[News] TEAP - Alice van’t Hoff “Against higher-order unrestrictedness”, 10 April 2026

Dear all, we are pleased to announce the fourth talk in our TEAP seminar series <https://sites.google.com/view/themeseap>. The talk is scheduled for Friday, April 10, 11:00-13:00 (CEST), at the following link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/68312177521?pwd=fdYFFrcK1hg3Qw7GH2nCNVTIdV26rs.1 (ID riunione: 683 1217 7521 Codice d’accesso: 722203) Alice van’t Hoff (University of Vienna) – Against higher-order unrestrictedness Generality absolutists argue that it is possible to quantify absolutely unrestrictedly over everything that there is. A challenge to their view arises if we take seriously the possibility of genuinely higher-order quantification. An influential proposal, first put forward by Timothy Williamson, however, suggests that to conclude on this basis against generality absolutism would be premature. Williamson's claim is that higher-order quantification in our object language is only a threat to generality absolutism if we, misleadingly, adopt a first-order metalanguage. I argue, though, that this approach is subject to a counter-example: intuitively, quantification in many-sorted languages need not be absolutely general. Yet both higher-order and many-sorted systems may involve multiple distinct quantifiers and there are, I claim, no differences of the kind relevant to a quantifier's unrestrictedness that distinguish these two versions of quantifier pluralism. This suggests, contra Williamson and others, that higher-order quantification is a threat to generality absolutism, at least insofar as we take quantification of this kind ontologically seriously. Hope to see you online! Michele Contente, Ludovica Conti and Caterina Sisti