Ingarden vs. Meinong on Ficta’s Generation and Properties

I explore the problems of ficta ‘generation’ and ‘properties’ in light of Meinong and Ingarden. Comparing Ingarden and the historical Meinong is not a novel project idea. By contrast, comparing Ingarden and a phenomenological Meinong, to my knowledge, has not been explored yet. Here, I rely on Alberto Voltolini’s ‘phenomenological conception of außerseiende entities’. I devise Ingarden’s phenomenological ontology to account for the problems of ascription and generation crippling Meinong’s. In short, I argue for Ingarden’s account as being the better suited to accommodate ficta’s generation and properties in a way that doesn’t complicate our approach to fiction.


I
Does Sherlock exist?Is he a genius detective?The answer to the latter depends on our answer to the former.In order to say anything about Sherlock, we have first to determine his existential status.At least this is how most non-eliminativist theories of ficta would go about this issue.Alexius Meinong begged to differ.According to him, we can talk about ficta's properties independently of their existence.In other words, although ficta are non-existent, they have certain properties.In Meinongian terms, the Sosein (being so-and-so) of a non-existent entity is independent of its Sein (existence).This is what Meinong termed the 'independence principle'.Meinong also speaks of the 'indifference principle'.According to him, 'the Object is by nature indifferent to being [außerseiend], although at least one of its two Objectives of being, the Object's being or non-being, subsist'. 1In application, the indifference principle states that existence or non-existence are not essential parts of Sherlock.It would be wrong, however, to understand this principle as entailing that Sherlock possesses both existence and non-existence. 2 These two principles are the key in Meinong's theory of objects, and it is these two principles on which analytic neo-Meinongians primarily build their reformulations of Meinong's position.
Richard Routley describes Meinong's 'independence principle' as laying the groundwork for his own characterization postulate.Routley posits that Meinong's principles pave the way for a view of nonentities (his version of Meinong's objects), in which they are characterized by their properties irrespective of their existential status.Following Meinong, Routley stresses that 'existence is not a characterising feature' and that we cannot determine the existential status of nonentities using characterization alone. 3Indeed, this is what Meinong posited, underlining that 'existence is not a constitutive nuclear property that qualifies the Sosein of any object'. 4Further, Meinong's independence principle entails the 'denial of the ontological assumption' -namely, the assumption 'according to which no (genuine) statements about what does not exist are true'. 5By and large, Routley's characterization postulate foregrounds Meinong's emphasis on properties and the role they play in determining the nature of nonentities.However, Routley's postulate raises numerous issues.
Given that Sherlock is a nonentity, how is it possible that he possesses many properties?Considered prima facie, two hypotheses come to mind as to how non-existent ficta possess properties.We can say that Sherlock possesses the property of being a genius detective due to 'language' or 'thought'. 6As Voltolini posits, it can be argued that nonentities have their properties through 'linguistic ascription', hence giving language the power of ascription.As Bertrand Russell showed, ascribing this power to language can render the object described contradictory (for example, the existent present King of France would be forced to exist).Another challenge lies in ascribing to language the power of generation.Routley's postulate suggests that we obtain a different Meinongian object by changing its description.This is the point with which Russell found issue, and which he tried to amend with his theory of definite descriptions. 7Meinong himself would not give language either of these powers.According to him, an object is designated by a linguistic term if it outlines a presentation, whose content then presents the object. 8at about thought?Can we say that thought ascribes properties to nonentities?
We can argue that the thoughts underlying language are responsible for nonentities having properties.This would make nonentities intentional.The generative power of thought can be explained by resorting to Franz Brentano's intentionality, in which every thought is directed at an object, existing or otherwise. 9Moreover, intentional objects are conceived of as having certain properties that distinguish them from other intentional objects.One can argue that Meinong would have gone beyond Brentano to assert thought as having the power of ascription as well.The resultant entities would be intentional objects that possess the properties they are conceived of as having.This formulation is what Voltolini terms the 'Meinongian phenomenological conception of außerseiende beings', according to which Meinong's objects are beyond existence and non-existence, endowed with the properties they have following their being thought of as such.Accordingly, ficta would be a subset of außerseiende intentional objects, introduced into the domain of being by an act of imagination.This account can be labelled a Meinongian phenomenological theory of ficta.sceptic of außerseiende entities would argue that the problems faced by language possessing generative or ascriptive powers also inflict thought.How can thought bring into being a fictum with properties?Whether it can or not, it is safe to say that Meinong did not adopt a phenomenological view of außerseiende entities.According to him, thought cannot have generative or ascriptive powers either.The intentional acts directed at nonentities only grasp independently constituted objects, and the properties they possess are independent of their grasping intentional acts. 11Following Meinong, many neo-Meinongians have tried to reformulate his position so as to avoid the aforementioned problems. 12 Routley's principle rightly emphasizes, it is properties that define Meinong's objects.
