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Ontology and Metaontology a Contemporary Guide

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Ontology and Metaontology a Contemporary Guide Ontology and Metaontology A Contemporary Guide Francesco Berto and Matteo Plebani Table of Contents A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s ix Introduction: What Is Ontology? What Is Metaontology? 1 Part I Quinean Metaontology 1 On Denoting 15 2 1948: On What There Is 23 3 The Standard View 34 Part II Alternative Metaontologies 4 Ontological Pluralism and Neo-Fregeanism 55 5 Carnap’s View of Ontology and Neo-Carnapians 68 6 Fictionalism 83 7 Meinongianism 99 8 The Grounding Approach 113 Part III Ontology 9 Abstract Objects I: Numbers & Co. 123 10 Abstract Objects II: Linguistic Types, Propositions and Values 152 viii Contents 11 Possible Worlds 163 12 Material Objects 181 13 Fictional Objects 199 14 Beyond Particulars: Properties and Events 211 References 229 I n d e x 241 Acknowledgements We are most grateful to Doug Edwards, David Liggins, Tuomas Tahko, Stephan Torre, Achille Varzi and Alberto Voltolini for their helpful comments and remarks on various parts of this book. h e division of labour for it has been as follows: we wrote the Introduction together. Chapters 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12 and 13 were written by Francesco Berto. Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 14 were written by Matteo Plebani. We reviewed each other ’ s chapters. Parts of Chapters 1, 3, and 7 draw on Chapters 2 and 4 – 6 of Francesco Berto ’ s Synth è se Library book Existence as a Real Property. h anks to Springer for allowing us to use that material. Parts of Chapter 9 draw on Matteo Plebani ’ s survey of nominalistic strategies in the philosophy of mathematics ( ‘ Nominalismo in i losoi a della matematica ’ ) for the online journal Aphex . h anks to the editors for allowing us to use that material. Parts of Chapter 11 come from Francesco Berto ’ s entry ‘ Impossible Worlds ’ for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . h anks to the editors, and particularly to Ed Zalta, for allowing us to reuse that material. Introduction: What Is Ontology? What Is Metaontology? Chapter Outline 1 Ontology … 1 2 … And metaontology 2 3 … And metaphysics 3 4 … And science, and common sense 5 5 The rest of the book 9 1 Ontology … Biology studies living things. Psychology studies mental functions. Astronomy deals with celestial phenomena and mathematics deals with numbers. h ey all study something , of course, but none of them studies everything . h ey do not address the whole of reality, or all that there is. Ontology does. h is characterization of ontology can be traced back to Aristotle, who in Book Four of his Metaphysics introduced the idea of a ‘ science of being qua being ’ , or of being as such. Yet Aristotle did not use (a Greek counterpart of) the word ‘ ontology ’ to name such a science, although the term comes from ó n , the present participle of e î nai , the Greek verb for ‘ to be ’ . h e word is a more recent seventeenth-century coinage (nor did Aristotle use a Greek counterpart of the word ‘ metaphysics ’ – we will get back to this). At er having been dismissed by much early analytic and neo- positivistic philosophy, ontology made an impressive comeback in the second half of the twentieth century. One initiator of the renaissance was Willard van Orman Quine, who made mainstream the idea that the task of ontology is to write down something like a complete catalogue of the furniture of the world. What we want from ontology is a list of all there is, and ontology gets the list right insofar as it misses nothing that is there, and includes nothing that isn ’ t there. However, many still think that there is something perplexing about the study of what there is , which sets it apart from the other above-mentioned disciplines. Laymen have a rough understanding of what biology, psychology or mathematics are about, and few doubt that living creatures, or the functioning of the mind or the realm of 2 Ontology and Metaontology numbers, are legitimate areas of rational investigation. But, i rst, what does it mean to study being qua being, or what is? And, secondly, via which methods or procedures of inquiry should such a study be carried out? While there are many excellent introductions to ontology on the market, few deal extensively with these two issues – questions to which professional philosophers give conl icting answers. h is provided our motivation for writing the book. 2 … And metaontology As its title makes explicit, this book is an introduction to ontology as well as an introduction to meta ontology. And the term ‘ metaontology ’ is a very recent coinage: as far as we know, it oi cially entered the philosophical landscape as the title of a 1998 essay by Peter van Inwagen, one of the greatest contemporary ontologists. Now, van