... that sentences quantifying over pluralities place constraints on how the world must be – and in particular, on what there must be, if those sentences are true – plethological commitments should be viewed as a metaphysical cost, just as ontological commitments are. Thus, plethological parsimony should be viewed...

... Mordell L Tappenden J Fraassen B van Kushner D Resnik M Sandborg D Mandelbrojt S Verhoeven L Weber H Cantor G Riemann B mathematical explanation scientific explanation Kitcher Steiner ontological commitment indispensability argument generality explanatory proof The topic of mathematical...

...What in our theoretical pronouncements commits us to objects? The Quinean standard for ontological commitment involves (nearly enough) commitments when we utter “there is” or “there are” statements without hope of eliminating these by paraphrase. Coupled with the indispensability of the truth...

... burden of proof God ontological debate over ontological commitment ontological debate “exist ” “objects ” neutral use of public meaning Hofweber T Ryle G indispensability arguments van Inwagen P Venclova T Carnap R existence pluralism quantifier domains Thomasson Amie existence...

...”). The best positive account of how it works, detailed and defended in this chapter, is substitutional. Since not all substitutes introduce objects, not all uses of “something” are ontologically committing. One merit of the view is that it explains the consistency of believing that there are things that don’t...

... Holmes S nominalism nominalists ontological commitment s Parsons T quantifier Meinong A van Inwagen P Burgess J P Dummett M Rosen G Shapiro S Maddy P naturalism confirmational holism indispensability existential quantification ontological commitment platonism anti‐platonism mathematical...

.... holes indispensability metaphysics ontological commitment ontology metaontology ontological deflationism ontological realism composite material objects monism simplicity fundamental entities ideology metaphysics room Ontologese quantification quantifier variance deflationism about...

...-existence of abstract objects will find themselves contradicting themselves many times every day—and are therefore “ontologically committed” to the existence of abstract objects. 7. There is only one real objection to Lewis’s theory of properties: it isn’t true. It is a model of what a good theory...

... such complexes as For some p, Paul believes that p and Elmer does not believe that p , without thereby being ontologically committed to the view that there are objects which sentences name. (I doubt whether any dogma, even of empiricism, has ever been quite so muddling as the dogma that to be is to be a value...

...This chapter examines the dispute between Quine and Carnap about how to understand ontological commitment and what ontology to adopt. The central dispute is over Carnap’s acceptance of abstract objects, including numbers, properties, and propositions, which Quine characterizes in “On What...

...This article begins with some clarification. Participants in contemporary debates surrounding nominalism tend to share certain assumptions about what ontological commitment amounts to, how the abstract and the concrete are to be distinguished, and what objects in general are. It is good to have...

... indispensability, and then argued that if this indispensability suffices to confer respectability on ontological commitments, so does indispensability for deliberation, or deliberative indispensability. It is also emphasized that this observation is consistent with a plausible ontological...

... of this argument. What deRosset takes as the lessons to be learned from Horden’s criticisms are explored in this chapter. deRosset L Horden J Stevenson J Carnap R Chalmers D Kaplan D Russell G analyticity metaontology ontological commitment requirements stipulation In (deRosset, 2015 ) (henceforth...

... system philosophical Armstrong D M Lewis D K Mulligan K Thomasson A L truthmaker Kim J Dewalque A Giustina A Textor M existence metaontology ontological commitment judgment fittingness self-evidence Brentano Brentano’s theory of judgment serves as a springboard for his conception...

... is that we are all implicitly committed to the existence of arbitrary sums even before we accept mereology, so that accepting mereology does not give us any new commitments. A different idea is that, although accepting mereology gives us new ontological commitments, the additional entities do not add...

...Interpretations of standard first‐order logic fail as vehicles for paraphrase of important segments of discourse involving tenses, modalities, and the like. This paper considers substitutional quantification, which severs the connection between quantifiers and ontological commitment, as a way...

... a truth bearer — a representation that the world is some way — and the world’s being that way. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment and its implications for the determination of what exists are discussed and found to be ontologically unilluminating. The question whether every truth has a truthmaker...

...Wedin considers the relation between the ontological commitment in the Categories and the semantical theory of underlying ontological configurations for standard categorical statements. According to Wedin, Aristotle's fourfold division of beings, which divides things according...

.... The ideological resources in question are primitive second-order quantifiers, which bind variables in predicate-position and have no analysis in terms of quantifiers binding variables in the name-position, and a hyperintensional connective like ’in virtue of’. These resources carry no ontological commitments...

... of abstraction ontological commitment virtual pornography telepresence informational privacy In the development of our understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. C. A. R. Hoare, Notes on Data Structuring (1972), p. 83...