Truthmakers and ontological commitment: or how to deal with complex objects and mathematical ontology without getting into trouble

Abstract

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.

Philosophers should prefer simpler theories

“…The nihilist posits only fundamental particles like quarks, while common sense allows composite objects like tables. One of the main arguments for nihilism is a preference for a simpler ontology (Schaffer 2007, Cameron 2008. We could understand the nihilist as being committed to only one type of object-simple objects-while common sense is also committed to composite objects.…”

Sémantique formelle et engagement ontologique1

“…Un tel point de vue est défendu par divers auteurs (Simons, 1997;Heil, 2003;Armstrong, 2004;Cameron, 2008;2010 (Simons, 1997, p. 265) Cette dernière phrase exprime assez clairement ce qu'on pourrait appeler l'approche vérifactionnelle de l'engagement ontologique. L'approche quantificationnelle (c'est-à-dire l'approche standard de Quine) et l'approche vérifactionnelle ne s'opposeraient pas si le vérifacteur d'une phrase existentiellement quantifiée comme « il y a un x » était toujours l'existence de cet x. Mais le défenseur de l'approche vérifactionnelle peut précisément rester neutre sur ce point ou le rejeter.…”

Fundamental and Derivative Truths

“…I think the relation here is complex. On some versions (Cameron (2008a)) the truthmaking theorist is attempting to articulate what the truth of true propositions require in exactly the sense at issue here. A distinctive further commitment is that requirements are all ultimately requirements that certain entities exist (for discussion of why the truthmaker theorist might be tempted by this step, see Cameron (2008b)).…”

“…This seems like an intuitively natural result. 45 The material from which this paper is drawn has been presented at the University of Leeds senior seminar, at the Philosophy Club at the University of Oxford, the Leeds CMM workshop 'Structure in metaphysics', and a St Andrews workshop on 'The metaphysics of being basic' (where a fused version of this paper and (Cameron, 2008a) was presented). An early version of this paper formed part of the underground programme of the INPC metametaphysics conference in Boise, Idaho in 2007.…”