I’ve commented at length on the central, load-bearing, section of Parson’s paper. The concluding five and a bit pages I found less engaging. There are some comments on a paper by Rayo and Williamson which I might take up when I get to thinking about Rayo’s related contribution here to Absolute Generality. Then there is an un-worked-out suggestion that we take ‘Everything is identical to itself’ as systematically ambigous. And finally there are some remarks about how those who might worry about the possibility about absolutely general quantification can handle seemingly all-encompassing common-or-garden claims such as that there are no (absolutely no!) talking donkeys. The latter remarks chime with some suggestions of Hellman’s that I’ve already commented on sympathetically, so I won’t expand on them here, but just say that I agree with Parsons that common-or-garden claims about talking donkeys aren’t a serious obstacle to anti-absolutism.
So let’s move on. I’ll set aside Rayo’s technical excursus for now: so that brings us to another monster paper, this time by Shapiro and Wright …