The claim conflates a metalinguistic question about domain membership with an object-language predication, a confusion van Fraassen and Lambert's free logic literature explicitly diagnoses and resolves.
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Object-language predication(as used in logic and philosophy of language)
Making a claim about things in the world using everyday language, rather than analyzing the language itself—like saying 'this table is brown' instead of analyzing what 'brown' means.
Van Fraassen(the philosopher whose theory is being discussed)
Bas van Fraassen is a contemporary philosopher who studies how we understand questions and knowledge. He developed influential ideas about how questions work and what it means to explain things.
free logic(Contrasted with standard first-order predicate logic)
A logical system in which the existential generalization '∃x φ(x)' cannot in general be derived from 'φ(t)' for a singular term 't', meaning singular terms do not automatically carry existential import