Quine’s criterion of theoretical ontological commitment is subject to a variety of interpretations, all of which save one yield incorrect verdicts. Moreover, the interpretation that yields correct verdicts is not what Quine meant. Instead the intended criterion unfairly imputes ontological commitments to theories that lack those commitments and fails to impute commitments to theories that have them. Insofar as Quine’s criterion is interpreted so that it yields only correct verdicts, it is trivial and of questionable utility. Moreover, the correct criterion (...) invokes analyticity, a notion that Quine spent most of his life tirelessly combating. This yields a dilemma for Quinean philosophy: Either his criterion of ontological commitment is incorrect, or else Quine is committed to a traditional philosophical notion that he emphatically rejected as disreputable. (shrink)

I revisit my 1993 paper on Putnam and mathematical realism focusing on the indispensability argument and how it has fared over the years. This argument starts from the claim that mathematics is an indispensable part of science and draws the conclusion, from holistic considerations about confirmation, that the ontology of science includes abstract objects as well as the physical entities science deals with.

This paper tries to unleash the nature of the paradox of nonexistence or non-being or negative singular existentials by using a General Metalogical Theory. In the first section, this paper explains in detail the paradox of negative singular eixistentials and explains how Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell respond to this paradox. Russell resolves the paradox using quantification method which Quine extends to formulate a criterion of ontological commitments. In the second section, a General Metalogical Theory is explained, and it is (...) shown that how the developed General Metalogical Theory is useful in unleashing the paradox of nonexistence. The principles of General Metalogical Theory is developed from Quine’s criterion: to be is to be the value of bound variable. In Quine’s criterion, the notion of the bound variable is significant. The General Metalogical Theory in unleashing the nature of the paradox mainly focuses on the question: from where does the binding of the bound variable come? The paper argues that it is not enough to say that the binding of the bound variable comes from the existentially loaded use of the particular quantifier. General Metalogical Theory attempts to show that the binding of the bound variable comes from somewhere else, so that we attach the particular quantifier to the variable and use the particular quantifier in an existentially loaded sense. Explaining the binding nature of the bound variable in the above-mentioned manner will unleash the nature of the paradox. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the development of analytic philosophy in the Philippines. I first highlight the circumstances that led to its inception in the late 1930s, and some of the notable works by prominent Filipino analytic philosophers that helped shape the tradition. Next, I discuss the socio-political climate in the late 1950s through the 1970s that may have led some Filipino philosophers to move away from analytic philosophy. Finally, I explore some signs of its re-emergence (...) in the late twentieth century and its possible trajectories in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Universalist and nihilist answers to philosophical questions may be extreme, but they are clear enough. Aliquidist answers, by contrast, are typically caught between the Scylla of vagueness and indeterminacy and the Charybdis of ungroundedness and arbitrariness, and steering a proper middle course—saying exactly where in the middle one is going to settle—demands exceptional navigating powers. I myself tend to favor extreme answers precisely for this reason. Here, however, I consider one sense in which Something may claim superiority over its polar (...) competitors, Everything and Nothing, when it comes to answerting the ontological question, “What is there?”. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the relations between Quine’s and Carnap’s metaontological stances on the one hand, and contemporary work in the metaphysics of time, on the other. Contemporary metaphysics of time, like analytic metaphysics in general, grew out of the revival of the discipline that Quine’s critique of the logical empiricists (such as Carnap) made possible. At the same time, the metaphysics of time has, in some respects, strayed far from its Quinean roots. This chapter examines some likely Quinean (...) and Carnapian reactions to elements of the contemporary scene. (shrink)

I begin by giving reasons to accept the block-universe view, the strongly supported by physics view that we live in a four-dimensional world. According to it, the past and the future are as real as the present. As a result, it seems that the future is determined in the sense that what will be the case will necessarily be the case. In the dissertation, I examine whether we have to accept this consequence. I show that we do not have to (...) bite the bullet: the future might be both real and contingent. I first start to consider modal realism (possible futures are real) as a possible solution. However, I propose then another account, actualist (positing the reality of only one possible world: the space-time we live in). This solution relies on a conventionalist theory about metaphysical modality (Sidelle, 1989). It states that modal modality is purely conventional. In combination with a realist interpretation of natural modality (causal and/or nomological), this framework allows me to propose that the future is conventionally closed and naturally contingent. In this view, the necessity of the future holds in virtue of linguistic conventions and then is conventionally necessary. But this is a distinct phenomenon from the natural contingency of the future: the future is naturally contingent because there are mind-independent probabilistic relations holding between the present and the future. This solution has strong consequences: most importantly, an anti-realist view about ordinary objects and physical particles. I end up by presenting and arguing in favour of the general image of the world that comes out from these views. (shrink)

