Abstract
This paper defends the view that ontological questions (properly understood) are easy—too easy, in fact, to be subjects of substantive and distinctively philosophical debates. They are easy, roughly, in the sense that they may be resolved straightforwardly—generally by a combination of conceptual and empirical enquiries. After briefly outlining the view and some of its virtues, I turn to examine two central lines of objection. The first is that this ‘easy’ approach is itself committed to substantive ontological views, including an implausibly permissive ontology. The second is that it, like neo-Fregean views, relies on transformation rules that are questionable on both logical and ontological grounds. Ultimately, I will argue, the easy view is not easily assailed by either of these routes, and so remains (thus far) a tenable and attractive approach.
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Notes
For simplicity I will just discuss sortal terms here, though on my view parallel points apply if we consider existence questions posed using singular terms, as I hold that these, too, must come associated with some basic conceptual content specifying a sort (or disjunction of sorts) of entity to be referred to. See my (2007, 42ff).
For further discussion and defense of this view, see my “Existence Questions” (2008).
I discuss objections to this view that arise from causal theories of reference in my (2007, pp. 38–53), and argue that accepting a purely causal theory of reference will not help the serious ontologist in my (2008).
I respond to intuitions that kangaroos could be robots in my (2007, pp. 48–53).
Provided *J* is well-formed—see Sect. 2.2.1.
One standard reply of the serious ontologist is to deny that the application conditions for ‘chair’ are met in the circumstances described above—for (they say) that requires that there be some object composed by the pieces of wood, but there is none. The defender of the easy view, however, only has to ask: what are the application conditions for ‘object’ used here? Either ‘object’ as used by the serious ontologist has application conditions or it doesn’t. If it is used as a sortal term with first-order application conditions of its own (say, requiring a plenum of unified matter), then it is implausible that fulfilling these is essential to fulfilling the ordinarily associated application conditions for ‘chair’. The idea that ‘chair’ applies only if ‘object’ applies derives from a covering use of ‘object’, on which ‘object’ applies provided any first-order sortal applies; but then we can’t deny that there is a chair on grounds of denying that there is some object. Finally, if ‘object’ lacks application conditions, then ‘is there an object here?’ is simply an ill-formed, unanswerable question. (See my 2009 for fuller details of this line of argument).
But things can admittedly get a bit more complicated. It is no accident that in my exposition of the view thus far (and most such expositions elsewhere) I have taken as my examples existence claims involving standard English terms such as ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘painting’, and ‘symphony’. For the approach relies on beginning from conceptual analysis to determine the term’s application conditions, and where we have a term with an established English use, there is much more to go on in undertaking a conceptual analysis, and we are much surer on our feet in knowing where a term is to be applied or refused.
Things can get trickier when we shift to distinctively philosophical terms of art, including such terms as ‘mereological sum’, ‘temporal part’, ‘trope’, ‘universal’, and the like. For these often have no established use in ordinary English, and if philosophers use these terms as different terms of art, with different associated application conditions, then debates, e.g. over whether or not there are universals, may turn out to be pseudo-debates in which the participants simply talk past each other. Nonetheless, to the extent that shared application conditions may be found, the debates may again be easily settled—e.g. if it is simply a rule of use that (for singular terms ‘a’ and ‘b’) ‘mereological sum of a and b’ applies provided ‘a’ applies and ‘b’ applies, then (assuming some other terms refer), it is a trivial matter to show that there are mereological sums.
Similarly, quantificational claims may fail to be truth-evaluable if they don’t involve specifying a domain—where that involves specifying (or presupposing) a sort or sorts of entity over which we are quantifying. See my (2009).
Yablo (2009) lays out as a condition for those who take a ‘quizzical’ attitude to ontological questions that they don’t make those existence questions that intuitively have clear answers unanswerable. This might be more generally thought of as a condition any deflationary view should fulfill; the semanticist view meets it with ease.
At least, unless the case can be made (as Sider (2009) hopes) that there is one absolutely best language, rather than different languages that may be better or worse suited to different pragmatic purposes.
Eklund (2006b, pp. 325, 326) similarly argues that generalizing the neo-Fregean approach commits one to what he calls a ‘maximalist’ ontology. (Note though that his argument only applies directly to the neo-Fregean view, and his way of defining the ‘maximalist’ position is not one I endorse, though his ‘maximalism’ is obviously closely related to the plentitudinous ontology that comes with semanticism). Hale and Wright (2009) dispute the charge that the neo-Fregean is committed to maximalism in Eklund’s sense.
Eklund raises another objection to plentitudinous ontologies: that they are apt to be contradictory, as the transformation principles may entail the existence of incompatible objects (Eklund 2006a). This is a development of the ‘bad company’ objection and is best addressed by imposing a harmony constraint on transformation rules.
For example the neo-Fregean view takes off from the syntactic priority thesis, understanding reference in terms of truth: for any singular term to refer is for it to appear in a suitable true statement (canonically, an identity statement). It is then the fact that numerical terms function as singular terms in appropriate true sentences that ensures that they refer. The semanticist approach, by contrast, analyses reference in terms of application conditions, and understands existence claims as true provided the application conditions for the appropriate terms are fulfilled.
In the neo-Fregean’s case the rules will involve combining the abstraction principle with the principle that the appearance of a singular term *J* in a true identity statement entails the existence of Js. These jointly enable us to move, e.g. from the claim about an equivalence relation to the claim about the existence of a number. The semanticist allows the rules to take a variety of forms, including, e.g., that if the following paperwork is filed, a corporation exists.
This is not to say one should deny reference where one or more constraints is not fulfilled—difficult issues may arise about what we should say in various cases, as in the baseball case (see below). It is only to say that the semanticist should only be committed to the guarantee of reference in cases that satisfy the constraints.
This, of course, will raise objections from those suspicious of analyticity; I will not have space to respond to those broad objections here, though elsewhere I have done so (2007, chapter 2), and have also elsewhere (forthcoming) developed an account of why analytic claims don’t need truthmakers—an account that may be pressed into service here in again showing why worries about the world failing to measure up are out of place. Karen Bennett (2009) notes that all participants in the serious metaphysical debates deny that such principles are analytic, taking this as evidence against their being analytic. But while it may be true that the serious participants deny that these principles are analytic, that does not undermine the present critique of the disputes: instead, the semanticist’s point may be precisely that that is where disputants on both sides of metaphysical debates jointly go wrong (much as the compatibilist maintains that libertarians and hard determinists jointly go wrong in taking our concept of freedom to be too demanding).
Cf. Hale and Wright (2009) who emphasize that the disputed abstraction principles are conceptual truths, and so do not leave any hostages to metaphysical fortune.
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Thomasson, A.L. The Easy Approach to Ontology. Axiomathes 19, 1–15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-008-9057-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-008-9057-9