. But now I get to Descartes's syllogisms on God's existence and that is not a good path.
But the general philosophical point here is that to avoid paradoxes, you need to make a distinction. The catchphrase "existence is not a predicate!" is one way of doing that. Another way is to distinguish the real from the actual. In any case, if you can meaningfully speak about X, there must 'be' an X in some sense, but that X need not be present in the actual world. [above, I've used 'refers' to mean 'present in the actual world', though of course you might want to say that other terms can refer to non-actual beings, non-being objects, etc etc].