Quine's criterion of ontological commitment entails that multiplying ontological categories is legitimate only when no single-category paraphrase preserves all explanatory work, a standard linguistic pluralism has not met.

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Explanatory work(what a theory accomplishes in helping us understand the world): The job that something does in explaining or accounting for why things are the way they are—the actual work of making sense of phenomena.
Linguistic pluralism(a philosophical position that Quine's criterion challenges): The view that we need multiple different types of languages or ways of talking to fully describe reality, rather than just one unified system.
Paraphrase(using different language to express the same idea): Rewriting or restating something in a different way while keeping the same meaning.
Quine(as a proper name referring to the philosopher whose theory is being discussed): Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher who wrote about how we know things and how language works. In this statement, we're discussing one of his specific ideas about observation.

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