It would not then be off the mark to state that determining the status of ficta properties is tantamount to determining ficta's status.This is what the Principle of the Freedom of Assumption (PFA) puts forth -namely, a view of non-existent entities that draws from their properties instead of the thoughts underlying their descriptions.We can speak of two versions of this principle: weak and strong.The weak version states that, for every collection of properties, there is a non-existent object that has all of them.
In Meinongian terminology, this object-generation principle states that an object corresponds to every being-so. 13The strong version states that, for every collection of properties, there is one and only one object that has all and only those properties. 14is way of putting Meinong's account turns him into a Platonist.That is, properties are postulated to be out there, and außerseiende objects' being depends on them.
Further, it can be argued that the manner by which the PFA generates Meinongian objects is trivial.'A certain Meinongian object is, so to speak, made to belong to the overall ontological domain by the fact that it possesses all the properties involved in any instantiation of the Principle.' 15 far, two possible readings of Meinong have been laid out.The Platonist reading is more akin to the historical Meinong.The PFA makes Meinongian objects' generation as having their properties less mysterious but it cannot explain how the overall domain of außerseiende objects can have a subset of ficta -for this reading only explains how außerseiende objects are generated without specifying the generation of subsets within this domain.The phenomenological reading, on the other hand, provides us with a theory of ficta as außerseiende objects of imagination.But this view inexplicably assigns to thought the powers of generation and ascription. 16ven that Meinong's historical account does not show how ficta fit within the domain of außerseiende objects, it would be wiser to further pursue the phenomenological theory.To do so, the problems of generation and ascription need to be sorted out.
I think what Voltolini is trying to achieve by reading Meinong phenomenologically is similar to what I am trying to defend here -namely, a phenomenological-ontological account of ficta properties.If anything could save Meinong's account, it would be the phenomenological-ontological reading.But Meinong himself did not take this route.
So it seems that we have reached an impasse.We can either explain how Meinong's entities possess properties and risk ending up with no account of ficta, or we can have an account of ficta and give problematic ontological powers to thought.I choose the latter alternative.In order to give substance to such a view and moreover to avoid the problems identified by Voltolini, I will in the following defend an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of ficta.

II
In Ingarden's view, ficta are generated by the author's creative acts.These acts are imaginative acts, which is a specific kind of intentional act (Phantasie).The generated objects are purely intentional objects. 17So, imagination is what Ingarden describes as possessing the power of generation.One can raise an objection to this -namely, would not such a view invite too many entities?How can I be sure that the Sherlock I am imagining is the same Sherlock someone else is imagining?Let us say I am imagining 'Sherlock'.I am picturing in my head a white man dressed elegantly in nineteenthcentury clothing.The famous hat is there, too.I am imagining a man as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock, whose imaginative acts first brought him to life.Without the properties ascribed to Sherlock by Conan Doyle, I would not be able to imaginatively distinguish Sherlock from, say, Dr Watson.So, properties are not only needed to determine ficta's identity criteria within and across written works; they are also needed to determine ficta's identity criteria within imagination itself.The fact that we cannot imagine, and thereby generate, a fictum without associating it with its properties shows that Meinong was right in foregrounding properties.However, depicting ficta as non-existent entities that are generated independently of thought misses the mark.For one, how can we ground Sherlock's properties?As I pointed out above, imagining one and the same Sherlock, or at least staying as faithful as possible to the original Sherlock, requires us to refer to his properties as described by Conan Doyle.Since Meinong did not subscribe to creationism, the question of grounding ficta's properties remains unresolved.Following Ingarden, grounding ficta's properties is fairly straightforward.Being products of imagination, ficta lack an essence of their own.In Ingardenian terms, they are 'heteronomous' entities.A heteronomous entity is 'an entity which draws its being and its collective stock of attributes from the enactment [Vollzug] of an intentional conscious experience, which in a specific integrated fashion is endowed with a content, and it would not exist at all without this enactment'. 18The concept of 'heteronomy' is contrasted with 'autonomy'.'An entity […] exists autonomously […]   if it has its existential foundation within itself.' 19 The creative acts that bring about ficta are existentially autonomous.Such a formulation, I argue, can avert Voltolini's criticism of thought as having the unfathomable ontological powers of generation and ascription.To be more explicit, the powers of generation and ascription are problematic because they need to be grounded in something that is not in need of further grounding.Meinong and neo-Meinongians seem to ground generation and 17 See Roman Ingarden, Controversy over the Existence of the World, vol. 1, trans.Arthur Szylewicz (Frankfurt: Lang, 2013), 109-55.Purely intentional objects differ from real and ideal entities.Whereas the former wholly depend on intentional acts, the latter do not.18 Ibid., 113.19 Ibid., 109.ascription in the jungle of non-existence.Apart from the other logical problems associated with it,20 this leads to a circularity problem.Meinong seems to ground generation in ascription and ascription in generation.Put differently, nonentities are generated as possessing their properties, and they possess their properties because they are generated as so.Ingarden, on the other hand, would argue that both the generation and the properties of ficta are grounded in intentional acts.Before saying more about ficta's properties à la Ingarden, ficta's generation as purely intentional entities calls for a more concentrated analysis.
