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Was Meinong Only Pretending?Author(s): Frederick W. KroonSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 499-527Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2108206 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LI1, No. 3, September 1992

Was Meinong Only Pretending?1

FREDERICK W. KROON

The University of Auckland

1. Introduction.

The last 25 years has seen a strong and growing interest among philosophers in the Theory of Objects that Meinong advanced in the late 1800's and early 1900's,2 an interest that seems largely rooted in the conviction that only a scheme like Meinong's can do justice to our pre-theoretical intuitions about the truth of such sentences as:

(1) The golden mountain is golden (2) The perpetuum mobile is nonexistent (3) [In the Shakespearean play] Hamlet is a prince of Denmark3 (4) The Greeks worshipped Zeus.

To account for such intuitions, according to many supporters of this resur- gent Meinongianism, we need to suppose that seemingly empty terms like 'the golden mountain' and 'Hamlet' denote after all: what they denote, however, are not your ordinary garden-variety existent objects like Mount Ever-

I am grateful to audiences at the Australian National University and the University of Queensland for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, in particular J. J. C. Smart, D. Braddon-Mitchell, the late D. Mannison and T. Nuyen. I owe special thanks to Richard Sylvan for helpful criticism of both my own project and 'pretence' theories in general, and to Ed Zalta and an anonymous referee for numerous useful and incisive comments leading to substantial improvements in the main argument of the paper.

2 Meinong's most famous declaration remains Meinong (1904), although it is one of the contentions of the present paper that neo-Meinongians should also pay more attention than they standardly do to such works as Meinong (1910). The (growing) list of neo- Meinongians include Hector-Neri Castafieda, Roderick Chisholm, Terence Parsons, William Rapaport, Ernest Sosa, Richard Sylvan/Routley, and Ed Zalta (see the partial bibliography at the end of the paper).

3 Pre-theoretical intuitions may, of course, differ, even in the case of neo-Meinongians. Zalta (1983) and (1988) is one who stresses the literal falsity of the unadorned 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark', and argues for the literal truth of a form like 'In the Shakespearean play Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' (that is, the unadorned sentence prefaced by a 'story' or 'in-the-fiction' operator). Zalta thinks that the differing attitudes to these sentences marks an important difference between two opposing Meinongian camps, to be discussed in section 2. (See also note 22 below.)

WAS MEINONG ONLY PRETENDING? 499



est and Prince Charles, but objects that lack existence despite somehow en- joying such properties as being golden, a prince of Denmark, worshipped by the Greeks, and so on.m This explanatory move is sometimes attributed to Meinong himself as well. Karel Lambert, for example, writes that:

[Meinong] took the statements 'The round square is round' and 'The perpetuum mobile is nonexistent' to express attributions. It was quite natural.. .for Meinong to conclude that 'the round square' and 'the perpetuum mobile' stand for objects. For how otherwise could the truth of the statements above be accounted for? (Lambert 1983, p. 37)

Let M be the thesis that the positing of objects which are somehow nonexistent but nonetheless have the appropriate properties allows us to account directly for a range of a priori and a posteriori truths (along the lines of (1)-(4)) that cannot, or cannot easily, be accounted for any other way. If we let (Meinongian) objectualism be the view that 'there are' such things as the nonexistent golden mountain, Hamlet, the perpetuum mobile, and so on, M thus claims that Meinongian objectualism can plausibly be justified in terms of the need to account for a broad range of truths along the lines of (1)44) above. Arguably, it is the standard view among (neo-) Meinongians of how best to motivate a Meinongian framework, as well as a view among some Meinong commentators of how Meinong himself motivates such a framework.5 Let us call the ascription of M to Meinong the Direct Interpre- tation of Meinong.

I believe the Direct Interpretation to be wrong on two fronts. First, like a number of other philosophers (e.g., Parsons 1980, p. 30) I deny that it was the intuitive truth of statements like (1)-(4) that motivated Meinong's commitment to objectualism. Secondly, the Direct Interpretation claims that this motivation led Meinong to invoke a framework of nonexistent objects and their properties that could account for the truth of these statements in a reasonably direct way (consistent with overall coherence), via an extension of the way in which ordinary objects and their properties are the truth-makers of ordinary statements. I also deny, however, that any such direct account of the truth of such statements was really possible from

4 An explicit grammatical argument for a semantic analysis of this type is given by Rapa- port (1981). (Chisholm 1972 also has such an argument, although he restricts it to 'intentional' statements such as (4).) Making this sort of argument in a more general way are, for example, Lambert (1983), Parsons (1980), chapter 2 et passim, Routley (1980), chapter 1 et passim, and Zalta (in the Introduction to Zalta 1983). (The argument is often presented in a fonn that eschews semantic ascent: ( prima facie). truths like (1) to (4) commit us to nonexistent objects such as the golden mountain, Hamlet, and so on. I take this to be a broadly equivalent claim.)

5 Lambert (1983) strongly argues for M as 'the deeper motive' underlying Meinong's views. Routley (1980) and Zalta (1983) seem to agree with this assessment, at least sometimes.

500 FREDERICK W. KROON



Meinong's point of view.6 In rejecting the Direct Interpretation of Meinong, what I hope to show in this paper is that Meinong had one kind of explana- tion of the truth of statements like (1)-(4) that is really rather interest- ingly different: more complex but also more sophisticated. This is Meinong's 'Assumption View', which he articulates in his On Assumptions (Meinong 1910) and which relies on a notion of pretence that assigns a far less direct role to Meinongian objects. Or so at least I argue. Because my reading of Meinong on this point is not the usual one, describing and defend- ing my interpretation of the Assumption View will occupy most of the paper. In the penultimate section I return to the vexing question of the need for Meinongian objects, and discuss Meinong's reasons for retaining them in the face of their apparent explanatory impotence. The final section draws some comparisons with contemporary 'pretence' accounts of fiction, and suggests that a crucial mistake prevented Meinong from adopting such an approach despite coming close to doing so.

2. Redefining the target.

Thesis M, and hence the claim that Meinong accepts thesis M, constitutes a scattered target. Beginning with Meinong's student Mally,7 followers of Meinong have acknowledged at least two different ways in which conditions on properties can consistently yield objects that 'have' those properties. Kit Fine characterizes the ways as follows in a recent discussion of the resurgence of modem Meinongianism:

[These two ways] were both suggested by Meinong's pupil, Mally. The first depends upon introducing two copulas: one is an ordinary copula and may be called 'exemplification'; the other is the special copula, which we may follow Zalta in calling 'encoding'...

The second method depends upon introducing two kinds of property: the ordinary or 'nuclear' properties, and the special or 'extra-nuclear' ones...(Fine 1984, p. 97)

6 Somewhat crudely, I call this a direct account-direct because the aim is to account for certain truths assuming only objects and the way they have their properties, modelling this as far as possible on the way ordinary objects have properties; the contrast is with the sort of indirect account I attribute to Meinong. (If the distinction seems too imprecise to be useful, it doesn't greatly matter, so long as the reader appreciates the distinctiveness of the account I attribute to Meinong in this paper.) Note that some philosophers who deny that Meinong's motivation is correctly captured by the Direct Interpretation nonetheless seem to think that this 'directness' part of the interpretation is surely right: admit the golden mountain, for example, and for Meinong 'the golden mountain is golden' becomes an obvious analytic truth, its truth directly accounted for by assigning the property of being golden to the golden mountain. (Findlay 1963, pp. 43-44, and Routley 1980, pp. 45 ff. come close to such a view.) But even this part of the Direct Interpretation seems to me seriously wrong.

7 See Mally (1904) and (1912).




The first 'two-copula' approach (2-C, for short) gets us a class of essentially abstract Meinongian objects that 'have' their usual properties in a non-standard way: the golden mountain, for example, is an abstract object that fails to exemplify being golden, since only concrete objects can be golden; instead, the properties of being golden and a mountain somehow determine or constitute the abstract golden mountain, which in turn can be said to encode these properties.8 The only properties that such an object can literally exemplify are properties like being abstract, non-golden (because no abstract object is golden), being thought about by Meinong and venerated by medieval explorers, and so on. Furthermore, such abstract objects have the logically trivial property of existence-just like any other object, they are there to be quantified over-although in another sense of 'exists' they may well lack 'existence' (namely, when the properties they encode fail to be ex- emplified by anything).

