Serious Actualism, Typography, and Incompossible Sentences

Abstract

AbstractSerious actualists take it that all properties are existence entailing. I present a simple puzzle about sentence tokens which seems to show that serious actualism is false. I then consider the most promising response to the puzzle. This is the idea that the serious actualist should take ordinary property-talk to contain an implicit existential presupposition. I argue that this approach does not work: it fails to generalise appropriately to all sentence types and tokens. In particular, it fails to capture the right distinctions we ought to make between what I call typographical sentence types—an interesting and previously undiscussed class of fine-grained sentence types which are partially individuated by their typography, or how they look when written out.