Quine's views on ontology and naturalism are well-known but rarely considered in tandem. According to my interpretation the connection between them is vital. I read Quine as a global epistemic structuralist. Quine thought we only ever know objects qua solutions to puzzles about significant intersections in observations. Objects are always accessed descriptively, via their roles in our best theory. Quine's Kant lectures contain an early version of epistemic structuralism with uncharacteristic remarks about the mental. Here Quine embraces mitigated anomalous monism, (...) allowing introspection and the availability in principle of full physical descriptions of the perceptual states which get science off the ground. Later versions abandon these ideas. My epistemic-structural interpretation explains why. I argue first-personal introspective access to mental states is incompatible with global epistemic structuralism. (shrink)

In this paper, I tackle the problem of diachronic identity. Far from providing a criterion for identity over time, the aim of this work is to understand if this issue pertains to ontology, conceived as that part of philosophy that tries to answer the question about what entities exist, or metaphysics, conceived as that part of philosophy that tries to explain, of those entities, what they are. On the face of it, only metaphysics has the task to solve this problem, (...) but I argue that this is false. Through the analysis of different theories concerning identity through time, I show how both ontology and metaphysics are concerned with the problem of diachronic identity, and how actually ontology turns out to be primary in solving the problem. (shrink)

Disagreement over what exists is so fundamental that it tends to hinder or even to block dialogue among disputants. The various controversies between believers and atheists, or realists and nominalists, are only two kinds of examples. Interested in contributing to the intelligibility of the debate on ontology, in 1939 Willard van Orman Quine began a series of works which introduces the notion of ontological commitment and proposes an allegedly objective criterion to identify the exact conditions under which a theoretical discourse (...) signals an assumption of existence. I intend to present the concept of ontological commitment and the Quinean criterion, to expose and evaluate some of the many criticisms to which the criterion has subject and to situate it in the context of Quine’s philosophy. As a product of such analyses, I hope to contribute to the discussion on the application and relevance of the notion of ontological commitment. (shrink)

As analytic philosophy is becoming increasingly aware of and interested in its own history, the study of that field is broadening to include, not just its earliest beginnings, but also the mid-twentieth century. One of the towering figures of this epoch is W.V. Quine (1908-2000), champion of naturalism in philosophy of science, pioneer of mathematical logic, trying to unite an austerely physicalist theory of the world with the truths of mathematics, psychology, and linguistics. Quine's posthumous papers, notes, and drafts revealing (...) the development of his views in the forties have recently begun to be published, as well as careful philosophical studies of, for instance, the evolution of his key doctrine that mathematical and logical truth are continuous with, not divorced from, the truths of natural science. But one central text has remained unexplored: Quine's Portuguese-language book on logic, his 'farewell for now' to the discipline as he embarked on an assignment in the Navy in WWII. Anglophone philosophers have neglected this book because they could not read it. Jointly with colleagues, I have completed the first full English translation of this book. In this accompanying paper I draw out the main philosophical contributions Quine made in the book, placing them in their historical context and relating them to Quine's overall philosophical development during the period. Besides significant developments in the evolution of Quine's views on meaning and analyticity, I argue, this book is also driven by Quine's indebtedness to Russell and Whitehead, Tarski, and Frege, and contains crucial developments in his thinking on philosophy of logic and ontology. This includes early versions of some arguments from 'On What There Is', four-dimensionalism, and virtual set theory. (shrink)

In 1901 Russell had envisaged the new analytic philosophy as uniquely systematic, borrowing the methods of science and mathematics. A century later, have Russell’s hopes become reality? David Lewis is often celebrated as a great systematic metaphysician, his influence proof that we live in a heyday of systematic philosophy. But, we argue, this common belief is misguided: Lewis was not a systematic philosopher, and he didn’t want to be. Although some aspects of his philosophy are systematic, mainly his pluriverse of (...) possible worlds and its many applications, that systematicity was due to the influence of his teacher Quine, who really was an heir to Russell. Drawing upon Lewis’s posthumous papers and his correspondence as well as the published record, we show that Lewis’s non- Quinean influences, including G.E. Moore and D.M. Armstrong, led Lewis to an anti- systematic methodology which leaves each philosopher’s views and starting points to his or her own personal conscience. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object, is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas (...) of Empiricism” is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine’s development, this paper redefines the place of ‘Two Dogmas’ in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine’s book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s ; Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper. (shrink)

