Abstract
Quine’s general approach is to treat ontology as a matter of what a theory says there is. This turns ontology into a question of which existential statements are consequences of that theory. This approach is contrasted favourably with the view that takes ontological commitment as a relation to things. However within the broadly Quinean approach we can distinguish different accounts, differing as to the nature of the consequence relation best suited for determining those consequences. It is suggested that Quine’s own narrowly formal account fails. Then a consideration of the necessitation approach championed by Jackson and Lewis shows that it does not do justice to the role of acknowledging consequences in determining rationality. I suggest that an approach which puts a priori consequence as the key relation does a better job. The task of spelling out the nature of a priori consequence is sketched, along with reasons to doubt the adequacy of the double indexing approach to analysing the a priori. The sorts of relations we can stand in to theories which allow us to inherit ontological commitments are touched on with a number of important philosophical strategies for introducing belief-like attitudes which nevertheless avoid ontological commitment.
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Notes
In the early 1990s David Lewis showed me a letter exchange between himself and Bill Lycan on the matter of whether a phenomenalist is a realist about primeval forests. I do not have a copy of it to hand and am reconstructing the points from memory.
But caution is important here: not all sentences of this form give rise to ontological commitments to Fs. For example, consider the sentence “There exist no ghosts”. Clearly although the structure of this sentence is superficially like the ones we are concerned with, at some level it is the negation of an existential rather than an existential. Moreover, we need to be careful about the way we identify sentences of the home theory, paraphrase is a famously difficult topic, but only because we do not have a solid grip on which sentences are in the home theory. I shall discuss this below.
This account of entailment is remarkably similar to the account given in Bolzano (1837), pp. 150–151. The similarity extends even to the vagueness over which terms are non-logical and so up for substitution.
However if your explicit introduction of the new predicate is by the definition nominated and so this definition is still in your belief set this is not so.
There are some logics in which the structural rule Cut which underpins this inference pattern is inadmissible. This is quite different situation than we find with the logics not defined as being closed under the rule, so called “Cut-free” logics. Many Cut-free logics are in fact Cut-free presentations of a logic within which Cut is admissible. That is, they contain every instance of Cut even though they are not defined as closed under Cut. Proving this for first order logic was Gentzen’s famous hauptsatz. A logic in which Cut is inadmissible fails to capture the sense in which logical inference is a transitive relation.
Jackson (1998).
There are some who accept that there are true contradictions and who might indeed be willing to accept true contradictions as a consequence of their explicit commitments. However, such a position seems at odds with the fact that deriving a contradiction is taken so naturally as a reason to revise back and change the premises from which the contradiction arose. It seems that the idea that there might be such a role for contradiction is missed by those who ignore proper rational hygiene.
A fuller presentation of this argument and some discussion can be found in Michael (2004).
I am alluding to the nomenclature Lewis (1980).
Notice also that if you start with points in your model which are epistemically constrained so that they are conceptually possible worlds, that you will fail to capture the metaphysical notion of possibility. Neither metaphysical nor epistemic notion seems to be reducible to the other.
See for example his remarks in Quine (1960, p. 221).
Not quite because I wanted to mention the influence on my thinking on this matter by Michael Frede, who sadly died recently.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the participants and audience at the Ontological Commitment Conference run by the University of Sydney’s Centre for Time in early December 2007 and an anonymous referee for this journal. In particular I would like to thank Luca Moretti who organised the conference. I further want to thank Fiona Wonsack for help with the typescript of this talk. Many of the ideas in this paper had originally been thrashed out in discussions with David Lewis, a deeply Quinean thinker from whom I learned a great deal. He did not end up agreeing with me in detail but at a certain level of abstraction we were on the same side.
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Michael, M. Implicit ontological commitment. Philos Stud 141, 43–61 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9262-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9262-9