On the second 'two-kinds-of-properties' approach (2-P, for short), the golden mountain quite literally exemplifies the properties of being golden and a mountain as well as the properties of being nonexistent and being thought about by Meinong; only the first of these are internal or nuclear properties, however, applicable in virtue of the nature of the object itself despite the object's unreality, while the second two are extranuclear properties whose applicability cannot be divorced from the nature of reality. Ex- tranuclear properties can be weakened to special nuclear properties, however, and unlike their extranuclear counterparts these may hold of an object in virtue of its nature alone (Parsons 1980). Furthermore, the two-kinds-of- properties view doesn't regard nonexistent objects as essentially abstract (unlike the two-copula view since nonexistent objects may exemplify perfectly standard physical properties like being golden and a mountain*-

In accordance with this way of drawing the distinction, writers like Cas- tafieda, Rapaport, and Zalta clearly belong to the two-copula camp, while others such as Chisholm, Lambert, Parsons, and Routley/Sylvan equally clearly inhabit the two-kinds-of-properties camp. Some, like Kit Fine and Ernest Sosa, are more difficult to place.9 Whether these writers also go along with a version of M I take to be a different question. I take 2-C and 2-P to be metaphysical theses concerning the way 'nonexistent' objects 'have'

Mally (1912) talks of 'determining'. The term 'constitute' is Rapaport's; see, e.g., Rapa- polt (1978). Zalta later introduced the term 'encode' for what is to all intents and purposes the inverse relation (Zalta 1983). Castafteda uses 'consociation' as opposed to 'consubstantiation' (see, e.g., Castafieda 1979), although for Castafieda fictional objects are in a sense no more abstract than real objects: they are just differently constructed systems of what Castafieda calls guises. See, e.g., Fine (1984), p. 99, and Sosa (1985/86), pp. 496-97. (Sosa here talks of a mode of correct speech in which a character like Hamlet can be said to be indecisive, for example, but also talks of the latter as an internal rather than an external property.)

502 FREDERIcKW. KROON



their properties. Thesis M, by contrast, is a motivational claim according to which something like 2-C or 2-P is required because it allows us to account directly for the truth of statements like (1)-(4). When 2-C or 2-P is appealed to in the latter sort of way I shall for definiteness talk of M2-c or

M2-P.

Which of these (2-C or 2-P) does the Direct Interpretation attribute to Meinong? Presumably 2-P, since it is well known that Meinong decided to follow the early Mally in speaking the language of nuclear versus extra-nuclear properties. At least one author, however, thinks that Meinong was never clear in his own mind which reading he really intended, although in general terms he knew well enough what he wanted: 'nonexistent' objects, and the properties they 'have' (in some sense or other), to provide an account of such data as the intuitive truth of (1)-(4).10

Thus the Direct Interpretation itself has a number of different possible readings. For my present purposes this matters little, however. What I shall argue is that there is a plausible way of understanding Meinong on which the Direct Interpretation on any of these readings misrepresents an important aspect of the way Meinong tries to account for the linguistic evidence. Note that this is not to argue against 2-C or 2-P as an account of Meinong's metaphysical views. I agree, in fact, with those authors who maintain that Meinong accepts a version of 2-P rather than 2-C. All I dispute is that he does so on the basis of the sort of direct argument the Direct Interpretation imputes to him. On my view, in fact, there is a curious relationship between the attitudes Meinong implicitly holds towards 2-P and 2-C. I agree that he in fact accepts 2-P. As I shall later show, however, his account of truths like (1)-(4) harbours a glaring internal tension that shows how close he really was to something more akin to 2-C. -

3. Meinong's Assumption View

Consider again our data: the intuitive truth of sentences like (1)-(4). The question is what account we can give of their truth. There is no doubt that for Meinong nonexistent objects must play a role in any reasonable account we can provide, but what, precisely, is this role? I am going to argue that Meinong's writings strongly suggest a picture of the role of these objects that is strikingly different from the sort of picture encouraged by M-type accounts of the truth of our target statements. Meinong's own picture fits what we might call a two-level account of the truth of such statements, with one level being used to identify the basis of certain truth-claims, and

10 This seems to be the view of Zalta (see Zalta 1988, p. 113, and chapter 8, passim). Virtu- ally every other commentator regards Meinong as a paradigm adherent of 2-P.




the other being used to defend an objectualist reading of the implications of this identification.

The truths that this two-level story apply to are of various types. One type comprises truths like (1) and (3) above: broadly speaking, seemingly genuine descriptive predications involving seemingly empty terms. A second comprises true singular negative existentials like (2). Relational sentences like (4) constitute an interesting special class, as we'll see. For the moment I shall consider only truths of the first type, such as 'the golden mountain is golden' (or, more generally, statements of the form "the P-er W's", where "the 4-er" doesn't denote any existing thing), 'phlogiston is a sooty substance that causes combustion, 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark', and so on.

Suppose then, quite generally, that we want to know what makes some given predication 'O is F' true, where term 0 may or may not stand for an existent object. For reasons we'll look at in section 5, Meinong is certainly committed to the view that 0 will typically stand for some object or other, so letting 0 represent or stand for object 0 (and F for property F), we want to know what makes it true that 0 has F. So far, so good: any M-type theory will agree with this way of putting the matter. At least where nonexistent objects are concerned, however, an M-type theory will then provide its own way of reading the truth-condition in terms of its own account of Meinon- gian objects and how these 'have' their properties. That the golden mountain is golden, for example, will for M2.c reflect the fact that the golden mountain encodes goldenness, while M2-p will see it as an exemplification that holds in virtue of the way a certain object-the golden mountain-is initially given in terms of its nuclear properties. Both accounts see the metaphysical picture as directly required by the need for a good semantic account of the predications in question.

The contrasting view of Meinong to be discussed in this paper is set out in considerable detail in his Ober Annahmen, translated into English as On Assumptions (Meinong 1910). It is presented largely in psychological-cum- epistemological terms, but on my proposed reading the kind of psychological/epistemological story Meinong tells in this work has significant semantic implications. In my view this is scarcely surprising: Meinong is inter- ested in our knowledge of objects, but how we can know a given proposition about an object is surely bound to be a fair guide to what makes it true in the first place. I shall say more about the connection when we come to consider objections to Meinong's view in the next section, but in the meantime I shall simply describe the picture Meinong gives, leaving its semantic content in the background.

The story Meinong tells goes as follows (for the moment I shall defer spelling out the way in which it is a two-level story). Suppose we want to know what some object 0 is like. To discover O's properties it is not enough

504 aEiIcKw.,KRooN



that I have a representation of 0, perhaps a mental image. I must in addition apprehend the object or, as Meinong puts it, intend the object, where intending an object is an active mental act which makes determinate thought and knowledge about an object possible.11 The account of intending he provides comes in two parts. If I believe that object 0 has some form of being (existence or subsistence), then my intending 0 is the mental act of judging that 0 has that form of being. By thus intending 0 I am then able to address the question of O's properties, perhaps by a further exploitation of the perceptual representation that provided the evidence for the existential judgment or, if 0 is a mathematical object, by following proofs whose validity partially rests on my recognition of O's subsistence (p. 174). Now consider objects that we cannot intend in the way described because we do not think of them as either categorically existent or subsistent. Our lack of commitment may be due to either agnosticism on our part or otherwise positive disbelief. Thus I may say (evincing the first attitude): 'The golden mountain may or may not exist', while another, a disbeliever, may say: 'The golden mountain does not exist'. Neither of us intends the golden mountain in the same way as someone who has a perceptual representation 'as of a golden mountain' and who apprehends the golden mountain thereby represented by (wrongly) making the appropriate existential judgment.

