Quine, On What There Is

1

• Quine, On What There Is
• A curious thing about the ontological problem
  is its simplicity. It can be put in three
  Anglo-Saxon monosyllables What is there? It
  can be answered, moreover, in a word
  Everything and everyone will accept this
  answer as true. However, this is merely to say
  that there is what there is. (p. 4a)
• (Q) Everything exists.

2

• But, surely, some things dont exist hobbits,
  dragons, Pegasus.
• What there is What there isnt
• Horses Dragons
• George Bush Pegasus
• Prime numbers 10 Largest prime
• (T) There are things that dont exist
• xEx (Ex x exists) ??
• Platos Beard, or The Riddle of nonbeing
• How do we talk about what is not?
• When we deny the existence of x, what are we
  saying?

3

• Some dumb philosophers, like McX, make the
  following argument If Pegasus were not, we
  should not be talking about anything when we use
  the word therefore it would be nonsense to say
  even that Pegasus is not. (4b)
• When pressed, McX says, the Pegasus-idea exists.
  But, of course, thats something different from
  Pegasus.

4

• But some clever philosophers, e.g. Wyman
  (Meinong), argue that Pegasus has his being as an
  unactualized possible. (p. 5a)

Dragons
All Objects
Actual Objects
Horses
5

• On this view, George Bush exists he is
  spatio-temporally connected to you and me.
• Pegasus, on the other hand, subsists Pegasus is
  a merely possible object.
• But, for Quine, this leads to a bloated
  universe, a slum of possibles. He is an
  advocate of desert landscapes. (p. 5b)
• Consider the possible fat man in the doorway. Is
  he identical with the possible bald man?
• Slogan 1 No entity without identity

6

• Resolution
• Russell singular descriptions.
• The author of Waverly was a poet
• ? Something wrote Waverly and was a poet and
  nothing else wrote Waverly.
• Virtue of Russells approach use of bound
  variables, variables of quantification, i.e.
  something, nothing etc. Not names at all.
• Russells theory of descriptions allows us to
  discuss non-being.
• We must rephrase Pegasus as a definite
  description the winged horse that was captured
  by Bellerophon
• I.e. Pegasus does not exist ? Either every
  thing failed to be the winged horse that was
  captured by Bellerophon or two or more things
  were winged horses captured by Bellerophon.

7

• Turn to universals
• McX claims that houses, roses, etc. can have an
  attribute redness in common.
• Ergo, McX attributes exist.
• Ontological commitment
• We could say There is something which red houses
  and sunsets have in common. Or There is
  something which is a prime number larger than a
  million.
• Slogan 2 to be assumed as an entity is, purely
  and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a
  variable.

8

• Some dogs are white some things that are dogs
  are white.
• x(Dx Wx)
• The range of the variable extends over some white
  dogs (if any there be) but not over doghood and
  whiteness.
• On the other hand, when we say that some
  zoological species are cross-fertile, we are
  committing ourselves to recognizing as entities
  the several species themselves, abstract though
  they are. (p. 9b)

9

• We look to bound variables not to know what there
  is but in order to know what a given remark or
  doctrine says there is. (p. 10b)
• Reasons for operating on the semantic plane
• (1) to escape the problem from the beginning in
  which Q has difficulty talking about things that
  McX countenances and Q does not.
• (2) to find common ground on which to argue, n.b.
  references to conceptual schemes.
• Our acceptance of an ontology is similarity to
  our acceptance of a scientific theory ? we adopt
  (or ought to adopt) the simplest conceptual
  scheme
• But appeals to theory simplicity are tricky.
• What ontology do we adopt?
• Question is open approach with tolerance and an
  empirical spirit.