ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss various objections to the coherence, or acceptability more generally, of GR (purported) quantification over non-actual individuals. Objections of this kind have often been accompanied by the suggestion that GR shares unwelcome features that are associated with Meinong’s conception of quantification and existence. Orthodoxy, or perhaps caricature, has it that Meinong’s thoroughly referentialist theory of meaning led him to countenance quantification ranging over entities that exist and entities – including non-actual possibilia and impossibilia – that do not exist (but subsist). So far as the evaluation of GR is concerned, the central question is not whether a properly Meinongian realism about possibilia is tenable, but whether, as many have alleged, the GR conception of quantification and existence is flawed in the ways that orthodoxy supposes the notorious ‘Meinongian’ conception of quantification and existence to be flawed.1 The ensuing objections that I discuss are as follows: (5.1) GR is committed to logical inconsistency in asserting that there are things that do not exist; (5.2) GR is committed to analytic falsehood in denying that everything is actual; (5.3) GR worlds are not proper individuals since they lack accidental properties; and (5.4)–(5.5) GR is unstable insofar as it admits possibilia and excludes impossibilia. Finally, I present and discuss in (5.6) a neo-Fregean objection to the propriety of GR quantification over possibilia which is based on the claim that such quantification is not appropriately underwritten by the possibility of singular reference to such things.
