Unrestricted Quantification

Semantic theories of natural and formal languages often appeal to the notion of domain of quantification in specifying the interpretations and truth conditions of sentences of the object language. In natural language, quantificational expressions, such as ‘every’, ‘some’, ‘most’, are routinely evaluated with respect to a salient and typically restricted range of entities  (e.g. an ordinary utterance of ‘she knew everything’ can be true despite the fact that the person referred to is not omniscient). In formal languages, standard model-theoretic semantics specify the interpretations of the object language by fixing a domain of quantification and assigning semantic values constructed from that domain to non-logical expressions of the language. A question that has received much attention of late is whether there is an unrestricted domain of quantification, a domain containing absolutely everything there is. Is there a discourse or inquiry that has absolute generality? Prima facie examples of sentences that quantify over an all-inclusive domain abound (e.g. 'everything is self-identical' or ‘the empty set contains no element’).  However, a number of philosophical arguments have been offered in support of the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification cannot be achieved. The growing body of literature on the issue has ramifications for semantics, metaphysics, and logic.