Ingarden's phenomenological-ontological account proves to be superior.This is so primarily because Ingarden grants authors a role in creating ficta.Meinong took a weird turn and raised his 'principle of the unlimited freedom of assumption' in defence of ficta's Platonic origins: 'In regard to every genuine or, so to speak, ordinary determination of so-being, it is in my power, according to the principle of unlimited freedom of assumption, to pick out -by means of adequate intention -an entity which in fact has that determination of so-being.' 21In fact, adhering to the logic of the excerpt above, the concept of 'generation' does not fit Meinong's account at all.If properties only 'pick out' ficta from an ever-existing realm, then it is pointless to talk of generation.A problem that concerns genuine Meinongians pertains to the criteria by which ficta are selected, not generated.Put differently, it is unclear how an author selects a certain fictum on the basis of its property set.Sainsbury raises an interesting suggestion by maintaining that, although ficta have no beginning in time, we can postulate a time at which non-existent objects' Sosein is subjected to 'enrichment'.This is precisely what the creative process of authors adds to Meinongian objects.
Prior to this process, there was already a non-existent object but it only possessed a 'minimal Sosein'.The creative process equips nonentities with more properties.A major problem with this suggestion is that there are no clear criteria that would allow authors to add properties to a certain object.This brings us again to the 'selection problem'. 22It is hard, if not hopeless, to treat ficta seriously without associating them with their authors.Sherlock did not just appear ex nihilo, miraculously possessing the properties of the famous Sherlock.It was in 1887 that Conan Doyle published the first story containing Sherlock, thus giving birth to the famous character. 23In fact, even some neo-Meinongians have conceded authorial creativity.Berto, for instance, argues for a refined Meinongianism, in which ficta are not selected but imagined to be so-and-so. 24Terence Parsons and Edward Zalta, attempting to regulate our discourse about ficta properties, have provided Meinongian accounts of ficta, in which their properties are bound by their authors' works. 25 can be argued, contra Ingarden, that his account of ficta generation leads to ficta that ontologically appear and disappear.That is, Sherlock only exists as long as an imaginative act is intentionally directed upon him.Once the act fades, Sherlock fades with it. 26To address this argument, we need to take a closer look at Ingarden's imagination theory.In his 'Essentiale Fragen', 27 Ingarden delves deeper into objects' creation (the following is Witold Płotka's reformulation): Given that phantasy creates its objects through contents, Ingarden defines five conditions of how to understand that 'objects are created in imagination' (Bildung der Gegenstände in der Phantasie): (1) Imagination is a combination of previous (and not original) experiences; (2) it is always possible to indicate a moment when such a presentation was built; (3) this presentation is a correlation of a concrete and creative psychic process that is localizable in time; (4) one can manipulate the imagined object; and (5) the object referred by the imaginative act does not exist. 28ese conditions illustrate that ficta's pure intentionality differs from Sartre's and Brentano's understanding of intentionality.Ingarden's imagination is an imagination extended in time.The phenomenological complexity of its acts leaves no room for problematic entities that ontologically flit in and out.Another argument in favour of Ingardenian intentionality can be made in reference to his system of dependencies. 29cta come to life after their author creates them.This is what Amie Thomasson designates 'historical dependence'.Sherlock is dependent on the creative acts of Conan Doyle and not, say, those of Virginia Woolf.In Thomassonian terms, Sherlock is 'rigidly historically' dependent on Conan Doyle's creative acts.In addition, ficta enter into a seemingly dependence relation with literary works.Thomasson labels this 'generic constant dependence'.A fictum depends constantly for its subsistence on the existence of some literary work about it.This dependence is merely generic because any work about it would do. 30According to Ingarden, ficta's 'foundation' is embedded in literary works.He distinguishes between two senses of foundation: 'immediate' and 'derivative'.On the one hand, ficta have their immediate existential foundation in the sentences that carry their descriptions.The literary work's sentences, on the other hand, have their immediate existential foundation in the creative acts of the work's author, which makes ficta's existential foundation derived. 