Noneism

Abstract: The main aim of the paper is to offer a solution compatible with Graham Priest’s Noneism and Amie Thomasson’s Artifactual theory which stresses the epistemic features of the notion of individuality in fiction in a framework where individuals are conceived of as functions (the framework is known as the world-lines-semantics of Hintikka). According to our view, it is the endorsement of a reader’s perspective that extends the range of the values of the functions (individuals) and that offers an alternative solution to cases of identity inside and outside the scope of a fictionality (or representation) operator. More technically, this proposal can be seen as both extending the notion of individuality of the Artifactual theory and furnishing an epistemic twist to Priest’s principle of freedom.

Abstract: In the recent literature on all things metaontological, discussion of a notorious Meinongian doctrine—the thesis that some objects have no kind of being at all—has been conspicuous by its absence And this is despite the fact that this thesis is the central element of the noneist metaphysics of Richard Routley (1980) and Graham Priest (2005) In this paper, we therefore examine the metaontological foundations of noneism, with a view to seeing exactly how the noneist's approach to ontological inquiry differs from the orthodox Quinean one We proceed by arguing that the core anti-Quinean element in noneism has routinely been misidentified: rather than concerning Quine's thesis that to be is to be the value of a variable, the real difference is that the noneist rejects what we identify as Quine's “translate-and-deflate” methodology In rejecting this aspect of Quinean orthodoxy, the noneist is in good company: many of those who think that questions of fundamentality should be the proper focus of ontological inquiry can be read as rejecting it too Accordingly, we then examine the differences between the noneist's conception of ontology and that offered by the fundamentalist We argue that these two anti-Quinean approaches differ in terms of their respective conceptions of the theoretical role associated with the notion of being And the contrast that emerges between them is, in the end, an explanatory one

Abstract: Noneism a is form of Meinongianism, proposed by Richard Routley and developed and improved by Graham Priest in his widely discussed book Towards Non-Being. Priest’s noneism is based upon the double move of (a) building a worlds semantics including impossible worlds, besides possible ones, and (b) admitting a new comprehension principle for objects, dierent from the ones proposed in other kinds of neo-Meinongian theories, such as Parsons’ and Zalta’s. The new principle has no restrictions on the sets of properties that can deliver objects, but parameterizes the having of properties by objects to worlds. Modality is therefore explicitly built in - so the approach can be conveniently labeled as \modal noneism". In this paper, I put modal noneism to work by testing it against classical issues in modal logic and semantics. It turns out that - perhaps surprisingly - the theory (1) performs well in problems of transworld identity, which are frequently considered to be the dicult ones in the literature; (2) faces a limitation, albeit not a severe one, when one comes to transworld individuation, which is often taken (especially after Kripke’s notorious ‘stipulation’ solution) as an easy issue, if not a pseudo-problem; and (3) may stumble upon a real trouble when dealing with what I shall call ‘extensionally indiscernible entities’ - particular nonexistent objects modal noneism is committed to.