According to the usual, simplified picture of the Meinong‑Russell controversy, Meinong’s semantics is structurally amazingly simple but ontologically very expensive, while Russell’s theory contains some counter‑intuitive syntactic complica-tions, but to make up for this expense it releases us from almost all ontological troubles. Now the reality is much more complex. On the one hand it appears that the alleged ontological innocence of Russell’s solution has been highly exaggerated. In particular it assumes a Platonic ontology of universal properties. At the same time, if we look a bit closer, also Meinong’s theory turns out to be much more complicated than it looks at the first sight. It involves a hierarchy of objects exhibiting different degrees of completeness and in the later period of Meinong’s thought the structure of intentional reference takes a form very similar to that which has been proposed by Russell in his On Denoting.

In this paper Roman Ingarden’s theory of meaning is presented. It turns out to be an interesting mixture of mentalist and anti-mentalist intuitions. Mentalists, like e.g. Edmund Husserl, claim that linguistic meaning has its source in the fact that our words express our mental states, while anti‑mentalists try to situate meanings outside our minds.