Meta-Ontology, Naturalism, and the Quine-Barcan Marcus Debate

Abstract

Quine’s ontological adage, ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’ (Quine, 1939a: 708; Quine, 1948: 32), played a pivotal role in the revival of metaphysics which gathered momentum in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet twenty-first century critics of Quine tell us he is a narrow-minded pragmatist whose naturalism consists in restricting metaphysics to the trivial and uninteresting pursuit of existence questions, especially existence questions implied by the physical sciences. Investigating Quine’s views in their proper context reveals that this is a misinterpretation; his work on ontology is meant to give us a systematic way of identifying where a theory provides good reason to believe in something. He makes explicit that the influence of his pragmatism and naturalism on his meta-ontology is not to shrink the role of metaphysics and truth in our theories, or to restrict the content of available theories to the physical. It is to give a theory-transcendent criterion of where theories, scientific and philosophical, assume the existence of something: where it is posited as the occupant of some indispensable theoretical role. Modern critics try to locate Quine’s naturalism where it does not belong, and as a result dismiss his view as far less interesting than it really is, as I will argue in Sections 2 and 3.