Expressing 'Something exists'

Bill returns to the limitations of language and logic.  He offers the following 'surely valid and sound' argument,

1. Stromboli exists,
Ergo
2. Something exists,

and shows that the attempt to render this using the so-called Quine formula for 'exists'  results in a 'murky travesty of the original luminous argument'.

I agree that he ends with a murky travesty.  But he doesn't start with a valid argument.  The name 'Stromboli' is plucked out of the sky without introduction.  This can lead to even murkier depths.  See Bill's piece Deducing John McCain from the Principle of Identity and especially the comment thread which dives deep into the mud at the bottom.  Interestingly, Bill correctly diagnoses the problem, namely that a supplementary premise is needed:

1.5 'Stromboli' refers to something that exists.

Putting this back in at the beginning we get

1. 'Stromboli' refers to something that exists.
2. Stromboli exists.
3. Something exists.

Substituting the equivalent Anglo-Saxon for the Latinate 'refers' and 'exists' in (1) we get

1. There is something called 'Stromboli'.
2. Stromboli exists.
3. Something exists.

That's now valid.  (2) is seen to be redundant and (3) is seen to be contained in (1). To render this in the language of the predicate calculus we first prise apart 'something' as 'some thing':

1. There is some thing called 'Stromboli'.
2. Stromboli exists.
3. Some thing exists.

This is equivalent to

1. ∃x.Thing(x)
2. Thing(Stromboli)
3. ∃x.Thing(x).

(2) is Existential elimination from (1) and (3) could be seen as Existential Introduction (aka generalisation) from (2).

The murky travesty suggests to Bill that

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no non-existent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense -- e.g. 'for some x, x' -- or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing.

Well, I'm not so sure about all that.  If Bill could let go of the bette noire of the Quine formula he would see that the predicate calculus language does better than he allows.  But he could still attack the murkiness of the predicate Thing().  [He does somewhere---I'll look it up],  As I use it here it's equivalent to Object() or Individual(), all candidates for the concept at the root of the Porphyrean Tree.  If Bill seeks the presuppositions  that cannot be expressed in the logical language, he might consider whether discrete individuals with discrete properties can indeed coherently be separated from the Bulk, ideas which do seem integral with the structure of the language.  But the existence of said individuals can be expressed.  That, as Quine says, is what the existential quantifier does.