Ontology, as Aristotle conceived it, is the most general of sciences. The other sciences are specialized, restricting their attention to some proper part of reality. It remains for ontology to take account of everything there is.

The question I would like us to investigate here is not a problem in ontology, but a problem in the meta-theory of ontology. I want to know whether, given the limits of logic and language, a science such as ontology is even possible, there being some reason to fear that we lack the conceptual resources to formulate a fully general science, because we have no any way reliably to ensure that our quantifiers range over everything there is. Even if we succeed in convincing ourselves that there is no logical impediment to the development of a fully general science, it will remain to be seen whether such a science has anything interesting to tell us. It could happen that the fully general truths are too abstract to be very important, and it could also happen that the fully general truths are beyond our epistemic reach, so that, while we are privileged to know rather a lot about our immediate surroundings, we are not in a position to know much of anything about the universe as a whole. But first things first.

The logical worry comes from the interplay of context and quantification. Often we use such words as ‘each’, ‘any’, ‘every’, ‘all’, ‘anyone’, ‘everyone’, and ‘everything’ without intending to talk about everyone and everything.