The debate over whether we should believe that mathematical objects exist quickly leads to the question of how to determine what we should believe. Indispensabilists claim that we should believe in the existence of mathematical objects because of their ineliminable roles in scientific theory. Eleatics argue that only objects with causal properties exist. Mark Colyvan’s recent defenses of Quine’s indispensability argument against some contemporary eleatics attempt to provide reasons to favor the indispensabilist’s criterion. I show that Colyvan’s argument is not (...) decisive against the eleatic and sketch a way to capture the important intuitions behind both views. (shrink)

The debate concerning the ontological status of musical works is perhaps the most animated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of music. In my view, progress requires a piecemeal approach. So in this article I hone in on one particular musical work concept – that of the classical Western art musical work; that is, the work concept that regulates classical art-musical practice. I defend a fictionalist analysis – a strategy recently suggested by Andrew Kania as potentially fruitful – and I develop (...) a version of such an analysis in line with a broad commitment to philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)

Philosophers often aim to demonstrate that the things we ordinarily think and say can be reconciled with our considered beliefs about the world. To this end, many philosophers try to paraphrase ordinary language claims by finding equivalent sentences that are less misleading. For instance, though we know that there is no British family that is the average one, we want to say that the average British family has 1.8 children, and we might do that by paraphrasing this claim as: there (...) are nearly twice as many British children as British families. This article aims to introduce and distinguish different paraphrase strategies, sketch their role in metaphysical debates and highlight some crucial questions that proponents of such strategies face. (shrink)

Whether a predicate is a referential expression depends upon what reference is conceived to be. Even if it is granted that reference is a relation between words and worldly items, the referents of expressions being the items to which they are so related, this still leaves considerable scope for disagreement about whether predicates refer. One of Frege's great contributions to the philosophy of language was to introduce an especially liberal conception of reference relative to which it is unproblematic to suppose (...) that predicates are referring expressions. According to this liberal conception, each significant expression in a language has its own distinctive semantic role or power, a power to effect the truth-value of the sentences in which it occurs. (shrink)

Tarski, Carnap and Quine spent the academic year 1940?1941 together at Harvard. In their autobiographies, both Carnap and Quine highlight the importance of the conversations that took place among them during the year. These conversations centred around semantical issues related to the analytic/synthetic distinction and on the project of a finitist/nominalist construction of mathematics and science. Carnap's Nachlaß in Pittsburgh contains a set of detailed notes, amounting to more than 80 typescripted pages, taken by Carnap while these discussions were taking (...) place. In my article, I present a survey of these notes with special emphasis on Tarski's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the passage from typed languages to first-order languages, Tarski's finitism/nominalism, and the construction of a finitist language for mathematics and science. (shrink)

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereology look counterintuitive (...) to various philosophers. In recent years, a proposal has been advanced to solve the tension between mereology and familiar ways of counting objects, under the label of Minimalist View . The Minimalist View may be summarized in the slogan: "Count x as an object iff it does not overlap with any y you have already counted as an object". The motto seems prima facie very promising but, we shall argue, when one looks at it more closely, it is not. On the contrary, the Minimalist View involves an ambiguity that can be solved in quite different directions. We argue that one resolution of the ambiguity makes it incompatible with mereology. This way, the Minimalist View can lend no support to mereology at all. We suggest that the Minimalist View can become compatible with mereology once its ambiguity is solved by interpreting it in what we call an epistemic or conceptual fashion: whereas mereology has full metaphysical import, the Minimalist View may account for our ways of selecting "conceptually salient" entities. But even once it is so disambiguated, it is doubtful that the Minimalist View can help to make mereology more palatable, for it cannot make it any more compatible with commonsensical ways of counting objects. (shrink)

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.

