Replies to the critics

Menzel’s commentary is a tightly focused, extended argument and it may be summarized as follows: (a) though Zalta gathers a range of phenomena under a small set of concepts, unfortunately, the framework is a possibilist one; (b) Zalta justifies possibilism by arguing that it provides the simplest and most natural explanation and analysis of such phenomena as ordinary modal discourse; but (c) by taking the modal operator as primitive, Zalta doesn’t really offer any genuine analysis or explanation of modal discourse and so cannot establish the superiority of his possibilism. With respect to (a), Menzel correctly points out that the theory’s possibilism derives not from its commitment to abstract objects, but rather from its commitment to objects x that possibly exist but which don’t in fact exist (i.e., to objects that satisfy the condition: E!x& ¬E!x). The theory doesn’t explicitly assert that there are any of these objects, but when one adds ordinary modal intuitions such as ‘There might have been something which is F ’ (i.e., ∃xFx), the Barcan formula guarantees that there is something which might have been F (i.e., ∃x Fx). If F is an existence-entailing property such as being a million-carat diamond or a