So how do we intend the difficult cases: the golden mountain, the perpetuum mobile, phlogiston, Hamlet? Meinong's answer, which he calls the Assumption View, is an intriguing one. Under conditions of agnosticism or disbelief (so runs the answer) we intend objects, and thereby gain a degree of cognitive access to them, by fairly explicitly assuming that they have being. In Meinong's own crisp summing-up:

...in order to give a thing some thought, a person "places himself in the situation in which there is such a thing". (p. 175)

Note that assuming a proposition or objective in this way carries no implications about belief, provisional or otherwise. Indeed, Meinong thinks that assuming is a sui generis intellectual attitude towards objectives, different in kind from judging in large part because of such an absence of commitment. The example that perhaps most graphically bears this out is the case of assumption in the case of play-acting, drama and fiction:

It is worth noting that Meinong has an almost Kantian view of why something like intending must take place for knowledge to be possible. Representations as such are (always?) passive, ambiguous and often virtually subconscious (On Assumptions, pp. 171- 72). Only through the making of an appropriate judgment of being does one apprehend the object:

Representation needs, as something indispensable, the help of an apprehension that is mediate, one going through the objective [of being]. (p. 174)




The intellectual attitude of the child at play is less than judgment, but it is more than representation; which it is to say, it is an attitude of assuming. (p. 84)

Similarly 'fiction is just assumption' (p. 86). What Meinong means is that in play-acting, drama and fiction a certain kind of pretence takes place. Thus

...the child at play "feigns" properties, situations, and so forth with regard to himself and others (p. 84),

while

the dramatist will inevitably be confronted with the task of "placing" himself in not just one but, by turns, almost all the roles of the drama. (p. 86)

Assumption, then, is frequently pretence. We often pretend -that things are thus-and-so without ever believing, even provisionally, that things are really this way. While such pretence can in a sense be entirely serious (a point Meinong makes on p. 84 when mentioning war-games), in no sense are participants serious in believing the assertions that occur during the pretence-unless, of course, they forget the point of the activity. There is no delusion here, no matter how provisional (p. 83), only a different kind of attitude towards assertions: an assumptive or pretend-attitude. Thus a child, playing a game, may put herself in the position of hunter about to be at- tacked by a snarling lion: 'that lion', she screams, pointing to her cat or perhaps a bit of empty space, 'is about to attack me'. Here the child is not making a true-or-false judgment to the effect that there is a lion about to attack her but is at best pretending to express such a judgment. (Meinong makes just this sort of point on p. 84).

Perhaps 'assumption' is a somewhat misleading term to use here-part of the difficulty is the translation-but I think that Meinong's meaning is clear enough. If so, we should have no further difficulty in understanding Meinong's attempt to import the Assumption View into his discussion of intending. Consider again the problem of how to characterize intending when intending is directed at objects about whose ontic status the intender is either agnostic or skeptical. To give such an object some thought, says Meinong, one needs to assume that it has the appropriate form of being (existence or subsistence), not in the sense of provisionally accepting that it has being but in the sense of 'placing oneself in the situation in which there is such a thing' (p. 175). (The form of words mimics rather closely what Meinong had to say about play-acting.) Only in this way can one go beyond mere representation to a cognitive grasp or apprehension of the object.

Meinong puts it like this in a crucial passage:

506 FREDERICKW. KROON



In all the cases we have taken into consideration so far (involving objects that clearly have be-

ing], it has been a factual objective that mediated the apprehending of an objectum. What if such an objective is not at one's disposal? If the person apprehending is in error on that score, it can scarcely mean any important alteration in the main issue. Tbus, if someone speaks in good faith of spirits, "astral bodies," and the like, then by having recourse to existential judgments he does "intend" these objecta, which are simply objecta whose objectives are lacking in factuality. But what if someone intended something like "phlogiston," in order to make this judgment about it: that there isn't anything of that sort? Or say that for whatever reason, he "intends" an

objectum and thinks about it without therewith giving any consideration at all to the question of its existence or non-existence.. .[No one would find reason in this to conjecture that in such a case objectives must play less of a part in his intending. Only this much is certain, that under the given circumstances the objectives which, as it were, mediate the intending cannot be immedi- ately apprehended by means of judgments....[Alssumptions play a quite essential role in the apprehending of object in such cases. This is also in thorough accord with the testimony of direct observation. It tallies with our clear-cut experiences in many cases, that in order to give a thing some thought a person "places himself in the situation in which there is such a thing." (p. 175)

A short digression: There are in fact two types of assumptions that play a role in the apprehension of objects for Meinong, and strictly speaking the above passage addresses only one kind-assumptions of being. The latter occur on the basis of what Meinong calls passive representation (p. 175), which probably covers characterizations that are not explicitly descriptive: terms like 'astral bodies', 'spirits', 'phlogiston', and, no doubt, fictional names like 'Hamlet' fit the bill. Assumptions of being involve pretending that behind the terms stand actual existent objects. In the case of descriptive characterizations, however, we need to appeal to assumptions of so-being. Thus consider the case of the golden mountain (or, more explicitly, the mountain that is of gold). Meinong comments:

...We can straightway see how little the objective of so-being can be judged, where the being of what is intended is left uncertain, let alone where it is negated. True, the "mountain that is of gold" is certainly golden, and the lightweight storage battery that we should so like to produce is certainly light, although at the present time the latter exists no more than the former. On the strength of that, one might again conjecture that the respective objectives of so-being, "the mountain is of gold" and "the storage battery is light in weight," are to be apprehended by means of judgments. But this time, as before, we can say without any reservations that the so-being through which I initially fasten upon an object cannot already be adjudged to the object by me. For to do that, I must have already fastened upon the object. Once this has taken place then the fastening-upon objectives, if I may speak this way, apply to the object analytically in the Kantian sense. But before the fastening upon or even during it, I lack contact with the facts. The fastening-upon objectives cannot be judged; they can only be assumed. (p. 197)

Meinong here appears to postulate a double assumption: I first assume that there is a mountain contextually determinate enough to warrant talk of the mountain, and I then assume that this mountain can be described as golden. It would be odd indeed if Meinong didn't believe that assumptions

wAs mEINONG ONLY PRETENDING? 507



of so-being thus rested on assumptions of being: not only is it hard to see what sense to make of assumptions of so-being without the corresponding assumptions of being, but in addition trying to have the one without the other would mean strangely divergent explanations of the truth of

(5) Phlogiston causes combustion

(to which the assumption-of-being view is supposed to apply) and

(6) The light sooty substance which leaves bodies during combustion causes combustion

(to which the assumption-of-so-being view applies). I shall therefore broadly understand by existential pretence also forms of pretence that Meinong would further characterize in terms of assumptions of so-being. If I am wrong about this, however, it doesn't greatly matter. In that case different versions of the Assumption View apply to different kinds of exam- ples, but this will not substantially affect my argument.

With this understanding in place, let us go on. Suppose that we have a person who is attempting to give the golden mountain some thought, but is skeptical of its existence. Such a person intends the golden mountain by 'placing himself in the situation in which there is such a thing' (or, using an assumption of so-being, he places himself in the situation in which some given mountain can be described as golden). He is not in a very enviable position, of course. There is no perceptual evidence to aid him in the acquisition of further information. Nonetheless, there are certain conclusions he can draw. He can make the safe claims: 'The golden mountain is golden' and 'The golden mountain is a mountain' as well as other claims sanctioned by logic. As Meinong puts it in the passage just cited, such attributes now 'apply to the object analytically in the Kantian sense'.

Similarly a person who is attempting to give phlogiston or Hamlet some thought puts himself in the situation in which there is such a substance or person, that is, in which the theory or play are taken as recording the truth. Subject to this existential pretence, he sees that phlogiston causes combustion, that Hamlet is a prince of Denmark, and so on. Note that all these claims are sanctioned by a form of ordinary (non-free) logic:12 their justification appeals to quantificational laws whose variables need only be taken to range over items that have being, since all our moves so far have taken place in the scope of a piece of pretence that presents us with a real or

It needn't be classical logic. Perhaps there is room for certain constraints on the idea that logical consequences of what is true in the scope of a pretence are also true in the scope of the pretence (for motivation of such constraints, see Parsons 1980, p. 177). I owe this point to Ed Zalta.

