Ontology

Abstract

One example of the impressive breadth, depth, and deep interconnectedness of Fine’s work concerns his views about what sorts of entities we should commit ourselves to, as philosophers. In “The Question of Ontology” he challenges existing accounts of the philosophical task of ontology, rejecting a Quinean concern with what there is in favor of a focus on what entities are real. Fine thinks such a notion of reality is primitive, although linked to the notion of being ungrounded. The present chapter constitutes a critique of Fine’s interconnected set of ideas about the task of ontology, and defends the ability of quantificational constructions to capture ontological commitments, while questioning the usefulness to ontology of a primitive concept of reality.

On what there is in particular

“…In this respect, at least, Fine's meta-ontology has no advantage over the Quinean's. Warren (2020) and Kroon and McKeown-Green (2020) independently make a different proposal. Rather than drawing a distinction between what there is and what's real, they draw on the resources of plural logic.…”

“…be plural variables which can take more than one object as their value, and let '≼' be an 'inclusion' predicate, roughly corresponding to the English phrases 'one of' and 'among'. We can now regiment Natural Realism and Integer Realism as commitments to pluralities of objects: the former is a commitment to a plurality containing all and only natural numbers -or the natural numbers; the latter is a commitment to a plurality containing all and only integers -or the integers (Warren 2020: 2856, Kroon and McKeown-Green 2020. This proposal doesn't capture the particularity of Alice's and Beth's views.…”