forthcoming in S. Mousavian (ed.), Russell, Meinong, and the Foundations of Logic: Themes from Bernard Linsky (Synthese Library), Cham: Springer.
Linsky & Zalta (1994, 1996) argued that simplest quantified modal logic (SQML), with its fixed domain, can be given an actualist interpretation by adding (actually existing) contingently nonconcrete objects to the domain. But SQML itself doesn’t require the existence of such objects; in interpretations of SQML in which there is only one possible world, there are no contingent objects. I defend an axiom for SQML that will provably (a) force the domain to have contingently nonconcrete objects and (b) force the existence of more than one possible world, thereby forestalling modal collapse. I show that the new axiom can be justified by describing the theorems that can be proved when it is added to SQML. I further justify the axiom by the reviewing the theorems that become provable when we extend SQML to the background framework of object theory (‘OT’). Finally, I consider the conclusions one can draw when we consider the new axiom in connection with actualism, as this view has been (re-)characterized in recent work.