31 have a 'borrowed intentionality', which gives ficta a relative independence from their generating acts. 32clarification of ficta's persistence is in order.Two main elements can be distinguished within linguistic intentionality.First, a sentence's intentionality has the 'source' of its existence in the intentional acts of the author, whereas the 'basis' of its existence lies within ideal concepts/qualities and word signs. 33What guarantees ficta's persistence are ideal concepts and their meaning content.According to Ingarden, '[i]t is only with reference to the meaning content of ideal concepts that the readers of a literary work can reactualize in an identical manner the meaning content of sentences given to them by the author'. 34But this raises a further challenge: what is the relation between language and consciousness?If we assign linguistic intentionality to subjective consciousness, would we not be stuck again with psychologism?To avoid this turn, Ingarden sought to answer the following: 'Are the sentences that arise from subjective operations intersubjectively identical?Do they also exist when they are not thought?
What is their mode of existence and the ontic basis of their existence if they do exist?' 35 In response, he advocated a metaphysical solution, conceding the existence of 'ontically autonomous ideal concepts'.By disregarding language as the reference point of intersubjectivity, Ingarden shields the literary work's mode from the threats of psychologism.What sentence-forming operations add to the literary work's mode is the actualization of the meaning components concerning ideal concepts. 36In short, linguistic intentionality has one basis in authorial intentionality and another in ideal concepts.The latter transcend both subjective sentence-forming operations and the meanings conferred on them.Structured as such, ideal concepts are the 'regulative principle' that ensures language's intersubjectivity. 37It is, therefore, 'impossible to achieve between two conscious subjects genuine linguistic communication' without the admission of ideal concepts. 38Through language, these objects become intersubjective, but only under the condition that language itself is not dependent on a subjective consciousness. 39garden also speaks of (Sartrean/Brentanian) imaginary entities but he attributes their existence to a different group of creative acts.He makes a distinction between two different groups of acts. 40The first group is responsible for the generation of 'free' fantasies, for example reading into a cloud shape a specific entity.This group of acts is satisfied with creating intentional entities that vanish with their generating acts.The acts of the second group take it upon themselves to bring into being purely intentional entities that are over and above their generating acts.To elaborate, two variants within the second group need to be clarified.One variant strives to make 32 Ingarden, Literary Work, 125-26.33 Ibid., 361.Ideal qualities are denoted by ideal concepts, which in turn are expressed by word signs.34 Ibid., 364.35 Ibid, 358.36 Ibid., 361.37 Ibid.38 Ibid., 364.39 Richard van Oort, 'Three Models of Fiction: The Logical, the Phenomenological, and the Anthropological (Searle, Ingarden, Gans) ', New Literary History 29 (1998): 453.40 This distinction ameliorates Ingarden's account of ficta generation, as opposed to merely imaginary entities.
the generated intentional entities lasting, relying on an existentially stronger basis that would ensure they outlive their generating acts. 41This transforms the generated entity from a purely subjective entity into an intersubjective objectivity (Objektivität), which can be accessible by distinct acts of consciousness. 42The second variant is comprised of acts that bring about intentional entities serving as 'models ' (Vorbilder)   or 'blueprints' for certain autonomous entities to embody. 43By and large, Ingarden's purely intentional account of ficta differs greatly from Sartre's and Brentano's imaginary views.And not just that: Ingarden's intentionality can be devised to avert the many problems plaguing the view of ficta as imaginary objects.

III
It is time to proceed to the 'ascription' problem.According to Voltolini, a phenomenological conception of ficta ascribes to thought an inexplicable ascriptive power, whereas a Platonic view of Meinongianism successfully formulates a view of non-existent objects as being characterized by their properties.In this section, I will show that (1) a phenomenology of properties is not problematic, and (2) a Meinongianism of properties raises many issues that can be remedied with the use of Ingarden's phenomenological ontology.