Inwagen understood metaontology as dealing precisely with the two issues just mentioned: if the key question for ontology, as Quine told us, is ‘ What is there? ’, then the (twofold) key question for metaontology is ‘ What do we mean when we ask “ What is there? ” ’ , and ‘ What is the correct methodology of ontology? ’ . By using the prei x ‘ meta- ’ , van Inwagen meant to suggest a kind of higher level rel ection: ‘ meta-X ’ as the inquiry on the central concepts and procedures of discipline X. It is only natural that the rel ection on the proper methodology of a discipline historically comes at er the discipline itself has l ourished and developed its own conceptual tools. Perhaps the main element of novelty in early twenty-i rst-century ontological research is that many of its practitioners pay more and more attention to metaontological issues. ‘ Metaontology ’, as Ross Cameron 2008: 1 said, ‘ is the new black ’. h is book aims to give a textbook presentation of the discipline in line with such recent developments. Now the metaontological turn has brought a rediscovery of some traditional and pre-Quinean approaches to ontology. As for the i rst of those two meta-questions, ‘ What do we mean when we ask “ What is there? ” ’ : the catalogue metaphor embedded in the Quinean view has it that the goal of ontology is to write a list of everything that falls under the notion being . But the original Aristotelian idea of a ‘ science of being qua being ’ was concerned, i rst of all, with the very concept of being, that is, with the meaning of the notion itself. Quine did have something important to say on the meaning of being, as we will see in the i rst part of the book. Other recently developed metaontological stances dif er from the Quinean approach in their conceptualization of being as such, and from this they derive dif erent views of ontology ’ s tasks. Some say that the primary goal of ontology is not to write a list of all there is, but (as also Aristotle set out to do in the Metaphysics ) to identify the most fundamental or basic entities: those which ground all the rest, and on which everything (else) depends. Introduction: What Is Ontology? What Is Metaontology? 3 Some claim, as Aristotle himself did, that being can mean dif erent things – that there are dif erent ways of being – and that the primary goal of ontology is to identify these meanings, or ways of being. Some even introduce a distinction between being and what is there , and claim that some things should be included in the universal catalogue because they are there, although they lack being. As for the second meta-question, namely ‘ What is the correct methodology of ontology? ’, the new methodological consciousness of twenty-i rst-century ontology has revitalized del ationist perspectives on the goals and ambitions of ontology itself. Quine ’ s methodology for ontology was naturalistic: he believed that we should include in the universal catalogue the kinds of entities our best natural science commits us to (he also had views on how such ‘ ontological commitment ’ ought to be understood, as we will see). He thus denied that ontology has a special philosophical autonomy, allowing it to l oat freely from the i ndings of natural sciences. Contrary to the beliefs of his master Rudolf Carnap, Quine believed ontological questions to generally make perfect sense and to admit of substantive replies. Nonetheless, other philosophers nowadays are much more Carnapian: they think that ontological questions make sense only when appropriately restricted or qualii ed. Some have a more strongly dismissive approach, and believe that most such questions are just shallow: they reduce – as some founding fathers of analytic philosophy also thought – to confusions concerning the meanings of some expressions of our everyday language. 3 … And metaphysics Ontology entertains a complicated relationship with metaphysics, which is itself one of the most traditional parts of philosophy. h e border between ontology and metaphysics in the works of contemporary philosophers is fuzzy. Some just use the two terms interchangeably. Sometimes the relationship between metaphysics and ontology is understood as of one between a discipline and one of its sub-disciplines. As a i rst approximation, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy which asks what reality is like – as opposed to such other branches as epistemology, which asks what we can know about reality and how; or ethics, which asks how reality ought to be. Textbook presentations ot en say that metaphysics is an investigation into the most fundamental and general structures and features of reality (Crane and Farkas 2004; Garrett 2006). Just as the word ‘ ontology ’ , so the word ‘ metaphysics ’ comes onstage later than the Greek philosophers who can be considered the founding fathers of the discipline.
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