ABSTRACT
Alexius Meinong draws a fundamental distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. Nuclear properties alone are freely assumable, and alone belong to the uniquely characterizing Sosein, or ontically independent so-being, of distinct Meinongian objects, in an ontically neutral way. The nuclear-extranuclear property distinction is intuitively justified, independently of its usefulness in preserving logical consistency in Meinong's object theory. Despite its usefulness in Meinong's theory, the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties has been difficult to define. The criterion for nuclear and extranuclear properties entails that if any Meinongian object lacks both a property and its complement, then the property is nuclear. The unrestricted freedom of assumption in Meinong's object theory has a wide field of application in understanding the semantics of fiction. In addition to the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties, Ernst Mally also suggested a distinction between dual modes of predication for the properties of Meinongian objects.
