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.
But, surely, some things don’t exist: hobbits, dragons,
Pegasus.
What there is
Horses
George Bush
Prime numbers > 10
What there isn’t
Dragons
Pegasus
Largest prime
(T) There are things that don’t exist
$x~Ex (Ex: x exists) ??
Plato’s 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?
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, that’s something different from Pegasus.
But some clever philosophers, e.g. Wyman (Meinong),
argue that Pegasus has his being as an unactualized
possible. (p. 5a)
All Objects
Dragons
Horses
Actual Objects
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
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 Russell’s approach: use of bound variables,
variables of quantification, i.e. “something,” “nothing” etc.
Not names at all.
Russell’s theory of descriptions allows us to discuss nonbeing.
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.”
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.
“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)
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.