On What Exists

2020 ◽  
pp. 200-229
Author(s):  
Nathan Salmón
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Correct Criterion

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.

Fictionalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Richard Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
As If

The moral error theorist maintains that our ordinary use of moral discourse involves ontological commitments that the world fails to satisfy. What, then, should we do with our broken moral discourse? The revolutionary fictionalist recommends maintaining it but removing the problematic ontological commitment, in a manner modeled on our familiar engagements with fictions. The hermeneutic fictionalist, by contrast, claims that this is already how we use moral discourse. One problem for the revolutionary fictionalist is that there is a multitude of possible moral fictions, so why prefer one to another? One problem for the hermeneutic fictionalist is that it really doesn’t feel as if moral discourse resembles an engagement with fiction. Reflection on the nature of the familiar “mini-fictions” of metaphorical language—whereby we say something false as a way of conveying something true—helps solve both these problems in the moral fictionalist’s favor.

scholarly journals Does Ontology Exist?

Philosophy ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Johann Glock
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Analytic Ontology

Early analytic philosophers like Carnap, Wittgenstein and Ryle regarded ontology as a branch of metaphysics that is either trivial or meaningless. But at present it is generally assumed that philosophy can make substantial discoveries about what kinds of things exist and about the essence of these kinds. My paper challenges this ontological turn. The currently predominant conceptions of the subject, at any rate, do not license the idea that ontology can provide distinctively philosophical insights into the constituents of reality. I distinguish four main sources of analytic ontology—Strawson's descriptive metaphysics, Kripke's realist semantics, the Austro-Australian truth-maker principle, Quine's naturalistic conception of ontology—and indicate briefly why the first three do not rehabilitate ontology. In the remainder, I concentrate on the most influential and promising position. Quinean ontology seeks to bring out and reduce the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories through logical paraphrase. Against this programme, I argue that Quine's conception of ontological commitment is inadequate, and that his logical paraphrase cannot contribute to the exploration of reality, but at most to the clarification of our conceptual framework.

The Transcendence of The Natural-Language “Exist” When Used to Assert or Deny Ontological Commitment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jody Azzouni
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

It’s shown that the existence concept that we express in natural languages and that we use to think about what we—philosophers and non-philosophers—take to exist in the world is criterion-transcendent, transcendent, and univocal. That is, speakers use a notion that they take to be fixed in its extension across languages and to be the same one they’ve used in the past and will use in the future. Furthermore, the existence concept has no meaning entailments. We do not understand what exists to have certain properties (or not to have certain properties) on the basis of the meaning of the word “exist.” “Exist” and “there is,” when used to express or deny ontological commitments, are neither ambiguous nor polysemous. Language-usage evidence is presented that confirms these claims.

Emergence Theories and Pragmatic Realism

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charbel Niño El-Hani ◽  
Sami Pihlström ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Recent Emergence

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories.

scholarly journals Ontological Indifference of Theories and Semantic Primacy of Sentences

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Greimann
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Ontological Reduction ◽  
Structuralist View ◽  
New Interpretation

Abstract In his late philosophy, Quine generalized the structuralist view in the philosophy of mathematics that mathematical theories are indifferent to the ontology we choose for them. According to his ‘global structuralism’, the choice of objects does not matter to any scientific theory. In the literature, this doctrine is mainly understood as an epistemological thesis claiming that the empirical evidence for a theory does not depend on the choice of its objects. The present paper proposes a new interpretation suggested by Quine’s recently published Kant Lectures from 1980 according to which his global structuralism is a semantic thesis that belongs to his theory of ontological reduction. It claims that a theory can always be reformulated in such a way that its truth does not presuppose the existence of the original objects, but only of some objects that can be considered as their proxies. Quine derives this claim from the principle of the semantic primacy of sentences, which is supposed to license the ontological reductions he uses to establish his global structuralism. It is argued that these reductions do not actually work because they do not account for some hidden ontological commitments that are not detected by his criterion of ontological commitment.

If Not Here, Then Where? On the Location and Individuation of Events in Badiou and Deleuze

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Williams
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Ontological Commitments

This paper sets out a series of critical contrasts between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of the event. It does so in the context of some likely objections to their positions from a broadly analytic position. These objections concern problems of individuation and location in space-time. The paper also explains Deleuze and Badiou's views on the event through a literary application on a short story by John Cheever. In conclusion it is argued that both thinkers have good answers to the objections, but that they diverge on the ontological commitments of their definitions of the event.

True Imaginings Integrating Panentheism and A Personal View of God

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Klaus Müller
Keyword(s):  
Challenging Problem ◽  
Personal View ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
As If

The perhaps most challenging problem for a panentheistic paradigm in Christian god-talk consists in integrating the trait of personhood in the monistic horizon of this approach. A very helpful way to this goal seems to be the concept of imagination. Its logic of an “as if” represents a modified variation of Kant`s idea of the postulates of reason. Reflections of Jürgen Werbick, Douglas Headley, and Volker Gerhardt substantiate the philosophical and theological capabilities of this solution which also include a sensibility for the ontological commitments included in the panentheistic approach.

The Structure of Truth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Truth Theory ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Theory Of Meaning ◽  
First Time

Donald Davidson’s 1970 Locke Lectures appear in print for the first time in this volume, accompanied by an introduction highlighting their significance as a snapshot of his evolving views in the philosophy of language and describing their relationship to the work he published during his lifetime. The lectures comprise an invaluable historical document that illuminates how Davidson was thinking about the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory therein, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, the notion of logical form, and so on, at a pivotal moment in the development of his thought. Unlike Davidson’s previously published work, they are written so as to be presented to an audience as a fully organized and coherent exposition of his program in the philosophy of language. Had these lectures been widely available in the years following 1970, the reception of Davidson’s work, especially in the philosophy of language, might have been very different. Given the systematic nature of the presentation of Davidson’s semantic program in these lectures, it is hoped that they will be of use to those encountering his thought for the first time.

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