Neo-Meinongians striving to save Meinong's account adopt two different strategies.
They are on the same page when it comes to ficta's characterization by reference to their properties but they disagree over ficta's status.According to some, ficta are not a subset of außerseiende entities; they are instead abstract entities.That is, unlike Meinong, they believe that ficta subsist (exist as abstracta).One neo-Meinongian approach depicts fictional entities as corresponding to the set of all the properties included in a fiction.This approach can be construed as entailing that a fictum is a 41 Literary works serve as such a basis.This should not be construed as stating that literary works are identifiable with their material substrates, or else there would be as many Sherlocks as there are books about him (see Ingarden, Controversy, vol. 1, 14).These substrates are not 'aspects' of the literary work (that is, they do not belong to its 'existential scope').The literary work, being an intentional object, is dependent only on conscious acts (and, eventually, ideal concepts).Of course, we can add material substrates as the 'basis' of literary works, but this must also be ascribed to them intentionally.
42 The intersubjective nature of fiction is explainable in terms of literary works.Ingarden holds objects of consciousness as 'primary purely intentional objects', for they are only accessible subjectively (Literary Work, 125).Husserl backed his view of consciousness with a transcendental idealism.Ingarden, having rejected Husserl's turn, could not ground his model in some form of empirical psychology of subjects.Instead, he grounded his intentionality in language, considering it an objective ground for intersubjectivity.Language borrows the author's intentionality, allowing a fiction's words and sentenceformations to subsist as 'derived purely intentional objects' (van Oort, 'Three Models of Fiction', 449).Explaining the intersubjective nature of fiction in terms of language brings the pragmatics of the former into play.Although Ingarden was not explicitly bothered about the pragmatics of fictional language, his phenomenological-ontological deliberations can shed new light on this matter.Summa, relying on Iser's critique, analyzes in detail the implications of Ingarden's thought to the pragmatics of fiction.Iser's view of the performative nature of fiction is specifically directed at the indeterminacies of the latter.Iser's claim that literary texts are 'appellative' (appealing to readers to participate) is devised to explain how readers fill out a fiction's indeterminacies.So, instead of regarding them as a flaw in themselves, fiction's indeterminacies bring to the fore the productivity of fictional language; see Michela Summa set-correlate rather than a pure set. 44Other neo-Meinongians consider ficta to be akin to generic objects like 'forms' or 'blueprints'. 45To elaborate, in an abstractionist view of ficta that bears some resemblance to Meinong, Zalta suggests we view ficta as Platonic forms.To defend his view, Zalta invokes Plato's 'one over the many principle', according to which 'if there are two distinct F-things, then there is a Form of F in which they both participate'.Forms can be considered as some sort of A-object (abstract object) that makes the form of an object G any A-object that encodes G. Zalta explicates his view in 'participation' terms.It can be stated that an object participates in the form of G if the form encodes a property that the object exemplifies.For instance, every object that exemplifies the colour red participates in the form redness. 46 In the same vein, Rapaport depicts M-objects (Meinongian objects) as 'blueprints': 47 'A blueprint of a house is to an M-object as a house of which it is a blueprint is to an actual object corresponding to the M-object.Just as the house need never be built or many houses may be built from the one blueprint, so there might be no or many actual objects correlated with an M-object.' 48In short, neo-Meinongians mostly adopt two approaches to ficta's characterizing properties: a set-theoretical approach and a Platonic approach.Both approaches follow Meinong's PFA but differ from him as regards ficta's mode. 49e set-theoretical and Platonic approaches assume that ficta are characterized by their properties.But ficta do not only possess properties that the story assigns to them; otherwise, many properties that ficta do possess would not be admitted.
For instance, the property Sherlock is created by Conan Doyle is not included in the fiction about him.It is, nonetheless, a property of Sherlock; a rather important one.
How can we, then, determine which properties Sherlock really possesses?To answer this, neo-Meinongians appeal to two distinctions: 'kinds of property' and 'modes of predication'. 50The kinds of property distinction is mostly adopted by proponents of ficta as set-theoretical abstracta.The roots of this distinction can be found in Meinong.
