 ‘How many things are there?’ also seems viciously abstract. A sortal such as KITTEN tells us the nature of a thing, thereby supplying criteria for counting and persistence. THING is a dummy sortal. How many things do you have when you have a capped pen? The question cannot be answered because you have not been given criteria governing whether the cap and the pen count as separate objects. All questions about existence must be relativized to sorts. Consequently, the question of why there is something rather than nothing is incomplete. Once we remedy the incompleteness with a sortal, the question will be answered by science.