We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds (...) of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

Circumstantialists already have a logical semantics for impossibilities. They expand their logical space of possible worlds by adding impossible worlds. These are impossible circumstances serving as indices of evaluation, at which impossibilities are true. A variant of circumstantialism, namely modal Meinongianism (noneism), adds impossible objects as well. These are so-called incomplete objects that are necessarily non-existent. The opposite of circumstantialism, namely structuralism, has some catching-up to do. What might a structuralist logical semantics for impossibilities without impossibilia look like? This paper (...) makes a structuralist counterproposal. We present a semantics based on a procedural interpretation of the typed λ-calculus. The fundamental idea is that talk about impossibilities should be construed in terms of procedures: some yield as their product a condition that could not possibly have a satisfier, while the rest fail to yield a product altogether. Dispensing with a ‘bottom’ of impossibilia requires instead a ‘top’ consisting of structured hyperintensions, intensions, intensions defining other intensions, a typed universe, and dual (de dicto and de re) predication. We explain how the theory works by going through several examples. (shrink)

This second volume continues Richard Routley’s explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse. It focuses on the essays 2 through 7 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first volume and explores its implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a further development of noneism in the direction of an ontologically neutral chronological logic and associated metaphysical issues concerning existence and change. What follows includes: a detailed (...) response to Quine’s On What There Is; a defense against further objections to noneism; a detailed account of Meinong’s own position; arguments in favour of noneism from common-sense; and a noneist analysis of fictional discourse. We present these essays separately and provide additional scholarly commentaries from a range of philosophers including Fred Kroon, Maria Elisabeth Reicher-Marek and a previously unpublished commentary on noneism by J.J.C. Smart. (shrink)

A world is trivial if it makes every proposition true all at once. Such a world is impossible, an absurdity. Our world, we hope, is not an absurdity. It is important, nevertheless, for semantic and metaphysical theories that we be able to reason cogently about absurdities—if only to see that they are absurd. In this note we describe methods for ‘observing’ absurd objects like the trivial world without falling in to incoherence, using some basic techniques from modal logic. The goal (...) is to begin to locate the trivial world’s relative position in modal space; the outcome is that the less we assume about relative possibility, the more detail we can discern at the edge of reason. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the Principle of Characterization—the most controversial principle of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, to show that Bertrand Russell’s well-known objection to the Principle of Characterization can be reformulated against contemporary unrestricted interpretations of it. Second, to propose an alternative formulation of this principle. This refers to the methodology of metaphysics and is based on the distinction between pre-theoretical and theoretical languages. The proposed formulation fits (...) well with every type of contemporary interpretation of the Theory of Objects and helps to overcome Russell’s criticism. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the Principle of Characterization—the most controversial principle of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, to show that Bertrand Russell’s well-known objection to the Principle of Characterization can be reformulated against contemporary unrestricted interpretations of it. Second, to propose an alternative formulation of this principle. This refers to the methodology of metaphysics and is based on the distinction between pre-theoretical and theoretical languages. The proposed formulation fits (...) well with every type of contemporary interpretation of the Theory of Objects and helps to overcome Russell’s criticism. (shrink)

According to Richard Routley, a comprehensive theory of fiction is impossible, since almost anything is in principle imaginable. In my view, Routley is right: for any purported logic of fiction, there will be actual or imaginable fictions that successfully counterexample the logic. Using the example of ‘impossible’ fictions, I test this claim against theories proposed by Routley’s Meinongian contemporaries and also by Routley himself and his 21st century heirs. I argue that the phenomenon of impossible fictions challenges even today’s modal (...) Meinongians. (shrink)

In, the author proposes a survey of Zalta’s Object Theory and, more specifically, of the Modal Axiom of Encoding. MAE claims that if something x possibly encodes a property F, then x necessarily encodes F. According to Bourgeois-Gironde, MAE fails to account for intentional phenomena which occur in conceivability-contexts. His solution is based on the notion of quasi-encoding: x quasi-encodes F iff x possibly encodes F. In this paper, I show that Bourgeois-Gironde’s concern is misguided and that Zalta’s framework captures (...) the conceivability-phenomena at issue by modeling Husserl’s notion of Noemata. I then argue that his solution is superior to Bourgeois-Gironde’s. The philosophical significance of such a discussion nonetheless goes well beyond the debate between these two authors. Indeed, Zalta’s theory of Noemata is only sketched and needs to be further explored to see, on the one hand, whether and how Object Theory successfully describes the behavior of objects in conceivability-contexts, and, on the other hand, to test the efficacy of its primitive notions that are – as the contemporary debate on Neomeinongianism largely shows – anything but uncontroversial. (shrink)

The topic of fictional objects is a familiar one, the topic of fictional properties less so. But it deserves its own place in the philosophy of fiction, if only because fictional properties have such a prominent role to play in science fiction and fantasy. What, then, are fictional properties and how does their apparent unreality relate to the unreality of fictional objects? The present paper explores these questions in the light of familiar debates about the nature of fictional objects.

The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, on which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell’s in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives (...) in which the discourse is fully meaningful even though those terms fail to refer. (shrink)

Fictionalism about a kind of disputed object is often motivated by the fact that the view interprets discourse about those objects literally without an ontological commitment to them. This paper argues that this motivation is inadequate because some viable alternatives to fictionalism have similar attractions. Meinongianism—the view that there are true statements about non-existent objects—is one such view. Meinongianism bears significant similarity to fictionalism, so intuitive doubts about its viability are difficult to sustain for fictionalists. Moreover, Meinongianism avoids some of (...) fictionalism’s weaknesses, thus it is even preferable to fictionalism in some respects. (shrink)

The paper provides an opinionated survey of recent contributions – roughly, in the last decade – to our understanding of how names and other referring expressions work in fictional discourse and addresses well-known philosophical worries that they raise. Views about the semantics of referring expressions in fictional discourse are usually accompanied by metaphysical views on the ontology of fictional characters, so this will also come under our focus.

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.