Three Kinds of Incompleteness

In sections 1-3, I distinguish three different kinds of incompleteness which I call weak, flat and genuine and I argue that, even if Meinong does not seem to have conceived of his incomplete objects as genuinely incomplete, only genuinely incomplete objects can play the role that incomplete objects have to play in Meinong’s theory. In the last section, I try to make clearer the notion of genuine indeterminacy, in terms of which the concept of an incomplete object is defined, and I defend it against other more familiar and less radical accounts of indeterminacy.