A puzzle about ontological commitment

Frank Jackson

pp. 191-199

in: John Heil (ed), Cause, mind, and reality, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

One question is what a theory says exists, its ontological commitments. Another question is the bearing of the answer to that question on the acceptability of the theory. It is Quine most particularly who has made us sensitive to the importance of these two questions.¹ Under his influence, very often we discern the ontological commitments of a theory as a preliminary to considering whether they give us a reason to reject the theory or at least for looking around for other theories which serve the same purposes while avoiding the commitment. We eschew as far as we can theories which have problematic ontological commitments, and we regret any problematic commitments of the theories we do accept. It turns out that there is a puzzle here. The obvious way to spell out what it is for a theory to be ontologically committed to entities of some kind appears to make nonsense of the way we use ontological commitments to evaluate the theory in a very common kind of case.

Cited authors

Quine Willard Van Orman