This paper is a discussion of an intuition commonly held by metaphysicians: that there must be a fundamental layer of reality; that chains of ontological dependence must terminate; that there cannot be turtles all the way down. I discuss application of this intuition with reference to Bradley's regress, composition, realism about the mental and the cosmological argument. I discuss some arguments for the intuition, but argue that they are unconvincing. I conclude by making some suggestions for how the intuition should be argued for, and discussing the ramifications of giving the justification I think best.

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What are the ontological commitments of a sentence? In this paper I offer an answer from the perspective of the truthmaker theorist that contrasts with the familiar Quinean criterion. I detail some of the benefits of thinking of things this way: they include making the composition debate tractable without appealing to a neo-Carnapian metaontology, making sense of neo-Fregeanism, and dispensing with some otherwise recalcitrant necessary connections.1 Metaontology Metaontology is the new black. We can no longer get away with simply worrying about what there is, now we have to worry about what ontological questions are all about in the first place.Metaontology arrived on the recent philosophical scene as a response to the debate over van Inwagen's Special Composition Question (SCQ): What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a collection of objects to compose some thing? SCQ divided philosophers: some, the universalists, held that the conditions for composition are vacuous-any collection of objects compose something; others, the nihilists, held that the conditions are never met-no collection of objects compose anything; and then there are various forms of restricted composition-the claim that there are conditions C such that a collection of objects composes a thing iff they are in C, and which some collections meet and some don't.

In this paper I further elucidate and defend a metaontological position that allows you to have a minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory of ordinary talk. On this view 'there are Fs' can be strictly and literally true without bringing an ontological commitment to Fs. Instead of a sentence S committing you to the things that must be amongst the values of the variables if it is true, I argue that S commits you to the things that must exist as truthmakers for S if it is true. I rebut some recent objections that have been levelled against this metaontological view.Keywords Ontological commitment Á Compositional nihilism Á Musical nihilism I am attracted to a radically minimal ontology. Many of the entities we quantify over in everyday speech do not, I hold, really exist. Complex objects are one such case: there is no mereology in reality-our ontology is one of simple entities lacking proper parts. However, I do not want to embrace an error-theory of talk about tables, chairs, etc.: it is, even speaking strictly and literally, true to say such things exist. Rather, I suggest, we should view the (strict and literal) truth of such claims as not bringing an ontological commitment to tables, chairs, etc. It is true to say that there are such things; but that it is true does not commit us to admitting such things into our ontology. The purpose of this paper is to further elucidate this metaontological view and to defend it from some recent objections.In previous work I have defended the claim that if you want to hold that 'there are Xs' is strictly and literally true whilst resisting ontological commitment to the Xs, you should show that one can provide grounds for the truth of such claims without appealing to the Xs: that is, you should show that an ontology lacking in Xs can