ABSTRACTA ‘sceptical’ approach to easy arguments involves reducing our confidence in the supposedly uncontroversial premise with which the arguments begin. Here I address the question: if we accept Yablo's new version of a sceptical proposal, what difference might that make for the relevant meta-ontological debates? I argue that serious difficulties remain for even this ‘best’ version of a sceptical approach. Noting these difficulties might motivate us to look again at the alternative strategy—of reading the uncontroversial premise straightforwardly and thinking that (...) doubts about the conclusion were based on artificial inflation or confusion. (shrink)

Any movement worth its salt has a creation myth. Analytic metaphysics is no exception. According to legend, it was born from the clash of two titans. On the one side, was the anti-metaphysical Logi...

Meinongians in general, and Routley in particular, subscribe to the principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein. In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of the independence principle that philosophers working outside the Meinongian tradition can accept. Drawing on recent work by Stephen Yablo and others on the notion of subject matter, I offer a new account of the notion of Sosein as a subject matter and argue that in some cases Sosein might be independent from Sein. The (...) question whether numbers exist, for instance, is not part of the question of how numbers are, which is the topic mathematicians are interested in. (shrink)

In the recent literature there has been some debate between advocates of deflationist and fictionalist positions in metaontology. The purpose of this paper is to advance the debate by reconsidering one objection presented by Amie Thomasson against fictionalist strategies in metaontology. The objection can be reconstructed in the following way. Fictionalists need to distinguish between the literal and the real content of sentences belonging to certain areas of discourse. In order to make that distinction, they need to assign different truth-conditions (...) to the real and the literal content. But it is hard to see what more is required for the literal content to be true than for the real content to be true. So, fictionalism is an unsatisfactory position. Here I offer a novel reply to Thomasson’s challenge. I argue that the literal and the real content need not be distinguished in terms of their truth-conditions; rather, they can be distinguished in terms of their different subject-matters, leaving it open whether their truth-conditions coincide or not. I explain how replying to Thomasson’s objection is crucial for deepening our understanding of fictionalist strategies in metaontology. (shrink)

Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as (...) they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do. (shrink)

Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity (...) of and differences between kinds of entities. We then argue that ontological category questions do not have trivial answers, are meaningful, and cannot be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Easy Ontology hence does not constitute a comprehensive ontological methodology. While some of ontology might be easy, category questions form a central part of ontology and are not answered easily. (shrink)