Quine’s general approach is to treat ontology as a matter of what a theory says there is. This turns ontology into a question of which existential statements are consequences of that theory. This approach is contrasted favourably with the view that takes ontological commitment as a relation to things. However within the broadly Quinean approach we can distinguish different accounts, differing as to the nature of the consequence relation best suited for determining those consequences. It is suggested that Quine’s own (...) narrowly formal account fails. Then a consideration of the necessitation approach championed by Jackson and Lewis shows that it does not do justice to the role of acknowledging consequences in determining rationality. I suggest that an approach which puts a priori consequence as the key relation does a better job. The task of spelling out the nature of a priori consequence is sketched, along with reasons to doubt the adequacy of the double indexing approach to analysing the a priori. The sorts of relations we can stand in to theories which allow us to inherit ontological commitments are touched on with a number of important philosophical strategies for introducing belief-like attitudes which nevertheless avoid ontological commitment. (shrink)

An overview of contemporary part-whole theories, with reference to both their axiomatic developments and their philosophical underpinnings.

The so-called New Theory of Reference (Marcus, Kripke etc.) is inspired by the insight that in modal and intensional contexts quantifiers presuppose nondescriptive unanalyzable identity criteria which do not reduce to any descriptive conditions. From this valid insight the New Theorists fallaciously move to the idea that free singular terms can exhibit a built-in direct reference and that there is even a special class of singular terms (proper names) necessarily exhibiting direct reference. This fallacious move has been encouraged by a (...) mistaken belief in the substitutional interpretation of quantifiers, by the myth of thede re reference, and a mistaken assimilation of direct reference to ostensive (perspectival) identification. Thede dicto vs.de re contrast does not involve direct reference, being merely a matter of rule-ordering (scope).The New Theorists' thesis of the necessity of identities of directly referred-to individuals is a consequence of an unmotivated and arbitrary restriction they tacitly impose on the identification of individuals. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the method of explication consists in replacing a vague, presystematic notion (the explicandum) with a precise notion (the explicatum) formulated in a systematic context. However, Carnap and others who have used this and related terms appear to hold inconsistent views as to what constitutes an adequate explication. The central feature of the present explication of 'explication' is the correspondence condition: permitting the explicandum to deviate from some established "ordinary-language" conventions but, at the same time, requiring (...) that the explicatum correspond (via an effective translation) to the chosen "definitive intension" of the explicandum. (In effect, the first stages of an explication provide an informal characterization of a vague and possibly inconsistent language convention.) The present account of explication contrasts sharply with that sketched by Quine in Word and Object (although Quine accepts a correspondence condition of a sort). The terms `explication 1 ' and `explication 2 ' are used to indicate these quite different senses of the term. In Kaplan's terminology, explication 1 is intended to remedy "external vagueness" while explication 2 is intended to remedy "internal vagueness.". (shrink)

In a number of essays published over the last decade or so, W. V. Quine has made some interesting suggestions concerning the ontology of theories. If I understand him correctly, one of his principal objects has been to formulate a criterion by means of which one can correctly decide what are the ontological commitments of any given theory. My aim in this paper is to reveal what I think are inadequacies in Quine's criterion and to indicate the direction in which (...) a proper formulation lies. (shrink)

W.V. Quine is a well-known proponent of naturalism, the view on which reality is described only in science. He is also well-known for arguing that our current scientific theories commit us to the existence of abstract objects. It is tempting to believe that the naturalistic philosopher should think scientists outside of philosophy are in the best position to assess the merits of revising our current commitment to abstract objects. But Quine rejects this deferential view. On the reading of Quine’s philosophical (...) methodology that I defend in this paper, the naturalistic philosopher not only may assess the merits of revising the commitments of our scientific theories, but also will recommend we make such revisions if doing so simplifies and clarifies our science. To develop my reading, I will examine John Burgess and Gideon Rosen’s naturalism in ontology that includes the deferential view Quine rejects. By explaining how Quine’s naturalism differs from the anti-revisionist, deferential naturalism in philosophy of mathematics that Burgess and Rosen advance, I seek to clarify and advance contemporary debates on naturalism. (shrink)

In this essay I try to give some overall statements in order to show that new realism is to be understood as a kind of positive philosophy. Against constructivism, I argue that there is a prevalence of the objects themselves on our understanding of them because reality offers a resistance to our attempt to grasp it depending on its level of dependence from our own understanding, which is different in the case of natural objects, ideal object and social object. This (...) negativity leads to an ontological necessity of facticity. In the second part of this paper I will describe – through the exposition of three key concepts of new realism, i.e. “unamendability”, “interaction” and “affordance” – an ascending path for which the negative and the resistance turn into positivity. (shrink)

