Exploring Routley's Nuclear Meinongianism and Beyond

Abstract

Even though Richard Routley is known as a proponent of so-called
nuclear Meinongianism (in his terminology, noneism), the details of his
view in Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond (1980) have not attracted
much attention. In this paper, I critically examine two notable
but less known features of Meinongianism in Routley (1980) which particularly
concern a core claim of nuclear Meinongianism that so-called
Characterization Principle (CP) is applicable to nuclear properties
(in his terminology, characterizing properties) but not to extranuclear
properties (in his terminology, noncharacterizing properties): The first
one is his ‘double determination’ argument for restricting the class of
properties to which CP is applicable; and the second is his expansion
of the class of nuclear properties in terms of the supposition operator s.
Firstly, I will show that the double determination argument fails, since,
for some extranuclear properties, the argument fails to justify that CP
is not applicable to them, and, moreover, the argument unintendedly
shows that CP is not applicable to some nuclear properties. Secondly,
based on the idea that the supposition operator, combined with any
property f, forms the intensional property of being assumed to have
f, I will give a formal treatment of the supposition operator within
the framework of world semantics. We will see that this interpretation
goes beyond Routley’s original nuclear Meinongianism and assimilates
his view with modal Meinongianism proposed by Priest (2005, 2016).