Against Dicopulaism in Meinongian Tradition

Is Meinongian dicopulation justified? This is the main problem in this paper and our hypothesis is that Meinongian dicopulaism is counterintuitive. This is despite the rich list of syntactic and semantic features that Meinongian advocates of the double copula strategy attribute to the Meinongian (internal/encoding) mode of predication in contrast with the ordinary mode of predication. That is what we demonstrate in this paper. We argue that neither of the requirement that Meinongian formulas (i.e. those containing the Meinongian mode of predication) must be monadic; nor that they resist lambda abstraction; nor that logical closure governs them; nor that they can be incomplete (or inconsistent) and nor that they are no way contingent, may succeed in discriminating Meinongian from ordinary predications. Nonetheless, dicopulaistic semantics support our intuitive understanding of abstract objects as sets of properties only whence they embrace the counterintuitive conception of multiple denotations; of either copulas or (abstract) objects. Meinongian dicopulaism does not work.