The logic behind Quine's criterion of ontological commitment

Abstract

Abstract This article first explains why Quine took first‐order classical logic to be the only language in which we should formulate a theory or declarative statement to determine its ontological commitments. I then argue that Quineans cannot relax Quine's restriction to classical logic such thatanynonclassical logic may be used to uncover a theory's ontological commitments. The reason is that this leads to radical ontological relativism according to which the ontological commitments of a theory are relative to a logic. This is not a Quinean picture of ontology, but a Carnapian one. Finally, I consider whether Quineans can go beyond Quine by allowing for classical and plural logic, but no other logics. I claim that this is not possible because plural logic is not transparent: it allows for ontologically nonequivalent theories to be formulated such that they come out as ontologically equivalent.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.