Recent controversies[edit]

The standard approach to ontological commitment has been that, once a theory has been regimented and/or "paraphrased" into an agreed "canonical" version,^[20] which may indeed be in formal logical notation rather than the original language of the theory, ontological commitments can be read off straightforwardly from the presence of certain ontologically committing expressions (e.g. bound variables of existential quantification). Although there is substantial debate about which expressions are ontologically committing,^[21][22] parties to that debate generally agree that the expressions they prefer are reliable bearers of ontological commitment, imparting ontological commitment to all regimented sentences in which they occur. This assumption has been challenged.


Inwagen has taken issue with Quine's methodology,^[23] claiming that this process did not lead to a unique set of fundamental objects, but to several possible sets, and one never could be certain that all the possible sets had been found. He also took issue with Quine's notion of a theory, which he felt was tantamount to suggesting a 'theory' was just a collection of sentences. Inwagen suggested that Quine's approach provided useful tools for discovering what entities were ontological commitments, but that he had not been successful. His attempts are comparable to an "attempt to reach the moon by climbing ever higher trees..."^[24]


It has been suggested that the ontological commitments of a theory cannot be discerned by analysis of the syntax of sentences, looking for ontologically committing expressions, because the true ontological commitments of a sentence (or theory) are restricted to the entities needed to serve as truthmakers for that sentence, and the syntax of even a regimented or formalized sentence is not a reliable guide to what entities are needed to make it true.^[25] However, this view has been attacked by Jonathan Schaffer, who has argued that truthmaking is not an adequate test for ontological commitment: at best, the search for the truthmakers of our theory will tell us what is "fundamental", but not what our theory is ontologically committed to, and hence will not serve as a good way of deciding what exists.^[26]


It also has been argued that the syntax of sentences is not a reliable guide to their ontological commitments because English has no form of words which reliably functions to make an existence-claim in every context in which it is used. For example, Jody Azzouni suggests that "There is" does not make any kind of genuine existence-claim when it is used in a sentence such as "There are mice that talk". Since the meaning of the existential quantifier in formal notation is usually explained in terms of its equivalence to English expressions such as "there is" and "there exist", and since these English expressions are not reliably ontologically committing, it comes to seem that we cannot be sure of our theory's ontological commitments even after it has been regimented into a canonical formulation.^[27] This argument has been attacked by Howard Peacock,^[28] who suggests that Azzouni's strategy conflates two different kinds of ontological commitment – one which is intended as a measure of what a theory explicitly claims to exist, and one which is intended as a measure of what is required for the theory to be true; what the ontological costs of the theory are. If ontological commitment is thought of as a matter of the ontological costs of a theory, then it is possible that a sentence may be ontologically committed to an entity even though competent speakers of the language do not recognize the sentence as asserting the existence of that entity. Ontological commitment is not a matter of what commitments one explicitly recognizes, but rather a matter of what commitments are actually incurred.