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    Quinean criteria of ontological commitment are ontologica... — Carmelics
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    Quinean criteria of ontological commitment are ontologically biased against realism about properties or universals.

    Philosophy of Language
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    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

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    • 1.Quinean criteria determine ontological commitment by focusing only on the values of bound individual variables.
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    • 2.Quinean criteria attach no ontological significance to the predicate.
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    • 3.A sentence such as '∃x Swims(x)' commits to entities that swim but not to a property of swimming under Quinean criteria, because no property of swimming need be among the values of the bound variables for the sentence to be true.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Quinean criteria are not biased but are methodologically neutral: they simply reflect what a given theory quantifies over, leaving realists free to quantify over universals.
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    • 2.A realist about properties can straightforwardly extend first-order quantification to include predicate positions, as in '∃P P(x)', thereby securing commitment to universals on purely Quinean grounds.
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    • 3.The alleged bias therefore reflects the realist's own theoretical choices, not a structural defect in Quine's criterion itself.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Quine's criterion is not an ontological thesis but a methodological tool for reading off commitments from theories we antecedently accept, as Quine explicitly argues in 'On What There Is'.
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    • 2.The criterion's silence on predicates reflects a principled parsimony rooted in Russell's and Quine's rejection of intensional entities as explanatorily idle, not an arbitrary exclusion of universals.
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    • 3.Charging the criterion with anti-realist bias conflates its descriptive role—cataloguing what a theory says there is—with a first-order metaphysical verdict against universals.
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    Philosophy of Language

    Related

    A realist about properties can straightforwardly extend first-order quantificati...A sentence such as '∃x Swims(x)' commits to entities that swim but not to a prop...Charging the criterion with anti-realist bias conflates its descriptive role—cat...Quine's criterion is not an ontological thesis but a methodological tool for rea...
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    Quinean criteria are not biased but are methodologically neutral: they simply re...Quinean criteria attach no ontological significance to the predicate.Quinean criteria determine ontological commitment by focusing only on the values...The alleged bias therefore reflects the realist's own theoretical choices, not a...The criterion's silence on predicates reflects a principled parsimony rooted in ...

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    A criterion of ontological commitment that omits implicit ontological ...90%The standard criterion of ontological commitment is accepted.89%Quinean criteria determine ontological commitment by focusing only on ...89%Modal criteria for ontological commitment cannot distinguish between c...89%

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    To play its appointed role, a criterion of ontological commitment should be ontologically neutral: it lets the theory speak for itself, as it were, without imposing ontological assumptions from the outside. Quinean criteria, however, by focusing only on the values of the (individual) variables, have been accused of being ontologically biased against realism about properties or universals because they fail to attach ontological significance to the predicate.[22] Consider ‘∃x Swims(x)’. According
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    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
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    1 edit