This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...) available to the classical theist for dealing with the challenge of Platonism. It probes in detail the diverse views on the reality of abstract objects and their compatibility with classical theism. It contains a most thorough discussion, rooted in careful exegesis, of the biblical and patristic basis of the doctrine of divine aseity. Finally, it challenges the influential Quinean metaontological theses concerning the way in which we make ontological commitments. (shrink)

An odd dissensus between confident metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians pervades early twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Each faction is convinced their side has won the day, but both are mistaken about the philosophical legacy of the twentieth century. More historical awareness is needed to overcome the current dissensus. Lewis and his possible-world system are lionised by metaphysicians; Quine’s pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics inspire antimetaphysicians. But Lewis developed his system under the influence of his teacher Quine, inheriting from him his empiricism, (...) his physicalism, his metaontology, and, I will show in this paper, also his Humeanism. Using published as well as never-before-seen unpublished sources, I will make apparent that both heavy-duty metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians are wrong about the roles Quine and Lewis played in the development of twentieth-century philosophy. The two are much more alike than is commonly supposed, and Quine much more instrumental to the pedigree of current metaphysics. (shrink)

We tend to talk about parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in an inventory over and above its own parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled the Minimalist View: an (...) element in the field of a part‐whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if, and only if, it does not overlap any other element that is itself included in the inventory. As it turns out, a clarification of this view involves both a defense of mereological extensionality and an account of the topological distinction between detached and undetached parts. (shrink)

This essay defends the neo-Quinean approach to ontology against the criticisms of two neo-Carnapians, Huw Price and Amie Thomasson.

When we use a directly referential expression to denote an object, do we incur an ontological commitment to that object, as Russell and Barcan Marcus held? Not according to Quine, whose regimented language has only variables as denoting expressions, but no constants to model direct reference. I make a case for a more liberal conception of ontological commitment—more wide-ranging than Quine’s—which allows for commitment to individuals, with an improved logical language of regimentation. The reason for Quine’s prohibition on commitment to (...) individuals, I argue, is that his choice of regimented language is heavily informed by his holist epistemology, in which objects are introduced via a description of their explanatory role. But non-holists can coherently attempt to commit to individuals using directly referential expressions, modelled in a formal language as constants. While holding on to the insight that a logical language is a helpful medium for ontology, I propose instead a more permissive language of regimentation, one expanded to permit the use of constants to record attempts to commit to individuals, which allows us to make sense of non-holist theories with alternative name-based or name-and-variable-based criteria of ontological commitment as well as Quinean theories. (shrink)

The indispensability argument is sometimes seen as weakened by its reliance on a controversial premise of confirmation holism. Recently, some philosophers working on the indispensability argument have developed versions of the argument which, they claim, do not rely on holism. Some of these writers even claim to have strengthened the argument by eliminating the controversial premise. I argue that the apparent removal of holism leaves a lacuna in the argument. Without the holistic premise, or some other premise which facilitates the (...) transfer of evidence to mathematical portions of scientific theories, the argument is implausible. (shrink)

W. V. Quine assumed that in _Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology Rudolf Carnap was attempting to dodge commitment to abstract entities--without either renouncing quantification over them or demonstrating their dispensability--by wielding the analytic/synthetic distinction against ontological issues. Quine's interpretation of Carnap's intent--and his criticism of it--is widely endorsed. But Carnap objected, I argue, not to abstract entities, but to his critics' suggestion that empiricism implies nominalism. Quine's and Carnap's views are therefore more akin than Quine ever suspected. Unfortunately, Quine's misinterpretation of (...) Carnap's position has led to a misunderstanding of the implications of Quine's own naturalistic turn for contemporary ontology. (shrink)