According to him, a fictum possesses 'constitutive' and 'extraconstitutive' properties. 51e first property kind is applicable to the properties that a fiction assigns to the fictum (for example, Sherlock's being a genius).The second kind concerns the properties 44 William Rapaport, 'Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox', Noûs 12  (1978): 153-80, and Parsons, Nonexistent Objects, are good examples of this approach.Whether neo-Meinongians adopting this approach adhere to set-correlates is a matter of controversy.Smith, for example, argues that Parsons's preference for set-correlates should be clearer (Smith, 'Ingarden vs. Meinong', 99).45 Voltolini, How Ficta Follow Fiction, 16-18.46 Zalta, Abstract Objects, 41-43.Note that 'exemplification' and 'participation' do not entail the same thing.To Zalta, some forms participate in themselves.For instance, we can posit that all forms participate in Platonic being, supporting the claim that forms can participate in themselves.47 Rapaport does not explicitly hold Meinongian objects to be abstract.48 Rapaport, 'Meinongian Theories', 164.49 For an analysis of the pros/cons of each approach, see Voltolini, How Ficta Follow  Fiction, 19-22.50 The property kinds / predication modes distinction is orthogonal to the ontological distinction concerning ficta's status.So, although Castañeda and Zalta, for example, favour the modes of predication distinction, the former takes ficta to be concrete, whereas the latter assumes they are abstract.A similar approach is found in the modes of predication distinction.In Zalta's terminology, Sherlock encodes the property of being a genius detective, and a fleshand-blood detective exemplifies the same property.I do not think Zalta's distinction is inspired by Ingarden but I will nonetheless claim that the two distinctions are reducible to one another.Of course, this is not without textual evidence.Ingarden, Uemura explicates, distinguishes between 'standard' and 'non-standard' property instantiation.Ficta instantiate properties in both modes.They instantiate the properties connected with their content non-standardly and the properties connected with their intentional structure standardly, that is, in the same way real objects do. 62t there are many problems with Zalta's distinction.If Ingarden's distinction is the same, then it is also subject to the same difficulties.A major problem raised against Zalta's distinction has to do with its ability to account for reference to ficta.Zalta's strategy to capture a fictional name's unique reference, as developed with Otávio Bueno, is embedded in Object Theory (OT).Holmes's denotation is: Because they are what stands between the creative acts of an author and the literary work's life, sentences 26 Brentano and Jean-Paul Sartre are paradigmatic examples of such a view.27 Roman Ingarden, 'Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zu dem Wesensproblem', Jahrbuch Für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung 7 (1925): 269-70.
Kroon argues that Meinong indeed defended a similar view of ficta at a certain point.Meinong believed that ficta 'are there' as long as they are postulated by thought.As regards properties, Meinong asserted that ficta possess properties insofar as it is pretended of them to have those properties; see Fred Kroon, 'Was Meinong Only Pretending?', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 499-527.
Put informally, Holmes is 'the abstract object encoding exactly the properties F such that, in the Conan Doyle novels, Holmes is F'.A story (situation), likewise, is an 'abstract object that encodes only properties of the form [λyp] (being such that p), for some proposition p'.The truth of a proposition p in a situation s is determined by whether it encodes [λyp]:Francesco Berto et al. find fault with what Bueno and Zalta postulate to facilitate their model, that is, 'a determinate group of features F such that, in the relevant stories, the fictional object is F'.Even if we assume that at a specific time there is such a content, it is not certain that we can have a determinate story content across different time spans.Storytelling is a temporally extended, revisable process.In Star Trek: Discovery we were introduced to new descriptions of Spock.For example, we learned that Spock has an adopted sister.Therefore, it can be argued that 'In the Star Trek saga, Spock has an adopted sister' was false until 2016.By Bueno and Zalta's identification criterion, it appears that the referents of'Spock' in 2016 (Spock2016)and 'Spock' in 2017 (Spock2017) are distinct.Spock2017 encodes a property that Spock2016 does not: that of having an adopted sister.Given OT's identity criterion, which states that abstracta a and b are identical iff for any property F a encodes F iff 62 Genki Uemura, 'Demystifying Roman Ingarden's Purely Intentional Objects of Perception', in New Phenomenological Studies in Japan, ed.Nicolas de Warren and Shigeru Taguchi (Cham: Springer, 2019), 143.As the attentive reader will have noticed, Ingarden seems to have a foot in the property kinds (strict/intended properties) and another in the predication modes (standard/non-standard instantiation).Perhaps his approach can be labelled combinatorial, but one can question whether it is dispensable.If an entity's strict properties are instantiated standardly and its intended properties non-standardly, then why can we not just stick with one of the distinctions?Personally, I would reduce the property kinds to the predication modes.Accordingly, strict/intended properties are reducible to instantiation modes.