 To appreciate Russell’s alternative account, consider first general nonexistence claims. To say that foxes exist is to say that there are some things that are foxes; that is, the property of being a fox is instantiated. This is reflected in the standard regimentation of the sentences ‘Foxes exist’ and ‘There are foxes’ in first-order quantificational logic as ∃xFx, where Fx is the translation for the predicate ‘x is a fox’. General kind terms do not, then, designate individuals, which we then (redundantly) say exist when using the predicate ‘exists’ or (paradoxically) say are not when using the predicate ‘does not exist’. Instead, kind terms designate properties and simple seeming subject-predicate sentences like ‘Foxes are carnivores’ are claimed to possess a more complicated logical form, ∀x(Fx→ Cx), where Cx translates the predicate ‘x is a carnivore’. (This ignores the difficult question whether generics are really quantifiers at all, made more troubling by the fact that some generics seem to admit of exceptions—‘Birds fly’ is true, even though penguins are birds and don’t fly; ‘Cats have four legs’ is true, even though there is a three-legged cat wandering the planet. See the entry generics.) Given this analysis, general nonexistence claims are unproblematic. The sentence ‘Dragons do not exist’ says, on this analysis, that the property of being a dragon is not instantiated. Take the most inclusive class of what there is; nothing in that class has the property of being a dragon. That is what ¬∃xDx says, letting Dx translate the predicate ‘x is a dragon’. This is significant because it does not require identifying some entity to then predicate of that thing the property of nonexistence.