Two ways of saying no to Quine

Abstract

W. V. O. Quine holds that the raison d’etre of metaphysics is the drawing of two lists; the list of entities that are part of the world and of those that are not. To achieve this aim, he suggests regimenting true sentences belonging to ‘our best theories’ to determine their ontological commitments. Many accept Quine’s project, differing with each other regarding what are the best theories, the sentences that belong to these and the entities that are part of the world. Other philosophers find this characterization of metaphysics deficient. Jonathan Schaffer considers the issue of what exists as trivial or uninteresting. The important issue is whether the things said to exist exists derivatively or fundamentally. He believes that there is a set of fundamental entities, and metaphysics ought to be concerned primarily with delineating this set of entities. Philosophical debates ought to be reconsidered along these lines. Theodore Sider on the other hand, thinks that the world contains a distinctive structure, and the aim of metaphysics is to discover the notions that enable us to describe facts concerning structure. Some of the possibilities and limits of these two approaches are highlighted.