Reading On what there is in 2026

Reading “On what there is” again in 2026, I am vert surprised about many things about it. Not onyl the tone – even though Alejandro Vazquez del Mercado has reminded me of how much the tone of analytic scholarship has changed in the last century, I was still surprised – but also how good it is!  So many good and deep thoughts! And also how bad it is, as well!  It is rigurous in following his and his opponents arguments to their consequences, but when it comes to give a final argument against Meinongianism and Platonism, he just shrugs and claims that:

“I remain free to maintain that the fact that a given linguistic utterance is meaningful (or significant, as I prefer to say so as not to invite hypostasis of meanings as entities) is an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact; or, I may undertake to analyze it in terms directly of what people do in the presence of the linguistic utterance in question and other utterances similar to it.”

And later

“The problem of explaining these adjectives ‘significant’ and ‘synonymous’ with some degree of clarity and rigor—preferably, as I see it, in terms of behavior—is as difficult as it is important.”

So he does the good old: “I do not have a [anti-realist] solution, and I recognize it will be hard to find it, but believe me that there has to be one” move!

And even for his positive proposal, i.e., the famous “To be is to be the value of a variable” or, to be more precise:

“a theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true”, 

there is not much of an argument in “On what there is”.This is because the debate is between two camps: those who take the ontological commitments to be determined by (at least) its constants and its (bound) variables, versus those who, like Quine, take it that only the bound variabels carry genuine ontological commitment. 

As Sting used to sing, “there is no monopoly of common sense, on either side of the ideological fence” (or something like that), and so both sides face immnediate serious problems. Quine’s position face the problem that a lot of truths seem,a t leats prima facie, to occupy essential constants, i.e., not all triuths are purely quantificational. On the other sides, Quine’s opponents face the famous problem of empty names. So Quine must both show how he can face the problem of non-quantified truths, i.e., to give a principled general quantificational account of how to determine its ontological commtiments, and respond to the many accounts of empty names his opponents have proposed. 

For the former goal, Quine adopts the general idea behind Russell’s strategy, i.e., to treat names as predicates. This is highly counter-intutitve indeed, but so will be all others. For the later goal, he divides the proposals in three: first, dualist Meinongian proposals where there are not really any empty names, empty names refer to entities that do not actually exist. I call these proposals dualists, because they introduce a new ontological distinction where there is abroader category than those of the esistent beings. As usual, and not very unfairly (just a bit), Quine presents the many counter-intutive consequences and many puzzles arising from this solution as a heavy burden against it. 

Then, come the reductivist proposals, which account for the truth and ontological commtiemnts of sentences where empty names occur in terms that commit us only to entities that we already must accept in our ontology: either universals or words. Against the former, he argues that we are not actually commited to universals. But his defense is pretty weak, in my opinion. On the hand, the concpeutalist/Fregean has the argument that Quine’s own quantificational account already commits us to at leats some universals, since we do say things like “these words have the same meaning” and “this is meaningless”. On the other, as I alreayd mentioned, Quine’s argument against this option is almost non-existent. So, strike against Quine.

But the most puzzling aspect of Quine’s argument is his response to the final account fo empty names, which as far as I can tell is just to admit that, yeah, empty names are (at leats some important times, as when we say stuff like “Pegauss does not exist”) probably about words (like “Pegasus”). But, if I have reocnstructed the dialectic correctly, this defeats the whole argument for Quine’s purely quantification account. Quine claims that not, because even if we admit that these sentences are (partially, he insists) about the words that occur in them, this does not mean that they are so because of the names that occur in them carry this commitment. In other words, yes, “Pegasus does not exist” is made true by the fact that “Pegasus” is an empty name, but this is not so, according to Quine, because “Pegasus” has itself as its referent in this sentence. 

But this cannot be enoguh, for sure! As I have  been insisting, the dialectic was that Quine had to demostrate that his purely quantificational account was superior to any and all non-purely quantificational accounts. This means showing somthing like his account beign able to account better for pehnomena his opponenst cannot. But in the end, he just admits that some phenomena can be given BOTH accounts, not that one is superior to the other. This is a definitve KO against Quine and so, in my opinion, the victory goes to those who hold proper names to be a non-transparent but still good guide into a theory’s ontological commitments!