Abstract

Quine's position on making ontological commitments in natural language is the most widely accepted in the field. Simply stated, his criterion is that one is ontologically committed only to those entities which one explicitly says there are. If an acceptable translation of an English sentence is given in the canonical notation, one is committed to the class of objects which serves as the value of any variable bound by a quantifier in an objectually quantified sentence. Recently, several attempts have been made to show why his criterion of ontological commitment is incorrect, however. ;Many of these attempts have started by arguing that Quine's view of the logical and quantificational structure of natural language is wrong. They object to his assumption that sentences of natural language have a logical form which can be explicitly shown by translating sentences of natural language into a canonical idiom whose logical features are those of classical logic. ;Other philosophers have criticized Quine's criterion on the grounds that quantificational expressions in natural language should not be translated by objectual quantifiers. They argue that substitutional quantifiers best translate natural language expressions and that substitutional quantifiers do not carry ontological commitments in the way that objectual quantifiers do. They conclude that Quine's criterion cannot be applied to natural language. ;A third attempt to show the criterion to be false comes from a disagreement about how Quine allows a speaker to use paraphrase in order to avoid ontological commitments. According to some philosophers, no sentence does a better job of displaying the logical form, and hence, the quantificational structure of a proposition, than any other. On this basis, they argue that paraphrasing a sentence which contains an apparent commitment to some abhorrent entity does not allow one to avoid ontological commitment to it. Their position entails that Quine's criterion of ontological commitment is false. ;In the course of this essay, I examine the reasons a philosopher may have for taking one of the positions outlined above and argue that the structure of natural language and the uses to which natural language is put do not support their conclusions. Thus, I argue that if Quine's criterion of ontological commitment is false, it is not for any of the reasons they suggest