Confessions of a Meinongian Logician

Abstract

Indulging in intellectual autobiography, I sketch the reasons and ways I became a practicing Meinongian logician. The path involves a chain of transgressions, especially of extensionalist presuppositions, and a struggle against widespread misinterpretations of Meinong’s object theory. Although the opposition toward Meinong’s theory of object persists in analytic philosophy, its main insights, that thought is intentional and that logic must be ontically neutral, have not lost their attraction. Moreover, there is no substantive criticism to show that we cannot refer to and truly predicate properties of intended objects regardless of their ontic status. The discussion affords an opportunity to discuss some difficult topics in object theory, and the sociology of Meinong’s scandalously biased lack of reception in the history of mainstream analytic philosophy. My commitment to seeking an ontically neutral adequate semantics for the propositions of science that turn out to be false, the hypotheses that are disconfirmed, as well as the logic of fiction, continues to drive my interest in seeing Meinongian logic, not merely take its place in some form alongside referentially extensionalist logics, but to engulf, encompass and supplant existence-presuppositional traditional conventional analytic philosophy-favored purely referentially extensionalist logics.