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Ontological commitment and ontological commitments

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Abstract

The standard account of ontological commitment is quantificational. There are many old and well-chewed-over challenges to the account, but recently Kit Fine added a new challenge. Fine claimed that the “quantificational account gets the basic logic of ontological commitment wrong” and offered an alternative account that used an existence predicate. While Fine’s argument does point to a real lacuna in the standard approach, I show that his own account also gets “the basic logic of ontological commitment wrong”. In response, I offer a full quantificational account, using the resources of plural logic, and argue that it leads to a complete theory of natural language ontological commitment.

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Notes

  1. See Quine (1948).

  2. For book-length challenges see Parsons (1980) and Routley (1982).

  3. Quoted from Fine (2009), p. 166.

  4. For example, see Truss (1997), pp. 45–47.

  5. Fine (2009), p. 166—there Fine is considering the general strategy of appealing to our theory of the integers, not this particular example.

  6. Stemming from Fine (2001).

  7. There seems to be a typo in Fine’s (2009) discussion of this, on p. 166.

  8. See, for example, part III of Anscombe (2015), McGinn (2000), Parsons (1980) and Routley (1982).

  9. Fine (2009), p. 166.

  10. See Bricker (2014). Bricker also briefly notes that commitment to “the” mammals can be analyzed as involving singular commitment to each particular mammal.

  11. In saying this, I’m endorsing a version of Boolos's (1984) widely accepted Cheerios argument.

  12. Russell (1905).

  13. See Boolos (1984, 1985); see also Lewis (1991). Boolos was originally interested in using plural quantification to interpret monadic second-order quantification, but this isn’t what I am endorsing here.

  14. See Resnik (1988), as well as the discussions in Parsons (1990), Hazen (1993) and Linnebo (2003).

  15. This assumption was made by Boolos and is formalized in Linnebo’s (2003) \({\mathsf {PLO}}\) system, for example.

  16. See the discussion in Oliver and Smiley (2016).

  17. Comprehension tells us, in effect, that we can plurally quantify over all sets, ordinals, and cardinals, despite singular quantification over these entities being notoriously problematic. For more on the interaction of plural logic and set theory, and some of the options faced, see Linnebo (2010) and Rayo and Uzquiano (1999).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Daniel Waxman, Jack Woods, and several anonymous referees.

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  1. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Jared Warren

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Warren, J. Ontological commitment and ontological commitments. Philos Stud 177, 2851–2859 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01342-9

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