Metaontological Studies Relating to the Problem of Universals
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Metaontological Studies relating to the Problem of Universals Mika Oksanen Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in auditorium XII of the Main Building, on the 11th of January, 2014 at 10 o'clock. ISBN 978-952-10-9580-1 ISBN 978-952-10-9581-8 (PDF) Unigrafia Helsinki 2013 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the supervisor of my dissertation, Professor Gabriel Sandu, and to the preliminary examiners of the dissertation, Professor Jussi Haukioja and Docent Markku Kein¨anenfor their comments. I also owe thanks to Docent emeritus S. Albert Kivinen, who supervised my licentiate thesis and whose lectures and seminars on ontology have in- spired the trains of thought which eventuated in this dissertation. I wish to thank Professor Ilkka Niiniluoto, who examined my licentiate thesis and whose lectures and writings have also greatly influenced me. I also wish to thank many students of Docent Kivinen and other persons interested in ontology as graduate students or researchers in the University of Helsinki with whom I have often discussed ontological questions, including Dr. Anssi Korhonen, Dr. Heikki J. Koskinen, Dr. Tuomas Tahko and Mr. Janne Hiipakka and many others I cannot here name separately. Work on this dissertation has been financially supported by Finnish Cul- tural Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation and University of Helsinki, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged. This dissertation has been written with the aid of the freeware LATEX typesetting program. I owe perhaps the greatest thanks to my mother Ulla Oksanen for her financial and emotional support during my lengthy work on this dissertation. I dedicate this work to the memory of my deceased father Arvo Oksanen. Hyvink¨a¨a,December 2013 Mika Oksanen Abstract My dissertation deals with metaontology or metametaphysics. This is the subdiscipline of philosophy that is concerned with the investigation of meta- physical concepts, statements, theories and problems on the metalevel. It analyses the meaning of metaphysical statements and theories and discusses how they are to be justified. The name "metaontology" is recently coined, but the task of metaontology is the same as Immanuel Kant already dealt with in his Critique of Pure Reason. As methods I use both historical re- search and logical (or rather semantical) analysis. In order to understand clearly what metaphysical terms or theories mean or should mean we must both look at how they have been characterized in the course of the history of philosophy and then analyse the meanings that have historically been given to them with the methods of modern formal semantics. Metaontological research would be worthless if it could not in the end be applied to solving some substantive ontological questions. In the end of my dissertation, there- fore, I give arguments for a solution to the substantively ontological problem of universals, a form of realism about universals called promiscuous realism. To prepare the way for that argument, I argue that the metaontological considerations most relevant to the problem of universals are considerations concerning ontological commitment, as the American philosophers Quine and van Inwagen have argued, not those concerning truthmakers as such philosophers as the Australian realist D. M. Armstrong have argued or those concerning verification conditions as such philosophers as Michael Dummett have argued. To justify this conclusion, I go first through well-known ob- jections to verificationism, and show that they apply also to current verifi- cationist theories such as Dummett's theory and Field's deflationist theory of truth. In the process I also respond to opponents of metaphysics who try to show with the aid of verificationism or structuralism that metaphysical questions would be meaningless or illegitimate in some other way. Having justified the central role of ontological commitment, I try to develop a de- tailed theory of it. The core of my work is a rigorous formal development of a theory of ontological commitment. I construct it by combining Alonzo Church's theory of ontological commitment with Tarski's theory of truth. Contents 1 Introduction 5 1.1 What are Metaontology and Metametaphysics and why are they needed? ........................... 5 1.2 A Roadmap of the Argument .................. 15 2 History of the Concept of Ontology 19 2.1 History of Metaphysics from Aristotle to Wolff ........ 19 2.1.1 Aristotle's different Definitions of Wisdom ....... 20 2.1.2 The Division of Metaphysics and Birth of Ontology in the Beginning of the Modern Age ............ 25 2.1.3 Recent History of the Concepts of Metaphysics and Ontology; Heinrich Scholz and the Phenomenological Tradition ......................... 