508 IiemmuciW. IROoN



existent golden mountain, a real substance phlogiston, a real person Ham- let. 13

Following Kendall Walton, I shall place whatever is true in the scope of a pretence of this sort within asterisks (* ( ) *).14 Meinong's view, then, is that in order to give an object like the golden mountain some thought we must first *accept that there exists a [contextually unique] mountain that is golden*, and hence *accept that the golden mountain exists*, and we are then able to conclude in virtue of the usual laws of logic that * the golden mountain is golden as well as a mountain *. Similarly for objects like phlogiston and Hamlet, although here the specification of what we are building into the scope of the pretence is bound to be much more complex, as are the conditions on the notion of what's true in the pretence. Note how different this is from the epistemological picture encouraged by accounts of type M2-c and M2-P: for the former, our judgment of the truth of 'the golden mountain is golden' presumably reflects our implicit understanding of the way conditions on (nuclear) properties generate objects exemplifying those properties, while for the latter it reflects our ability to decode what an object like the golden mountain encodes. Neither acknowledges anything like an intermediate level of pretence."5

So far we have talked of intrinsic property-ascriptions only-property-ascriptions like 'the golden mountain is golden', 'Hamlet is a prince of Den- mark', 'phlogiston causes combustion'. These fit Meinong's category of intendingng" an objectum and think[ing] about it without therewith giving any consideration at all to the question of its existence or non-existence'. But Meinong also applies his Assumption View to negative existential statements such as 'phlogiston [the perpetuum mobile, Hamlet, etc.] doesn't exist'. Thus consider the first long passage cited above. Meinong there begins his discussion of the intending of objects that are not believed to have existence by asking:

13 Compare the moves made within the scope of the pretence with the sort of moves one can make in conditional natural-deduction proofs by making certain assumptions 'pro tempore'. (I owe the analogy to an anonymous referee, but it is one that Meinong would certainly accept since such a use of assumptions is one that Meinong himself emphasises when expounding his doctrine of assumptions.)

14 See Walton's seminal papers of the 1970's, Walton (1973) and (1978), and his recent book Mimesis as Make-Believe (Walton 1990), which I unfortunately saw only after the present paper was completed. Cf. also Evans's account and development of Wal- ton's techniques in Evans (1982).

15 To be sure, Zalta talks a lot of the importance of 'in-the-fiction' truths, and their role in settling the properties objects like Hamlet 'have'. Zalta's procedure, however, seems more a case of certain clear truths that apparently make objectual reference to Hamlet being allowed to determine what properties Hamlet has. This is nothing like the quite indirect way in which a psychological attitude-assumption or pretence-is involved in determining facts about Hamlet on Meinong's account.




...what if someone intended something like "phlogiston", in order to make this judgment about it: that there isn't anything of that sort? (p. 175)

He continues that only the assumption or pretence that there is such a thing can allow us to think about it and hence make this judgment about it.

On the surface, such a move looks barely intelligible: how can one apprehend the object by 'placing [one]self inma situation in which there is such a thing', only to deny that there really is such a thing? How does the appeal to a contradiction solve the puzzle of how we know the statement 'phlogiston doesn't exist'? The answer is surely along the following lines. When we 'make this judgment about [phlogiston]: that there isn't anything of that sort', we must be using a piece of existential pretence to say something about reality. Roughly speaking, the sentence 'Phlogiston does not [really] exist' as uttered by a person P is true just when a certain bit of pretence- *phlogiston exists*-invoked by P in uttering the sentence happens to be merely pretence in so far as the real world fails to match the world as it is pretended to be. The latter is presumably the case when the sorts of intrinsic properties uncovered by such a use of existential pretence fail to fit any object found in the real world. Thus because 'the golden mountain is golden and a mountain' and 'phlogiston is light, sooty and causes combustion' are both determined as true on this model, and given that the real world con- tains nothing that is golden and a mountain or a light and sooty cause of combustion, we can truthfully aver that the golden mountain and phlogiston do not exist.

4. Objections to Meinong's Assumption View. The account I have attributed to Meineng raises some basic questions that must be answered if we are to see it as a plausible alternative to the Direct Interpretation of Meinong. Let me try to deal with the most obvious one first. Meinong, it is bound to be said, indulges in a fairly monstrous piece of illogic if the above account is a fair characterization. The mistake occurs in the ascription of intrinsic properties, that is, in the extrapolation from: *

the golden mountain is golden* to: the golden mountain is golden, from *Hamlet is a prince of Denmark* to: Hamlet is a prince of Denmark, and so on. (Call this the exportation strategy.)16 Remember that Meinong is ex- plaining how a person might discover truths concerning such nonexistents as Hamlet and the golden mountain-truths such as 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' and 'the golden mountain is golden'. It is little comfort knowing that there are pretend-truths of this kind which the person has access to, for what is true within the scope of an existential pretence surely need not be

16 Kit Fine uses the term 'exportable' in a very similar context (see Fine 1984, p. 136).




literally true (unless, of course, what one pretends to exist also actually exists). To the extent that Meinong supposes this without argument his strategy begs the question.17

Meinong's reply, I think, would be that in the case of an object lacking existence that is the way to determine its ordinary properties. Any other model of property-ascription would be inappropriate in this case. To even think about a nonexistent object is to represent it as existing: discovering its properties is just to exploit this existential assumption, just as discovering the properties of an existent object is to exploit the evidential circumstances in terms of which we think about that object.

Unfortunately, the analogy simply reinforces the problem. In the case of existent objects, perception is an acknowledged (if fallible) way of determining an objects's properties: perception puts us in touch with the object and its properties, and so we understand how the epistemic method can be said to yield knowledge of the fact that the object has these properties. How we know, we might say, should be rooted in what we know, and that is surely so in the case of perceptual knowledge of real objects. In the case of unreal objects, however, there seems to be no reason to suppose that the use of 'existential pretence' similarly puts us in touch with the object concerned.

The only way Meinong can answer this objection, I think, is to admit to an especially intimate relation between property-ascriptions and pretence. We might say that Meinong seems committed to the following Superve- nience Thesis:

The sense in which a nonexistent object may be said to have a property P is to be analytically grounded in the 'existential pretence' that there is such an object and in the fact that this object has P in the scope of the pretence,

for if the thesis is right, there is nothing more to the fact of the object's possessing P in this sense than its possessing P in the scope of the existential pretence, thereby making the validity of the exportation strategy immediate. Meinong doesn't say explicitly that this is his view, but it certainly fits with what he says elsewhere (recall, for example, his comment that in light of the pretence that 'the mountain is golden', being golden and being a mountain 'apply to the object [the golden mountain] analytically in the Kantian sense'). In light of the need to understand the exportation strategy, the Su- pervenience Thesis appears to represent the only charitable, and surely the least problematic, way of reading the Assumption View. It is a way of read-

17 This sort of argument is also used in Grossman (1974 b) to argue for the claim that nonexistent objects have no extensional properties.

WAS MEiNONG ONLY PRETENDING? 511



ing the view, furthermore, that receives strong support when we turn to discuss the real source of Meinong's objectualism (section 5). In any case, that is how I propose to read Meinong from here on. If I am wrong about this, and if for Meinong the Assumption View is (wrongly) intended as a purely epistemological-cum-psychological view without semantic implications,18 then the remainder of the paper is best read as a discussion of an account that Meinong might very profitably have adopted and arguably should have adopted.

Before we reject the Supervenience Thesis out of hand (and with it, perhaps, the attempt to attribute so odd a view to Meinong), it is worth noting that the thesis is of a form that anyone has to adopt if he or she is to combine commitment to an ontology of fictional objects, say, with a belief in levels of characterization that originate in the pretence that the world is a certain way. Thus Gareth Evans, Saul Kripke and John Searle, among others, all think that fiction is based on pretence, but they also think-and for varying reasons-that there nonetheless exists a genuine existent fictional character corresponding to a name like 'Hamlet'.19 Such philosophers will find it hard to resist the view that this fictional object in some sense has a property like wanting to kill his step-father to avenge his own father's death, with the property-ascription somehow supervening on the pretence embodied in the play. For the very kind of locution that warrants adopting the ontological commitment also warrants the property-ascription: e.g., the true sentence

(7) Hamlet is a famous Shakespearean character who wanted to kill his step-father to avenge his own father's death

displays an ontological commitment to fictional characters in the main clause, according to these philosophers, and makes an associated property-ascription in the subordinate clause.

