Abstract

By claiming, against Bolzano, that all presentations have an object on top of their content, even when this object does not actually exist, Twardowski notoriously paved the way for Meinong's "Gegenstandstheorie", which will make place for inexistent objects and their properties. And this provides a very interesting counter-model to the standard account of meaning and reference which is linked to extensional semantics. However, by equating inexistent objects with the sets of their descriptive features, Meinongian formal systems tend to jeopardise the content-object distinction. The universal validity of such a distinction will here be assessed by having a closer look at different kinds of “inexistent objects”.