Meinongian Theories of Generality

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Facing problem of making semantic sense of some complex expression in ordinary language, one can sometimes adopt easy way out claiming that expression is not to be taken at face value. Then one feels free to appeal to some purportedly deeper level of analysis, where no urge is felt, for one reason or another, of assigning any one semantic value to it. E.g., one can claim that what appears to be a complex but unitary expression is such only at surface level, whereas it is to be paraphrased away at level of logical form. Being entirely faithful to ordinary language, i.e., keeping appeal to surface/depth dichotomy to a minimum, is usually much more difficult. Meinong, it seems to me, tried to adopt latter strategy, while Russell gave an outstanding example of former in his theory of definite descriptions. In this, however, as in so many other ways, he was simply following Frege. There are sentences containing definite descriptions for which Russell's analysis obviously fails, namely those such as whale is a mammal, horse is a four-legged animal, etc., where no individual whale or horse is meant in particular. Russell, however, did not have to bother with them: in fact, Frege had already dealt with them and way he had done so is paramount example of strategy of paraphrasing away. As we all know, sentence horse is a four-legged animal is taken by Frege to mean All horses (or, all normal specimen of horses) are four-legged. The expression the horse, as a whole, has disappeared from logical form and so has need of making semantic sense of it and assigning it some entity or other. In fact, idea of having indefinite entities play this role was ridiculed by Frege (see, e.g., What is a Function?) just as much as he did in case of variable