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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 quantifier account of ontological commitment should be rejected by ontologists.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.There is a primitive distinction between entities that are fundamentally real and those that are not, marked by the predicate 'Real(x)'.
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    • 2.The ontologist's task is to determine which entities and kinds of entity are fundamentally real.
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    • 3.The quantifier account is insensitive to the distinction between fundamentally real and non-fundamentally-real entities.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.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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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.If quantifying over Fs in our best theory commits us to Fs, then standard physics commits us to the existence of the average star, which has 2.4 planets—an entity no serious ontologist should posit.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.A criterion that cannot distinguish ontological weight from mere quantificational convenience conflates the semantic role of variables with the metaphysical question of what genuinely exists.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Kit Fine and Jonathan Schaffer argue that ontology's central question is not 'what exists?' but 'what is fundamental?'—a question grounded-entity theorists show cannot be read off from existential quantification alone.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Two theories can have identical quantificational commitments yet differ radically in their grounding structure, meaning the quantifier account is blind to the ontological hierarchy that metaphysicians like Fine take to be the subject matter of ontology.
      ?

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