Ontological Categories and the Problem of Expressibility

Abstract

Frege famously held that ontological categories correspond to logico-syntactic types. Some-thing is an object just in case it can be referred to by a singular term, and likewise for allthe other categories. This view faces an expressibility problem. In order to express theview, we need to generalize across categories; but by the view itself, any one variable canonly range over a single category. We provide a sharp formulation of the problem, showthat there is no easy way out, and then explore some of the hard ways.