So if I am right in my reconstruction of Meinong, he is by no means alone in grounding property-ascriptions to such things as fictional objects in the

18 I want to stress how difficult it really is to take this view seriously. Perhaps the most basic problem it faces is the following. On the Assumption View anyone who uses and understands a sentence containing a teim for a nonexistent like Hamlet, phlogiston, or the golden mountain 'intends' the object and thereby assumes its existence. But in that case without something like the Supervenience Thesis none of us ever has an untainted grasp of the real meaning of an attribution such as 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark', 'phlogiston is a light, sooty, substance' or 'the golden mountain is golden', since the truth-conditions of such statements involve the attribution of relevant properties to nonexistent objects.

19 See Evans (1982), p. 364ff and Searle (1979), p. 240. Kripke's remarks on this point are contained in his 1973 John Locke lectures, and in lectures at Princeton University in 1981 and Cornell University in 1982 (and, no doubt, at other places and times). Although I heard Kripke's oral presentation in 1981, I am here and elsewhere in this paper relying for the most part on the brief account contained in Evans (1982). (Unfortunately, Kripke's work is still not in print, so I am unable to provide first-hand documentation.)




pretence that the world is a certain way. Given a commitment to such objects, this is scarcely an unreasonable approach, and so it can scarcely be the unusual nature of this way of grounding property-ascriptions that prevents us from seeing the suggested interpretation of Meinong as a reasonable interpretation. We shall see below and in the concluding section that the real oddness of Meinong's view is located elsewhere-in the nature of the property-ascriptions that he thinks his method warrants.

Let me now consider a different objection to Meinong's strategy: the claim that it yields property-ascriptions that even Meinong must concede to be blatantly false. For within the scope of an appropriate existential pretence, we can decide not only judgments of the "the 4-er )'s" and 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' variety but also existential judgments (trivially so). Thus within the scope of the existential pretence that there is a (contextually unique) mountain presented as golden, the golden mountain assuredly exists, just as within the scope of the story of Hamlet Hamlet assuredly exists (i.e., *Hamlet exists*). Meinong's view now appears to license the extrapolation from an existential pretence such as *the golden mountain exists* or *Hamlet exists* to a literal existence-ascription such as 'the golden mountain exists' or 'Hamlet exists'.20 Hence on my interpretation of Meinong Meinong seems to do more than beg the question: he buys into blatant falsehood.

Odd though they may seem, such existence-ascriptions should occasion little surprise. We do, after all, have a use for a statement like 'Hamlet exists'. Whenever one wants to draw a contrast between such a statement and a corresponding statement concerning what is fictional within a work of fiction like Hamlet, something like 'Hamlet exists' is precisely what we do say. Thus we can certainly truly say the following:

(8) Hamlet exists alright. The actions of this prince of Denmark dominate the play. There is no such person as Gonzago, on the other hand. He is just a character from a drama whose perfor- mance, Hamlet hoped, would show up the king's treachery.21

20 Meinong in effect denies this sort of implication on p. 197 of On Assumptions, claiming that what is assumed true in thus intending an object can't be judged true (unless, of course, the object is subsequently found to have genuine existence). Beyond the fact that it gets him out of trouble, however, I doubt that Meinong has any reason for rejecting this implication of his method.

21 The reference is to Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2. Castafleda provides an intriguing example of the phenomenon of fictional fictional characters in 'Fiction and Reality' (Castafieda 1979, p. 45), that of Anatole France's hero Putois who is a merely fictional character within the main fiction of the story, yet is in the end more central to the story than any of the main characters.




Presumably the reason why it is more difficult to see a reading of this sort where talk of the golden mountain is concerned is that there is no corresponding contrast between what is fictional and not fictional in the myth of the golden mountain: the myth is not rich enough to generate such a contrast. But that is a contingent feature of the myth, not an essential feature of the use of the description 'the golden mountain'.

In short, the sentence 'Hamlet exists (did exist)' as used in (8) is indeed as much of a truth as 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark': the sense in which one is true is a sense in which the other is true. So it is to that extent no criticism of Meinong's view (on my interpretation of that view) that it implies the truth of 'Hamlet exists'. The real problem that this example brings up is quite different. Meinong is also aware that there is in addition a rather more salient sense in which 'Hamlet does not exist' is true. If anything, that is the literal truth about Hamlet: our very understanding of the sentence, as Meinong emphasises in the Assumption View's account of negative existentials, involves a movement in thought from an existential pretence to reality. So Meinong is really committed to the view that any sense in which 'Hamlet exists' is true is not the most salient, literal sense. But by our earlier argument that also suggests that any sense in which 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' is true is not the most salient, literal sense either, since those two sentences are true in exactly the same sense under the Supervenience Thesis. So the Supervenience Thesis should have led Meinong directly to the conclusion that the sort of property-ascriptions about nonexistents that this thesis sanctions are not property-ascriptions in the standard, literal sense.

Meinong didn't quite see this, of course: there is every evidence that he thought 'the golden mountain is golden' and 'Hamlet is a prince of Den- mark' were ordinary cases of property-ascription, that is, that the golden mountain exemplifies the standard property of goldenness just as you and I exemplify such properties as being blond or grey-haired. The fact that the Assumption View is supposed to show how we can have a degree of cognitive access to objects even when we don't know whether they exist or not demonstrates this point rather nicely, since the Assumption View is thereby thought to have the resources to give a uniform treatment of the various kinds of property-ascription. This being so, we might speculate that Meinong could have tried to deal with the above problem by invoking the one-copula-but-two-kinds-of-properties view 2-P, maintaining that 'exists' as used to state the truth 'Hamlet exists' really signifies the nuclear rather than extranuclear property of existence whereas being a prince of Denmark is a straightforward nuclear property.

From the point of view of our objection, however, this rather gets things the wrong way around. I have tried to argue that, given the Assumption View and the Supervenience Thesis it encourages, there is no reason whatso-

514 REDERICKW. KROON



ever to see a fundamental distinction between two kinds of properties. Only if one accepts the sort of direct argument that drives an M-type theory like M2Lp-and this stands opposed, in my view, to Meinong's argument in On Assumptions-will the literal truth of target-sentences like 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' or 'the golden mountain is golden' appear an overriding datum, in the end requiring a distinction between two kinds of properties in order to render the ensuing theory consistent. So even though there is every reason to believe that Meinong accepts 2-P, his method of argument in On Assumptions suggests that he shouldn't have, and that he is simply confused on this score. (I return to this point in the concluding section.)

5. The Assumption View and the Role of Meinong's Objectualism.

In the previous section I tried to defuse some obvious objections to the As- sumption View, along the way attributing to Meinong what I have called the Supervenience Thesis. If what I said there is substantially correct, Meinong's Assumption View is on reflection not as curious a view as it first appears. Still, the radical nature of the view should not be underestimated. Just how radical a view it is can best be seen by noting that Meinong accepts both objectualism and the Assumption View, allowing the former to inter- pret the latter. Thus for Meinong when we 'place ourselves in the situation in which there is such a thing' as phlogiston or Hamlet we are assuming, of phlogiston, that it is a substance actually found in the world, and, of Ham- let, that he actually exists as a real person. We might say that Meinong holds to an objectual conservatism about pretence, in the sense that the relevant form of pretence has to be about, or conserve the identity of, particular objects that are available independently of the pretence.

So on my interpretation of the Assumption View, Meinong's account of sentences like (1)-(4) involves not only an appeal to pretence but also an appeal to Meinongian objects, with the mediating link between these two ele- ments provided by Meinong's objectual conservatism about pretence. Now on the surface there is a yet another problem here for Meinong's view as I have interpreted it, but of quite a different kind from the problems consid- ered in the previous section. Such a combination of pretence and objectualism seems unnecessarily extravagant. The point can be put as follows. We began the characterization of Meinong's Assumption View by asking what, for Meinong, made it the case that some possibly nonexistent object 0 was F. But the subsequent appeal to pretence makes one wonder about the wisdom of this way of phrasing the question. Why need objects come into it at all? If Meinong's real concern can be more neutrally described as a concern to discover what makes some sentence 'phlogiston is F' or 'Hamlet is G' a truth rather than falsehood (and why not redescribe Meinong's project thus?), there may be no need to go beyond a thorough-going appeal to pretence.




