ABSTRACT
It is easy to see that Lucretianism - of the sort espoused by Bigelow - is supposed to face an aboutness objection. According to the Lucretian, what makes true <there were dinosaurs> is that the world now instantiates the property having-contained-dinosaurs. Intuitively, <there were dinosaurs> is about dinosaurs that did exist. Having established the aptness objection, and having demonstrated that Lucretianism is impugned by such an objection, people now need to turn their attention back to the case of negative existentials. If the problem of negative existentials is to be solved, it looks to require a solution that commits them to negative ontology. The proposal due to Barker and Jago builds upon an Armstrongian account of states of affairs. As a reminder, Barker and Jago simply add a different type of instantiation relation: anti-instantiation. This view also suffers from an aptness objection.
