Quine's criterion ties ontological commitment to first-order existential quantification, but natural language and scientific discourse routinely quantify over fictional, modal, and abstract entities without thereby asserting their mind-independent existence.
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mind-independent existence(epistemology and metaphysics)
Something that exists and is real whether or not any person is thinking about it or observing it.
modal(in logic and metaphysics)
Dealing with possibility and necessity—questions about what could be true, what must be true, and what's merely contingent (could go either way).
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.