This, in fact, is precisely what we find in some versions of the currently popular pretence-account of the nature of fiction. Modem pretence theorists of fiction use the idea of pretence to explicate both the nature of the speech- act a writer engages in when writing or telling fiction and also the notion of truth in and, for some, about fiction. Thus Gareth Evans writes (in true Meinongian spirit) that

... story-tellers, actors, etc., engage in pretence when they create the infonnational backdrop [against which the actions of their creations takes place]. (Evans 1982, p. 364)

In addition, however, he urges that nothing more than pretence is needed to account for truth 'about what went on in the novel' as well:

...discourse "about what went on in the nover' (or "in the film" or in the 'play") involves a continuation [for serious purposes] of the pretence in which these creations originated.. .(p. cit., p. 365)22

Armed with the idea of pretence, there may not even be a need to invoke special objects in order to deal with true negative existentials such as 'phlogiston doesn't exist' or 'Hamlet does not exist'. Thus, true to form, Gareth Evans has tried to give a pretence-oriented, non-objectualist account of certain true singular negative existentials-sentences such as 'that little green man doesn't [really] exist', uttered in the context of a game of make-

2 See Evans (1982, pp. 365-66). Evans thinks that this kind of account shows how the sentence 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmaik' (as used by us rather than Shakespeare) can be seen as really true, not just pretend-true or make-believe true, even though it makes no reference to a fictional object Hamlet. So does Walton (1990). Others demur. For example, Ed Zalta (private communication) claims that only something like 'In the play Hamlet was a prince of Denmark' is really true; and he thinks that we are owed a semantic account that shows this, thus hoping to motivate an M-type theory of such linguistic data. But I see no overriding reason to reject the intuition that 'Hamlet was a prince of Denmark' is true. Why can't we just decree to assess such a sentence for absolute truth or falsity in the manner described by Evans? (I agree that such a way of assessing sentences is not the usual way, of course.) Nonetheless, I accept Zalta's point that the pretence theorist certainly ought to be able to give an account of the operator-prefaced version. It seems to me, however, that our theorist may well have a plausible way of doing this. Thus Evans could say that by using the in-the-story operator 'in the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet...' the ut- terer of the sentence 'Hamlet was a prince of Denmark' somehow signals his intention to continue a pretence indulged in elsewhere, namely in the fictional work indicated, but in a way that is up for assessment as true or false absolutely depending on whether what is said is true or false in the scope of the original pretence. Here 'in the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet...' functions as kind of quasi-place indicator. So if I am right the pretence theorist can perfectly happily accept the intelligibility of in-the-story operators without this committing him to fictional objects. It is only if we think of 'in-the-story' operators as intentional operators of a certain kind that Zalta's challenge becomes a difficult one (but on this point see Evans's criticisms of such operators in Evans 1982, p. 364). For a different non-objectualist account of sentences like 'In the play, Hamlet was a prince of Den- mark', but from broadly within a pretence-framework, see Bach (1985/86) and Currie (1990, chapter 2 and p. 158ff.).

516 REDERICKW. KROON



believe in which participants pretend that they are looking at a little green man. For Evans, someone uttering this sentence pretends or make-believes that there is such a little green man, only to disown the pretence as mere pretence in the very utterance of the sentence.23 Such a position is an analogue of Meinong's position, with perhaps the only truly striking difference being the objectualism in terms of which Meinong understands the act of 'placing oneself in the situation in which there is such a thing'.

What we may call (relatively) pure pretence accounts of fiction thus try to do without special fictional and mythical objects in places where Meinong imports an appeal to such objects.24 The question that now con- fronts us is this. Why did Meinong not opt for such a 'de-objectified' Meinongian position? If, as I have claimed, the Direct Interpretation is wrong to understand Meinong's inference to Meinongian objects in terms of the need to account for the truth of sentences like (1)-(4), what is left to explain the fact that Meinong invokes Meinongian objects in the Assump- tion View? That commitment now seems to be left largely unintelligible, which is surely a problem for the sort of interpretation of Meinong that I have offered in this paper.

The solution to this problem is in fact not all that hard to find. Meinong does indeed appeal to both pretence and objectualism in his account of property-ascriptions like (l)-(4). I don't think that Meinong's way of doing this is based on any simple fallacy, however. In particular, I doubt that Meinong believed that the logic and dynamics of pretence straightforwardly requires it to be objectually conservative. That puts things the wrong way around for Meinong. Instead, Meinong's objectualism forms the constant background to an enquiry that ends up invoking pretence in order to solve a problem about property-ascription in the case-of antecedently given Meinongian objects. Objects already enter at the ground-level, as it were.

23 I should admit that this simplifies the story considerably. According to Evans's Russel- lian account of propositions, there literally is no proposition to be entertained if there is no little green man; we can in that case only make-believe that we are entertaining a proposition. Evans concludes that the sentence 'that little green man really exists' is literally true just when in make-believedly entertaining the proposition expressed by 'that little green man exists' we are in fact entertaining a true proposition, and so is literally false when in thus make-believedly entertaining a proposition we are only make-believedly entertaining a proposition.

24 Strictly speaking, few pretence theorists try to do without fictional objects altogether (Walton 1990 is one of the few exceptions), so that pureness, not surprisingly, is a matter of degree. Thus even Evans agrees that there are fictional objects, but he thinks these only get appealed to in theoretical contexts such as: 'There are only three characters in the whole of English literature who kill their mothers' (Evans 1982, p. 367). See also van In- wagen (1977), who is not strictly a pretence theorist but who bases his commitment to fictional objects on the same broad theoretical grounds.




Meinong's real reason for his objectualism and his consequent objectual conservatism about pretence is in fact not at all mysterious. The reason concerns our actual relationships as opposed to anything that could be construed as pretend-relationships. When Meinong presents his Assumption View in terms of our giving 'a thing some thought' (e.g., p. 175), he means precisely what he says. He bases his statement of the cognitive problem on the belief that we already stand in actual relationships to nonexistent objects such as the golden mountain, phlogiston, Hamlet. The evident fact that we stand in these relationships is what justifies Meinong's objectualism, but because these relationships do not determine a set of intrinsic facts about the objects (or, on the epistemological side, a way of knowing them) we need to sup- plement this story with the Assumption View.

In the first edition of On Assumptions, Meinong had thought differently. There he had proposed what we might call the No-Objects View according to which what is involved in the objectivity of representations is the fact that we merely assume or pretend to ourselves that there exists a represented object. This is what Meinong now has to say in the second edition of On As-

sumptions:

...if objectivity consists in the 'having' of an object, and the 'had' object must be one that has be-

ing, then a representation simply does not have an object in any of the instances of fiction, and at

this point one really cannot see why objectivity is still ascribed to the representation, despite

its dependency on a fiction....4Those proceeded in a more consistent fashion who flatly termed a

representation like that of the golden mountain.. .objectless.

Yet even now this attitude strikes me as being completely in conflict with the facts. Just as

clearly now as before, the facts tell me instead that when I think of unclouded human happiness or of the perpetual motion machine, my thoughts are directed to 'something', i.e., to an object,

just as surely as if it were a matter of the most everyday piece of actuality. (p. 170)

Meinong commentators seem mostly to agree that this is Meinong's central argument for his belief in nonexistent objects.25 Furthermore, it is in some ways quite an attractive argument, especially in the context of Meinong's adherence to the Assumption View. For both editions of On As- sumptions, it seems, the Assumption View was supposed to show how you might sensibly arrive at facts about 'fictions' by exploiting the pretence that certain representations had existent objects. The second edition of On As- sumptions lays down the limits of the use of such pretence. Meinong now claims that, contrary to the No-Objects View, the pretence that certain representations have existent objects can only be seen as pretence, about the objects of these representations, that they are in fact existent. (Hence Meinong must think that 'pure' pretence theories are bound to fail.) The reason is that

5 Thus Parsons (1980), p. 30, agrees despite himself espousing a version of M. (As we saw earlier, Lambert [1983] is one who disagrees.)