31 2.1.4 Ontological Fundamentalness .............. 38 2.2 Kant's Metametaphysical Attacks on (Transcendent) Meta- physics ............................... 48 2.2.1 Four major Epistemological Positions and their metaon- tological Consequences .................. 51 3 Verificationism and Other Metaontological Principles in Log- ical Positivists 68 3.1 Different Elements in Logical Positivism: Empiricism, Struc- turalism, Foundationalism, Coherentism and Syntacticism .. 68 3.1.1 Empiricism and Verificationism in Logical Positivism . 68 3.1.2 A Proposed Re-evaluation of Logical Positivism .... 71 3.1.3 Structuralism and Structural Realism in Logical Pos- itivism and Outside It .................. 76 3.1.4 Coherentist and Conventionalist Elements in Logical Positivism ......................... 86 3.1.5 Syntacticist attacks on Metaphysics .......... 89 3.2 Logical Positivists' Arguments against Metaphysics and Their Problems ............................. 95 3.3 Problems with Verificationism in General ........... 111 2 3.4 Holistic Verificationism and Semantic Holism ......... 137 3.5 Current Verificationism and Logical Positivism ........ 144 3.5.1 Quine and Kuhn and Logical positivism ........ 144 3.5.2 Dummett's Justificationism ............... 151 3.6 Other Miscellaneous Objections to Metaphysics ........ 157 4 Metaontology and the Theory of Truth 168 4.1 Correspondence Theory of Truth and Deflationism ...... 168 4.2 Different Definitions of Correspondence Theory and Different Correspondence Theories .................... 177 4.2.1 What is Correspondence Theory? ............ 177 4.2.2 Fact-based and Object-based Correspondence Theories 182 4.2.3 Aristotle's Theory of Truth and Aristotelian Theories of Truth .......................... 189 4.2.4 Truthmaker Theories ................... 198 4.3 Different definitions and kinds of deflationism and inflationism 213 4.3.1 Field's Two Theories of Truth and Meaning ...... 215 4.3.2 Realism and the Theory of Truth ............ 233 4.3.3 Truth as a Property ................... 236 4.3.4 The Theory of Truth and Explanation ......... 244 4.3.5 Conservativeness and Deflationism ........... 256 4.4 A New Formulation of Correspondence Theory: Non-dyadic Correspondence Relations .................... 259 5 A Theory of Ontological Commitment 266 5.1 Introduction ............................ 266 5.2 Historical Background: Earlier Candidates of the Criterion of Ontological Commitment .................... 268 5.2.1 Logical Positivism and Reality and Existence ..... 268 5.2.2 Bergmann's Theory of Ontological Commitment ... 273 5.3 The Eleatic Principle ....................... 275 5.4 Motivating Quine's Theory ................... 279 5.5 Existential Univocalism and Multivocalism .......... 280 5.6 Unrestricted Quantification and Absolute Generality ..... 290 5.7 Explicating Quine's criterion: Different Kinds of Ontological Commitment ........................... 297 5.8 Justification of Ontological Commitments and Pragmatism . 303 5.9 Objectual and Non-objectual Quantification .......... 308 5.9.1 An Argument for Free Predicate Logic ......... 317 5.9.2 Carnap's Relativistic Distinction between Internal and External Questions .................... 320 5.9.3 Ontological Commitment and the Metaphysics of Modal- ity and the Semantics of Propositional Attitudes ... 330 5.10 The Problem of Non-existence; an answer to Meinongians .. 340 3 5.11 Church's criterion of ontological commitment and truth ... 352 5.12 The Symbolization of ontological commitment ......... 357 5.12.1 A Paradox of Ontological Commitment ........ 362 5.13 A Recursive Characterisation of Explicit Ontological Com- mitment .............................. 365 5.14 From Explicit to Implicit Ontological Commitment ...... 372 5.15 Ontological Commitment in Natural Languages ........ 377 5.16 Materially Implicit Ontological Commitments ......... 389 5.17 A Model-theoretical Account of Ontological Commitment .. 392 6 What is the Problem of Universals? 402 6.1 The Problem of Universals, Abduction and Induction ..... 402 6.2 A Problem of Explanation or of Description? ......... 409 6.3 The Problem historically considered .............. 410 6.3.1 Porphyry's Formulation of the Problem of Universals . 411 6.3.2 What are Universals? .................. 421 6.3.3 Different Kinds of Purported Universals ........ 436 6.4 The Problem of Universals systematically considered ..... 450 6.4.1 Explanation, Description and Perception ........ 454 6.5 A Problem of Truthmakers or of Ontological Commitments? . 484 6.5.1 The A question and B question ............. 484 6.5.2 Higher-order and First-order Notation in Theories of Predication ........................ 490 7 A Preliminary Argument for the Existence of Universals 495 4 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 What are Metaontology