This chapter investigates what is involved in asking general ontological questions such as: “what exists?” and “how many things are there?” It is argued that well-formed existence and counting questions are “specific” existence questions that specify a certain category or sort of entity enquired about. Purely “generic” existence and counting questions (asking about “anything whatsoever”, where “thing” is not used sortally) are ill-formed unanswerable questions. This gives us reason to think that quantificational claims likewise presuppose certain categories of entity quantified over. It also suggests that many of the questions driving ontological debates are based on pseudo-questions, and does so without subscribing to anti-realism or quantifier variance. The chapter closes by considering whether we can revive a form of universal quantification by way of a “covering” use of “thing” that generalizes over a range of category-specific terms.
Keywords: counting, sortal, quantification, anti-realism, quantifier variance, pseudo-questions, category