518 FmEmucKw. KROON



appealing to assumption or pretence without bringing in objects is in the end powerless to account for certain plain facts about actual people. Among such facts we find our apparent ties to mythical and fictional objects: just as we admire or despise Gorbachev, so we admire or despise Hamlet; just as mountain-climbers think hard about the mountains they are about to climb, so medieval explorers thought often and hard about the golden mountain; just as we may fear certain people, so the Greeks feared and worshipped Zeus-no amount of appeal to our powers of pretence seems able to turn these into anything but actual facts about actual relationships. Hence the need to posit Hamlet, Zeus, the golden mountain, and so on, as objects of a certain sort.26

We can now also begin to see more clearly why the Assumption View fits this sort of perspective particularly well, thus confirming my interpretation of that view. For M-type theories, nonexistent objects are objects ev- identially tied to the need to account for the truth of certain statements. The above argument for Meinongian objects, on the other hand, delivers such objects as objects of consciousness. Such a dependence on consciousness can be understoood in two ways. If the dependence is merely evidential (so that consciousness merely provides us with the evidence for a new class of mind- independent objects), then one can justifiably complain that the Superve- nience Thesis makes it mysterious why the having of standard properties like being golden or being a prince of Denmark should have such radically different grounds in existent and nonexistent objects. But there are in fact good reasons for supposing that Meinong understood this dependence on consciousness in a particularly strong sense: such objects are given as intentional objects, and so are conceptualized in terms of their relationship to consciousness.27

26 From the point of view of some of the other doctrines in On Assumptions this is actually a very weak argument. Meinong really gives the game away when he says that we can't think of a nonexistent object without representing it at the same time as existing, since according to the Assumption View that is how we intend such an object. But what part of the intentional phenomena, then, can't we explain in terms of the agent's merely assuming that there is such an object, as on the No-Objects view, rather than there actually being such an object? How is the feeling of 'directedness' accounted for by positing objects when our real grasp of such objects is via the pretence of their of existence-a feature they don't possess in fact-rather than via our access to some objective feature that causally accounts for the feeling of directedness?

27 An excellent defense of such a claim is found in Bencivenga (1985/86). I take my own work in this paper as being largely sympathetic to Bencivenga's view, and, indeed, as providing additional support. Like Bencivenga, I am not impressed by the argument that for Meinong nonexistent objects are conceptually independent of consciousness since 'it is no more necessary to an Object that it be presented in order not to exist than it is in order to exist' (Meinong 1904, p. 83). The 'conceptualization' view doesn't deny this, but merely insists that because nonexistent objects are conceptualized in terms of consciousness they are all at least in principle objects of thought even if in fact no one has ever thought about




Still, if they are to be worthy of the title 'object', they better have their complement of intrinsic properties. But which? Since they are objects of consciousness, presumably the answer must also be found in consciousness, in particular in the sort of intentional attitude by which we are able to think of them. According to Meinong, that attitude is just the attitude of intending, which involves assuming that the object in question has being or so-being. Whatever properties are correctly ascribed within the scope of such an assumption thus correctly capture the nature or constitution of the object. Be- cause of the organic connection which the 'conceptualization' view thus posits between the kind of object it is and the ground of the associated property-ascriptions, the Supervenience Thesis now appears to reflect a deep truth about nonexistent objects on Meinong's understanding of such objects (thus in turn providing further evidence for my interpretation of the Assumption View).

It is time-at last-that we made good on an earlier promise to explain how Meinong's Assumption View gives us a distinctive two-level account of what makes sentences like (1)-(4) true. This is possible now that we understand more clearly the nature of Meinong's commitment to nonexistent objects. Take a sentence like (3) ('Hamlet is a prince of Denmark'). Accord- ing to the Assumption View as I have interpreted it, what makes such a sentence true is that the particular object Hamlet vouchsafed to us through the above sort of argument for objectualism can be made the subject of an existential pretence-that is, * it is the case that [this] Hamlet exists *. It will then be true in the scope of this pretence that Hamlet is a prince of Denmark (i.e., * Hamlet is a prince of Denmark *). That, in turn, is what analytically grounds the fact that the object Hamlet does indeed have the property of being prince of Denmark (by the Supervenience Thesis). So in the account of what makes the sentence true, objectualism and pretence play complemen- tary roles, linked by Meinong's objectual conservatism about pretence. The objectualist commitment to a certain object accessible to thought and the consequent objectually conservative pretence that grounds such an object's properties give us the two theoretical levels.

Similarly with a relational truth like (4) ('The Greeks worshipped Zeus'). (4) has the interesting property that it reports the existence of the sort of intentional state that Meinong saw as obviously directed towards nonexistent objects. Someone contemplating the truth of such a sentence,

them. (Meinong agrees: '...all objects are knowable', he admits in Meinong 1904, p. 92.) On my interpretation of him, Meinong should say that what intrinsic properties such an unknown but knowable object has is determined by what someone would find were that person to pretend that the object exists, in much the same way as on the usual response-dependent account of color the color of an unseen surface is determined by how it would appear under standard conditions. (The color-analogy is adapted from Bencivenga 1985/86, pp. 477-79.)




however, also finds himself standing in an intentional relationship to the object in question (the relation of intending), and to do so he *accepts that Zeus exists*. His judging that the Greeks worshipped Zeus thus takes place against the background of this objectually conservative bit of existential pretence. But since for Meinong the proposition thus judged as fact truly concerns worship of a nonexistent object Zeus, we once again need to attribute to Meinong belief in some form of the Supervenience Thesis, some way of legitimating the cancelling of the pretence, since the pretence literally assumes something false.

Once again we see here the joint operation of the two levels of objectualism and objectually conservative pretence. As we saw earlier, M-type theories present us with a contrastingly more direct account of what makes sentences like (1)-(4) true, with objects and their properties brought together in a way that extends as directly as possible the way in which ordinary objects and their properties function as truth-makers of statements. Unlike Meinong's Assumption View, such accounts allow no constitutive role to the mental act of pretending that there is such a thing, or that a thing is such- and-so.

6. A Problem for the Assumption View. In this paper I have defended an interpretation of Meinong's theory of objects based on his Assumption View. I have not tried to defend the Assump- tion View itself, however, except to the extent that certain initially very plausible criticisms would have cast doubt on that interpretation. Hope- fully I have thereby shown that the interpretation is a reasonable one. I want to conclude this paper by offering a brief critique of Meinong's account, based not on alleged defects in the ensuing theory of objects but on the pres- ence of a crucial internal tension in Meinong's understanding of the As- sumption View. While this critique might persuade some that the interpretation itself is at fault, in my opinion it points to something quite different-that we find in Meinong's combination of an appeal to both pretence and objectualism a surprisingly rich and sophisticated doctrine, carrying implications that Meinong never fully understood.

In the previous section, recall, we saw how Meinong moved between the first and second editions of On Assumptions from a No-Objects version of the Assumption View, yielding a view in some ways similar to 'pure' pretence theories of fiction, to an objectualist version. I shall begin my critique by trying to push the analogy between Meinong's appeal to assumption and the currently popular pretence approach to fiction even further, assimilating Meinong's combination of objectualism and pretence in the second edition of On Assumptions to what we might call 'impure' pretence accounts of the use

wAs MEINONG ONLY PRETENDING? 521



of fictional terms. My critique of Meinong rests on the way the analogy breaks down.

(Relatively) 'impure' pretence-accounts of the use of fictional terms argue that at a certain level of sophistication in the ordinary use of fictional terms there emerges ontic commitment to fictional entities or characters. ('Pure' pretence accounts virtually try to do without objects altogether, as we saw earlier.) John Searle, for example, thinks of this level as the level of truth about fiction as opposed to truth within fiction (Searle 1979, pp. 240- 41). Unlike Evans who thinks that truth about fiction involves a continuation of the pretence indulged in by the original authors of the fiction concerned, Searle posits fictional entities as a way of securing the absolute (non- pretend) truth or falsity of statements about fiction.