The repudiation of propositions as “obscure entities” which is prevalent among logicians and philosophers of “nominalistic” persuasion, is frequently justified by pointing out that no agreement seems ever to have been reached about the identity-condition of propositions. And if we cannot specify, so they argue, under what conditions two sentences express the same proposition, then we use the word “proposition” without any clear meaning. Quine, for example, feels far less uneasy about quantification over class-variables than about quantification over attribute-variables and (...) propositional variables, because there is a clear criterion for deciding whether we are dealing with two classes or with only one class referred to by different predicates: two classes are identical if they have the same membership. And such a criterion of identity is alleged to be lacking for intensions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to offer a method for determining the ontological commitments of a formalized theory. The second section shows that determining the consequence relation of a language model-theoretically entails that the ontology of a theory is tied very closely to the variables that feature in that theory. The third section develops an alternative way of determining the ontological commitments of a theory given a proof-theoretic account of the consequence relation for the language that theory is in. (...) It is shown that the proof-theoretic account of ontological commitment does not entail that the ontological commitments of a theory depend on the variables of that theory. The last section of the article discusses how this account of ontological commitment can be used in other philosophical projects such as Wright’s (Frege’s conception of numbers as objects, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1983) abstractionism. The article concludes with a discussion of the upshots of adopting the proof-theoretic account of ontological commitment for ontology generally. (shrink)

This paper resolves the problems raised by Israel Scheffler and Noam Chomsky against Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. I call Scheffler’s and Chomsky’s problems as (1) the problem of inexorable ontological commitments and (2) the problem of false existential inferences. I extend their problems to a third one, which is called as the problem of extended inexorable ontological commitments to rival entities. In order to present the third problem, two ontological disputes are considered: Russell–Meinong dispute from the context of the (...) referential theory of meaning and David Lewis–Meinong dispute from the context of modal metaphysics. In order to work out a resolution to these three problems, I emphasize the distinction between meta-ontology/meta-theory and object theory. Then, it is explained that there is a functional difference between Quine’s criterion of ontological commitments (meta-theory) and the object theories to which this criterion is applied. Here, considering the functional difference, I introduce different kinds of commitments: direct commitments and indirect commitments. Using Strawson’s views on the notion of presupposition, the distinction between direct commitments and indirect commitments is characterized further. Employing this distinction, I resolve the problem of inexorable ontological commitment to the entities, the problem of false existential inferences and the problems of extended inexorable ontological commitment to the rival entities. (shrink)

According to a growing consensus in the secondary literature on Quine, the judgment Quine makes in favor of the nominalism outlined in “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism” is in tension with the naturalism he later adopts. In this paper, I show the consensus view is mistaken by showing that Quine’s judgment is rooted in a naturalistic standard of clarity. Moreover, I argue that Quine late in his career is committed to accepting one plausible reading of his judgment in 1947. In (...) making these arguments, I draw attention to a version of naturalism that misreadings of Quine have prevented philosophers from appreciating, and thereby articulate and clarify a version of naturalism I recommend philosophers investigate today. (shrink)

In two papers in the mid-seventies, Quine has discussed an ontological deba-cle, the reduction of ontology to an ontology of pure sets only. This debacle, which weakened Quine’s interest in ontology, is the natural outcome of on-tological relativity, or, more precisely, the proxy-function argument. It is ex-plained how Quine unavoidably came to this conclusion. Moreover, it is ar-gued that the result is even more damaging for Quine’s philosophy than has hitherto been assumed. It is shown that in addition to an (...) ontological debacle, there is an ideological debacle, reducing the ideology (lexicon) of science to the ideology of set theory. The ideological debacle results from applying ex-tensional substitution of predicates within a scientific theory that is reinter-preted by means of proxy-functions to a theory with a set-theoretic ontology. Though Quine has recognized the possibility of an ideological debacle, his rebuttal is unconvincing. As a result, his tenet of extensionalism is under heavy pressure. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the study of bare nominal arguments (i.e., determinerless NPs occurring in canonical argumental positions) from a crosslinguistic point of view. It is proposed that languages may vary in what they let their NPs denote. In some languages (like Chinese), NPs are argumental (names of kinds) and can thus occur freely without determiner in argument position; in others they are predicates (Romance), and this prevents NPs from occurring as arguments, unless the category D(eterminer) is projected. Finally, (...) there are languages (like Germanic or Slavic) which allow both predicative and argumental NPs; these languages, being the ‘union’ of the previous two types, are expected to behave like Romance for certain aspects of their nominal system (the singular count portion) and like Chinese for others (the mass and plural portions). This hypothesis (the ‘Nominal Mapping Parameter’) is investigated not just through typological considerations, but also through a detailed contrastive analysis of bare arguments in Germanic (English) vs. Romance (Italian). Some general consequences of this view, which posits a limited variation in the mapping from syntax into semantics, for current theories of Universal Grammar and acquisition are considered. (shrink)