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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The entailment account of ontological commitment captures ontological costs that the quantifier account misses.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Theory T ('∃x K(x)') and theory T* ('True(T)') mutually entail one another, assuming 'K' is not a semantical predicate.
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    • 2.On the entailment account, mutually entailing theories share the same ontological commitments, so T and T* are both committed to Ks.
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    • 3.A philosopher cannot eliminate her commitment to Ks merely by switching from T to T*, even if T*'s commitment to Ks is only implicit.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Quine's criterion identifies commitment via canonical notation, but canonical paraphrase is theory-relative, not a neutral logical fact.
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    • 2.If paraphrase choice determines commitment, then switching to T* genuinely masks rather than eliminates ontological costs, confirming the entailment account's superiority.
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    • 3.Hartry Field's fictionalism exploits exactly this paraphrase flexibility, showing the quantifier account is gameable in ways that betray its purpose.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Truthmaker theory, developed by Armstrong and Bigelow, requires that true sentences are made true by entities in the world, not merely by quantificational form.
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    • 2.T* ('True(T)') inherits whatever worldly grounds make T true, so its ontological costs are real even when hidden from surface quantifier structure.
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    • 3.An adequate account of ontological commitment must track what a theory requires the world to contain, and the entailment account does this where the quantifier account cannot.
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