[Renall]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

Are you sure about that? I mean, I think you might have broken the limit of your reasoning. If this is correct Ryuukishi could've said "a witch did it" (since witches doesn't exist).

Or to give a more practical example, when "Kanon was killed by someone else" it could be that the someone else it refers to doesn't exist at all for instance. The truth concerning that red isn't much better, I admit, but this just seems a bit too much.

No, actually, you're taking it further than it's allowed to go. "The current King of France is bald" is different from "the current King of France gave me a haircut." When you ascribe action to a nonexistent entity you essentially construct its asserted existence into the truth value of the statement. For the latter statement to be true, not only must I have been given a haircut, but a specific actor must have given it to me or the sentence is false. Since there is no such actor as the current King of France, the statement is false.

However, describing a nonexistent entity or asserting it did not do something doesn't construct its existence, creating a logical problem where we can't say whether the King of France is bald or not because he doesn't exist. The answer to the former question is not "True" or "False," but "uhhh, well there is no such guy, so it's really neither."

You can't say "a witch committed the murders" because it creates a falsifiable logical statement which can be disproved. If you show who did commit the murders, then you need only observe that they were not a witch (or were a witch), in which case the statement is either true or false. You can't do this for all the cell phones on Rokkenjima, because in 1986 there weren't any there so you can't confirm whether all of them were working. But they also weren't not working, because they didn't exist at all. This appears to create a circumstance where you can declare in red that any cell phone on the island worked, but only because there weren't any and you aren't suggesting that any actor actually used them for any purpose. It's like saying "Krauss's boat cannot get you off the island" when Krauss doesn't have a boat. Ryukishi appears to view this as fair game to state in red, but only because there isn't any subject for it to apply to.

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Japanese grammar doesn't have articles, so there is no distinction between "the knock" and "a knock" in the first place. The two phrases are totally ambiguous.

That only really makes it easier to discuss something nonexistent as you can be intentionally non-specific while creating the impression of specificity. That is, as long as the thing you are describing is nonexistent; as long as there was no knock, any discussion of a knock essentially follows these rules, and this would hold for any nonexistent subject described in any degree of specificity.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

It's a little different, Renall, but close.

During the night, between 24:00 and morning, a living Kinzo could not have existed anywhere outside Natsuhi's room!!

So for your statement of the Bald King you should have rather said.

There is no King of France outside of a bald one.

And that's consistent with

None of the characters misidentified a knocking sound.

To structure it more closely with the Japanese formulation, perhaps, but grammatically there's no real difference in English. I was careful with my formulations to refer to everything as directly as possible, e.g. "the space aliens in the hallway" are a singular descriptive unit of a nonexistent entity, not an assertion that the aliens do actually exist there. It's just misleading.

Also changing it to "other than the space aliens in the hallway, no one could have caused the knocking sound" is actually a different sentence. Although it's a particularly good example of a misleading statement because instead of saying, as I did, "the nonexistent entity did not cause a knock" (which is obvious, because something that doesn't exist can't cause anything), you've said "other than an entity that doesn't exist, no one could have caused the knock," which is logically equivalent to "no one caused the knock." Mine leaves open the possibility that a knock was caused, but makes a meaningless-but-true statement that a nonexistent being didn't cause it.

The "living Kinzo" is a more direct and apparent example of this, and it was obviously intentional on Ryukishi's part. The reason that one is different is because you can't really formulate it the opposite way because doing so would create the direct assertion that Kinzo is somewhere, which asserts being on his part and therefore ceases to be a definite description error (even if it is factually wrong). You might be able to get away with "during those hours, Kinzo could only possibly have been in Natsuhi's room." The reason why this is true is simple: If Kinzo existed, there's only one place he could have been, but that doesn't mean he actually was there. Same thing as the actual statement as written, just flipped around. Again, it implies existence but doesn't actually assert it. However, many a philosopher would probably argue that's the wrong way of looking at it. But in Ryukishi's work I guess we gotta follow Ryukishi's rules, and he has many instances of a true-but-meaningless statement being made in red which means he believes a meaningless statement has a truth value of true.

That apart it could work even with the article because you could interpret that as "the knocking sound you are talking about" rather than "the knocking sound that actually happened".
The examples above show that according to Ryuukishi's logic you can mention unexistent things in red, you just cannot directly imply that they exist. So if you say that the space alien did or is something you do it wrong. But you can say that the space alien isn't or didn't do something.

I disagree. I think you can imply the existence of something - and Ryukishi does - but you can't directly state it through definition or action.

For example, you can't say "space aliens were in the hallway and they didn't cause the knock" because it's a direct assignment of existence. You can't say "space aliens in the hallway caused the knock" because it's a direct statement of an action undertaken (which in turn asserts the existence of both actor and action). But you can say "space aliens in the hallway didn't cause the knock" because "space aliens in the hallway" is a description of an actor that doesn't exist and the actor is not stated to have taken any action. An actor not existing cannot take action, so stating that no such action was undertaken by such an actor is a true statement.

Articles shouldn't affect this in any way. You don't need a definite article to run upon this logical problem. If anything, it makes the problem easier to construct, as Ryukishi can talk about "knocks" without the implication of definite existence or numbering (another thing a definite article would do that the Japanese will not; "the knock" implies one, but lack of a definite article means it's not clear if there was one knock, many knocks, or any knock).