We have already seen that Meinong occupies a special niche on the question of where the need for nonexistent objects first becomes theoretically pressing. According to the argument of the last section, Meinong believes that ontic commitment of a sort emerges primarily at the level of our actual intentional relationships to items like fictional and mythological characters and not at the level of, for example, truth about fiction. While truth about fiction will no doubt in the end be truth about such fictional characters, the need to posit such entities arises from this more fundamental source. Is there an analogue to such a choice of level within the 'impure' pretence approach to fiction?

Surprisingly enough, there is. Saul Kripke, for one, has defended a broadly similar choice of level in a series of (unpublished) lectures, beginning with his John Locke lectures at Oxford in 1973. According to Kripke, fictional objects are required to make sense of the truth of such broadly intentional relational statements as 'John admired Hamlet' and 'The Greeks worshipped Zeus', but are not required to make sense of the truth of such statements about fiction as 'Hamlet was a prince of Denmark'. The latter can be understood in terms of pretence alone, unlike the former which are truths about actual relationships between people and objects."

But while there are clear similarities between Meinong's Assumption View and this version of the pretence approach, the differences between these views are even more fundamental, and they underscore what seems to

2 Cf. Evans (1982), p. 367. The emphasis on such relational sentences reminds one of Chisholm's argument in Chisholm (1972) for Meinongian objects, but Kripke, as will be- come clear, is not at all sympathetic to Chisholm's literal Meinongian reading of these sentences. Note that Kripke, like Chisholm, wants to account for the truth of certain favoured statements. Meinong, by contrast, tells his story in non-semantic, broadly psychological temps. Allowing for this difference, I hope that the similarities between the two accounts are obvious enough. For criticism of Kripke's view that more than pretence is needed to explain the truth of such relational intentional statements, see Evans (1982), p. 366, Walton (1990) and Wettstein (1984).

522 FREDERICK W. KROON



me an important weakness in Meinong's approach. For remember that Meinong uses his objectual conservatism about pretence as a link between his objectualism and his appeal to pretence. By contrast, a pretence theorist like Kripke does not think that in pretending that there is such a person as Hamlet we are pretending that the actual fictional object Hamlet has the property of physical existence. That would make little sense, since fictional objects on this sort of model are abstract existent objects (as on the two- copula view) that are causally dependent in some way on particular works of fiction. The most that Kripke can say is that such abstract fictional objects should in some sense be credited with properties that supervene on the pretence embodied in these works of fiction: that is, the position should make room for truths like our earlier (7):

(7) Hamlet is a famous Shakespearean character who wanted to kill his step-father to avenge his own father's death,

but obviously not by insisting that the abstract character Hamlet literally exemplifies the property of wanting to kill his stepfather (only real people can exemplify such a property).29

So modern pretence theorists like Kripke do not follow Meinong's objectual conservatism about pretence even when they follow a version of his objectualism about fictional entities. Why, then, does Meinong's Assumption View see a tight connection between these two doctrines? I can only conjecture that Meinong saw no other option: once Hamlet, the golden mountain, etc., are vouchsafed to us as intentional objects, pretending for the sake of determining further facts about these objects that there is such a 'thing' as Hamlet or the golden mountain can only mean pretending de re of Hamlet or the golden mountain that there is such a thing, for only in this way can what is uncovered in the pretence reveal what is true of the object.

But it is Meinong, I think, who is confused about this issue, and if some of my earlier remarks are correct the source of the confusion lies within the Assumption View itself. For Meinong's objectual conservatism about pretence presupposes that we can meaningfully pretend that Hamlet and the

29 As I recall from an oral presentation of his view, Kripke argued for a systematic reinter- pretation of a clause like 'wanted to kill his step-father to avenge his own father's death' in this kind of context. That would make the view an instance of what Castafieda calls a 'predicate ambiguity' view, effectively criticized in Castafieda 1979, pp. 41-42. (I hope this correctly represents Kripke's view at the time.) Other versions of the 'abstract fictional objects' view are the Rapaport-Zalta 2-C approach and the approach of van Inwa- gen (1977). Both of these appeal to a second, structurally distinct way in which an abstract object can 'have' its properties-the ascription of properties by a work to an abstract fictional object for van Inwagen, and the object's encoding of properties for Zalta. (I should add that van Inwagen's account is far from clear. It can probably also be understood as a misleadingly presented version of the predicate-ambiguity view.)




golden mountain have ordinary worldly existence (something which even Meinong would agree is not possible in the case of such abstract 'things' as numbers and qualities, which have subsistence rather than existence). But what, we can now ask, licenses this presupposition? One incipient problem is that if, as suggested earlier, such objects are really conceptualized as objects of consciousness, then it is far from clear that they are objects of a kind we can think of as existing in the ordinary worldly sense. More generally, whether Hamlet or the golden mountain can be sensibly thought of as having worldly existence depends on what kind of thing it is, and hence on what its fundamental properties are. How can we be sure that such objects fit the bill in this regard?

Now it may be thought that the Assumption View implicitly answers this question, since it claims to be able to show how the golden mountain must be golden, phlogiston a light and sooty substance, Hamlet a prince of Denmark, and so on. Objects with such properties can easily be imagined to have the property of existence, presumably, since these are properties of the very type possessed by ordinary existent objects. Of course the Assumption View derives this conclusion by presupposing objectual conservatism about pretence, but maybe we can see here a kind of 'bootstrap' argument in support of objectual conservatism.

As we saw earlier, however, the argument from the Assumption View contained a subtle flaw: the most it could license was the claim that there is a sense in which Hamlet, for example, is a prince of Denmark or phlogiston a light and sooty substance, where this can't be the literal sense since otherwise the method would license such clear falsehoods as 'Hamlet exists' and 'phlogiston exists'. As for what non-literalness might mean here, there are a number of possibilities. It might mean that a nonstandard mode of predication is involved (as for 2-C) or, alternatively, that predicates like 'is a prince of Denmark' and 'is a light and sooty substance' undergo a systematic rein- terpretation in such cases. The details do not concern us in this paper. What is clear, however, is that if it can't be the literal sense then it is surely doubtful that we can meaningfully think of a fictional object like Hamlet as having ordinary worldly existence: it just doesn't seem to be the right sort of object once ordinary property-ascription is reconstrued in such a way. So it is doubtful that 'placing ourselves in the situation where there is such a thing' can be meaningfully understood in terms of Meinong's objectual conservatism about pretence. It follows that Meinong's Assumption View harbours a double confusion-it can't yield the sort of literal truths about nonexistent Meinongian objects that Meinong wanted, and its account of the role of pretence in relation to these objects is seriously flawed as a conse- quence.

524 F MCEKRIC W. KROON



These comments are not intended to be purely critical. For if I am right in my reconstruction and in my critique, it shows that Meinong's position is in a way not all that far from one of the best anti-Meinongian views around (at least in the case of fiction), namely some version of the current pretence approach to the nature of fictional language, coupled, perhaps, with a commitment to abstract fictional characters. Thus like current pretence accounts of fictional language, Meinong stresses the semantic importance of something like the activity of 'plac[ing oneself] in the situation in which there is such a thing' as Hamlet, although to his credit he generalises the approach to en- compass talk of failed posits like phlogiston and Zeus as well. We saw that this brought him close to a pure version of a pretence account in the first edition of On Assumptions where he was tempted by a No-Objects version of the Assumption View. In the second edition, by contrast, he firmly accepted an objectualist version of a pretence account, and his objectualism here seems to be the familiar extravagant commitment to concrete nonexistent so de- spised by his critics. But even here Meinong's own arguments bring him close to quite a different, some would say patently anti-Meinongian, version of such an objectualist framework.30 For had Meinong realised that his very method of grounding property-ascriptions in terms of pretence harboured the difficulty of non-literalness commented on earlier, he might have realised that from the point of view of at least the argument in On Assump- tions his 'nonexistent' objects were nothing like ordinary concrete objects in kind, but were more akin to abstract objects, much as for Kripke and 2-C. As to whether this hidden implication is not in the end too great a price to pay for taking Meinong's views on the role of pretence seriously, that of course is another and, no doubt, much more difficult question.

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