Actualism and quantification

James E. Tomberlin

pp. 25-37

in: Francesco Orilia, William J. Rapaport (eds), Thought, language, and ontology, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

A central working assumption of the present essay is that most of us embrace actualism— the view that there are no objects that do not actually exist and that there are no philosophical problems whose solution calls for or requires an ontological commitment to non-actual objects.1 Relative to this assumption, my aim is to determine what sort of quantification theory should accompany the actualist ontological stance. To facilitate matters, I shall confine the examination to just three principal approaches to quantificational logic.