Examples Of Nonexistents

#Better examples for theories of talk about nonexistent objects

We present new examples which we believe make better examples than the standard ones for discussing theories of how we should talk about nonexistent objects. In particular, these examples should help us to adjudicate between broadly Meinongian theories and broadly Russellian theories, where broadly Meinongian theories are those which say we can understand the copula “is” in a statement like “x is phi” as applying some sort of subsistence predicate to x.

Jason: maybe some brief waffle about the new popularity of applied philosophy (Stich etc.)

Alison: (a) find examples in corpuses/corpera of talk about nonexistents, and (b) discuss the importance of using real examples.

Jason: rest of paper