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    It is not the case that Quinean criteria of ontological commitment are ontologically biased against realism about properties or universals.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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