Work on category distinctions also has other applications in assessing traditional debates in metaphysics. Thomasson (2007) argues that various mistakes and puzzlements in ontology can be traced to the mistaken use of category-neutral existential and quantificational claims. A great many arguments in ontology rely on claims about whether, in various situations, there is some object present (or how many objects there are), where the term ‘object’ must be used in a category-neutral way for the arg