The end of existence?

I'm tempted to make this the last comment I write on Bill's existence posts.  His latest, What the Meinongian Means by 'Has Being' and 'Lacks Being', promises much but delivers nothing new, as far as I can see.   Bill has been reviewing Peter van Inwagen and he hangs this piece on remarks he finds in PVI's  Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities.  PVI says that he doesn't understand what a Meinongian might mean by the phrases has being and lacks being.  Bill puts PVI's incomprehension down to his adherence to the so-called 'thin', 'Quinean', or 'Fressellian' so-called 'theory of existence', and treats us to another exposition of its inadequacies.  This is a pity.  It would have been nice if Bill had told us what he thinks Meinongians mean by a statement such as
M. Some items have no being.
Instead he tells us that he rejects (M) on the grounds that he holds that everything exists.  This, surely, is to conflate the somewhat weaselly term 'item' with 'thing' and 'has being' with 'exists'.  This is not a million miles from PVI's position, which finds (M) to be contradictory, hence false, or so it seems to me!  My own view is that we can make sense of (M) and see that it is true, but we have to draw distinctions between 'item' and 'thing' and between 'has being' and 'exists'.  More on this later, if I can get my thinking clear.

The essence of the 'thin theory' is that nothing of interest can be said about 'existence'.  I'm afraid that over the ten years or so that I've been following his postings on this topic, Bill has said nothing to persuade me otherwise.

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