Quine's criterion of ontological commitment entails that semantic decisions about logical form directly determine what entities one is committed to, collapsing the supposed ontology/semantics distinction.

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Ontology(Carnap argues this enterprise is based on a mistake): The philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is.
Ontology/semantics distinction(Quine's idea challenges this separation): The traditional philosophical separation between questions about 'what exists?' (ontology) and questions about 'what do our words mean?' (semantics)—the idea that these are two different problems.
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.
criterion(as used in philosophy to describe a test for whether an idea works): A standard or rule used to decide whether something counts as true or valid.
logical form(Used to characterize logical consequence): The way that a sentence is built up from the logical particles.
ontological commitment(Used to derive that literal truth of 'a is F' entails existence of a): The criterion by which acceptance of a sentence as literally true commits one to the existence of the objects referred to by singular terms in that sentence, provided the sentence cannot be paraphrased away.
semantics(Distinguished from metasemantics and pragmatics in Kaplan 1989): The domain that concerns the facts about what meanings words or phrases have.

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