Page 544 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
neitheroftheseanimalsexists,itnonethelessremains true that each person has distinct thoughts and is thinking about distinct things.
It is considerations such as these which motivate Meinong's introduction of a notion of 'object' which is neutral with regard to existence. In other words, on Meinong's account, it makes sense to say that some things exist and some things do not. Trees exist but dragons do not. But all objects have properties. Dra- gons do not exist, but they do have properties, e.g., breathing fire. There are also objects which do not exist in the sense that trees do, but which are none- theless real. A paradigm instance would be math- ematical objects like numbers: if one is thinking about the number seven that it is prime, then it seems true (a) that there is something being thought about, and (b) that what is being thought about it is true. In Meinong's own terminology, all objects have 'Sosein' (character, properties) irrespective of whether they have 'Sew? (being). This even applies to the case of impossible objects such as round squares, which are 'beyond being' (Aufiersein). One can think about the round square, and even in this extreme case, be correct
in attributing it a shape.
Meinong distinguishes a further class of object
which he calls an 'objective,' which most closely approximates what many philosophers call a 'prop- osition'—the sort of thing that can have a 'truth- value.' Objectives can bejudged to be necessary, prob- able, or possible.
2. Developments and Ramifications
Almost all of the issues discussed by Meinong can be transposed into the arena of linguistic theory. There is a widely recognized analogy between the content of thoughts and the semantic content of linguistic expressions, and many of the same problems can be discerned in the theoretical debates about language.
Meinong's work is especially relevant to the analysis of what are called 'prepositional attitude' con- structions of the form 'X thinks (believes, hopes, fears) t h a t . . . ' and modal constructions, e.g., 'It is necessary
that...,''Itispossiblethat—'Theanalysisofexis- tence and the notion of 'object' have implications for the treatment of quantification in natural language, i.e., of expressions such as 'All' and 'Some.'
Meinong, while showing great sensitivity to the subtleties of natural language, is to an extent prepared to take natural language and its constructions at face value. In this respect, his approach is at marked vari- ance with some mainstream thinking in both phil- osophy and linguistics. Many philosophers of logic, influenced by the belief that natural language is messy and ill-adapted for the rigors of scientific or philo- sophical inquiry, have operated with a distinction between 'logical form' and 'grammatical form,' with the implication that the refined language of technical logic should replace ordinary idiom for such purposes. Interestingly, linguistic theorists, conspicuously those working within the paradigm of Transformational Generative Grammar have used the distinction between 'surface structure' and 'deep structure' to mark the discrepancy between the overt forms of natu- ral language expressions and their 'real' structure and meaning. These two approaches led naturally to the equation of deep structure with logical form.
More recently, some logicians have developed new logics in a Meinongian vein which, it is claimed, do more justice to natural language, and are more adequate to deal with discourse about the nonexistent or the impossible.
See also: Fiction, Logic of; Intentionality; Ontology. Bibliography
Jacquette D 1996 Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Exis- tence and Nonexistence. De Gruyter, Berlin
Meinong A 1960 The theory of objects. In: Chisholm R M (ed.) Realism and The Background of Phenomenology. Free Press, Glencoe, IL
Quine W V O 1953 On what there is. In: From A Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Russell B A W 1905 On denoting. In: Marsh R C (ed.) 1956
Logic and Knowledge. Allen and Unwin, London Parsons T 1980 Nonexistent Objects. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Hilary Putnam (b. 1926) is a professor of math- ematical logic at Harvard University. A pupil of Hans Reichenbach and W. V. O. Quine, he is best-known for his theory of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, and for his views on meaning and reference,
although he has contributed widely to debates in the philosophy of science.
1. Language and Meaning
Not untypically for a philosopher, Putnam's views on
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Putnam, Hilary D. E. B. Pollard