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On modal Meinongianism
pp. 3329-3346
Abstract
Modal Meinongianism is a form of Meinongianism whose main supporters are Graham Priest and Francesco Berto. The main idea of modal Meinongianism is to restrict the logical deviance of Meinongian non-existent objects to impossible worlds and thus prevent it from “contaminating” the actual world: the round square is round and not round, but not in the actual world, only in an impossible world. In the actual world, supposedly, no contradiction is true. I will show that Priest’s semantics, as originally formulated in Towards Non-being, tell us something different. According to certain models (especially models that are interesting from a Meinongian point of view), there are true contradictions in the actual world. Berto and Priest have noticed this unexpected consequence and have suggested a solution (I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me the relevant footnotes in Priest and Berto’s work), but I will show that their solution is highly questionable. In the last section of this paper, I will introduce a new and simpler version of modal Meinongianism that avoids the problem.
Publication details
Published in:
(2016) Synthese 193 (10).
Pages: 3329-3346
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0933-8
Full citation:
Giraud Thibaut (2016) „On modal Meinongianism“. Synthese 193 (10), 3329–3346.