Abstract
When we use a directly referential expression to denote an object, do we incur an ontological commitment to that object, as Russell and Barcan Marcus held? Not according to Quine, whose regimented language has only variables as denoting expressions, but no constants to model direct reference. I make a case for a more liberal conception of ontological commitment—more wide-ranging than Quine’s—which allows for commitment to individuals, with an improved logical language of regimentation. The reason for Quine’s prohibition on commitment to individuals, I argue, is that his choice of regimented language is heavily informed by his holist epistemology, in which objects are introduced via a description of their explanatory role. But non-holists can coherently attempt to commit to individuals using directly referential expressions, modelled in a formal language as constants. While holding on to the insight that a logical language is a helpful medium for ontology, I propose instead a more permissive language of regimentation, one expanded to permit the use of constants to record attempts to commit to individuals, which allows us to make sense of non-holist theories with alternative name-based or name-and-variable-based criteria of ontological commitment as well as Quinean theories.
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Notes
It is a little-known fact that Quine allows for some sense to be made of essence provided it is interpreted as relativised to a theoretical context. For more details and a modern development of this view, see (MacBride and Janssen-Lauret 2015, Sect. 4).
For further details, and a defence of Quine’s method of regimentation against the claim that it is toothless and equivalent to anti-metaphysical pragmatism or deflationism, see Janssen-Lauret (2015), Sect. 3.3.
An anonymous referee for this journal notes that a certain degree of realism must be presupposed for the project of regimentation to make sense, since it is unclear how Quine would treat theories that embrace a strong global anti-realism, or completely disavow the notions of truth or logical form. This is true but, for ontological purposes, not problematic. A theory must already embody some degree of realism, insofar as it must have a determinate logical form aimed at saying something true about some objects in the world, to aspire to an ontology in the first place.
Alston and an anonymous referee for this journal object that translations should inherit ontological commitments because the translation relation is symmetric: a sentence and its translation share a meaning (Alston 1958, pp. 9–10). I reply that ordinary-language translation is symmetric, but translation into the regimented language is not. Since the regimented theory need not even be fully materially equivalent to the pre-regimented theory, a fortiori we should not expect to see all of its meaning fully preserved. Regimentation is guided by pragmatic concerns. Ontologists opt for the regimented theory over a natural-language theory, or for one regimented theory (without commitment to migrations) over another (with that commitment) because it performs better on their criteria of theory choice, e.g. explanatory capacity, simplicity, predictiveness, fecundity. The theory which performs best on these criteria, they take it, is the most likely to be true.
For Quine and Barcan Marcus both, their choice of logic and regimented language is informed by their criterion of ontological commitment: Quine’s logic eschews constants, since he takes only variables to be committing; Barcan Marcus interprets quantification substitutionally because she thinks the only ontologically committing expressions are names. This contradicts Azzouni’s claim that choosing a criterion of commitment has ‘no significant effects whatsoever’ for the choice of logic (Azzouni 1998, p. 10).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Peter Clark, Gary Ebbs, Jane Heal, Chris Hookway, Gary Kemp, Fraser MacBride, Peter Sullivan, and Alan Weir for discussion. Thanks are also due to audiences at the Universities of Campinas, Glasgow, McMaster, St Andrews, and Rome La Sapienza, and to the people who attended my postgraduate seminar Logical Form and Ontology at the University of Campinas in 2014. This research was supported by a Capes Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant.
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Janssen-Lauret, F. Committing to an individual: ontological commitment, reference and epistemology. Synthese 193, 583–604 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0763-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0763-8