Minimal Substantivity
This chapter defends a notion of “minimal substantivity” for ontological disputes, focusing on persistence and composition as case-studies. Deflationists argue that these disputes are defective: they are merely verbal, or epistemically underdetermined. Anti-Deflationists emphasize the substantivity of these controversies, either in Quinean terms, or in terms of fundamentality. This chapter aims at striking a mid-way between these approaches, thus outlining a Minimal Anti-Deflationism. First, it is shown that even if these ontological disputes are merely verbal, they can be recast as non-verbal metalinguistic disputes. These exchanges have in turn an ontological substantivity if we understand them as disputes about which ontological commitments we should undertake. This substantivity is however minimal, because it need not be articulated either naturalistically or in terms of fundamentality. In closing, an illustration is provided of the fruitfulness of the minimal substantivity notion for cases of conceptual engineering.