There seems to me to be a fundamental tension in Quine's thinking about ontology, between his commitment to pragmatism (and hence to ontological relativity) and his view -- not prominently expressed in the essay On What There Is -- that experience marks an outside boundary to the conceptual sphere. Hence Quine is led to suggest that a phenomenological ontology (an ontology of sense data, or "surface irritations", is explanatorily primary relative to epistemological concerns, whereas a physicalist ontology is explanatorily primary relative to other sorts of concerns (e.g. concerns about laws governing the behaviors of re-identifiable material objects). But this way of characterizing epistemological concerns as concerns with "objects" that allegedly are closer to the experiential boundary of our web of beliefs betrays a commitment to indirect realism that is rather inimical to thoroughgoing forms of ontological pragmatism, or so it seems to me.

Interestingly, Davidson, while endorsing a view on radical interpretation that is broadly pragmatist, can't either countenance ontological relativity just because he challenges the Quinean dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content that sustains this relativity. Davidson still takes as point of departure for the (notional) process of radical interpretation of a language user her attitudes of assenting to, or dissenting from, declarative sentences in various perceptual contexts. The the view that emerges is coherentist, and non-foundationalist, since individual "perceptual beliefs" are open to challenge as much as are any other kinds of beliefs. But Davidson's view, while dispensing with sense data or surface irritations, still retains something of the idea of a perceptual boundary to the conceptually structured web of beliefs of a individual or community. (...Not entirely satisfactory, in my view, in accounting for the epistemic authority of experience, but still a progress over Quine's, possibly).

For those interested -- a good follow-up paper:

http://www.hist-analytic.com/Gricestrawson.pdf

EDIT: My mistake. I was just excited to have found this article and so wanted to share it, but this is really not a good follow-up to "On What There Is", but is obviously better suited to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

EDIT: My mistake. I was just excited to have found this article and so wanted to share it, but this is really not a good follow-up to "On What There Is", but is obviously better suited to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" — Moliere

It is nevertheless and essential paper and I second your recommendation. I started typing in some comments about its relevance and its relation to the work of Kripke, which also raises difficulties for Quine's accounts of reference, meaning and proper names (one of them already mentioned by Shmik). But I would probably need to re-read In Defence of a Dogma first.

OK got it, thanks.

It's about protecting a certain understanding above all others at any cost. The "universal" is proposed to suggest that, within a given set of knowledge (say a disease and it symptoms), there is no other possible outcome or interaction in the situation. People do to try and ensure one particular understanding is always used in a particular circumstances.

As such it has ceased to be about describing the world at all. It's only concern is to prevent people from understanding the given situation in any other way. The status of the entity of "universal" is given because we need to imagine something is always there for the attempt to restrict understanding to function. If all we were working off were present moments (i.e. in these cases, this disease has caused "X"), there would be nothing to hang the (supposed) necessary outcome on. It would be obvious we haven't confirmed that the given outcome was always so for the given circumstance.

To say:"It's universal" means "The world is must be "X" at any time within this context." It gives us the excuse to say we know what must be so in a given situation.

I wonder if anyone can relate all this to my own simple-minded dualist ontology of stuff and arrangements?

For example, wallpaper is stuff; but it is an arrangement of stuff, namely wood fibres and other. Wood fibres are arrangements of cellulose and lignin which are arrangements of carbon and hydrogen, which are arrangements of protons neutrons and electrons, which are arrangements of quarks or strings or some such, which is stuff.

Wallpaper is often patterned.

A wallpaper group (or plane symmetry group or plane crystallographic group) is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art. There are 17 possible distinct groups. — Wiki

"There are 17 possible distinct groups."

It seems sensible to say this even if it happens that only 16 of the groups have ever been actually printed. But philosophically, it is an odd thing to say 'there are possible...', because ontology is all about what is actual. But mathematics is all about the possible arrangement of possible arrangements, and gives not a fig for ontology. If the universe turns out to be digital or discrete, and finite, then I suppose irrational numbers will turn out at the limit not to be instantiated along with ideal circles and right triangles. But however that goes, there will not be an 18th wallpaper pattern, and there will be 17.

Your post raises many issues and I will comment on just one of them. This concerns your idea of a dualism of stuff, or material constituent, and arrangement. I recently provided in another thread a link to Haugeland's paper Pattern and Being. An idea similar to yours was discussed in p.5 of this thread.

In Haugeland's view, to be just is to be an intelligible (and empirically discloseable) pattern. I will leave aside your question whether for X to be part of an ontology, X must be actual (or perceived) or merely discloseable, and thus just potentially existing. I just want to focus on your idea of a dualism of pattern and 'stuff patterned' (as one might put it).

If seeing, or empirically disclosing, a real pattern consists in seing a pattern in the arrangement of some entities that can be independently identified, then seeing a pattern always is a case of seeing as. An example would be seeing an arrangement of chess pieces on a chess board (at a definite stage in the course of a chess game) as constituting a king being checkmated. But, more basically, it could also be a case of some wooden figurine shaped thus and so being seen as a bishop. To be a bishop, in the context of a chess game, just is to be a material figurine (say) that plays a particular role according to intelligible rules. For chess pieces to have the identities that they have (bishop, pawn, king, etc.) is for them to be ascribed roles that disclose intelligible patterns (from the point of view of someone who merely observed the game going on). The constitutive rules and standards that govern the practice of chess playing (when insisted upon by chess players) bring those patterns into existence.

The point of this example, that I am adapting from Haugeland, is that for X to be, in the sense that X is a re-identifiable part of an intelligible pattern that belongs to some empirically discloseable domain of experience, doesn't just depend on the way in which the constituents of X are arranged internally. The internal organization of X may or may not, in some cases, enable X to play the functional role, within some broader context of activity, that defines X as the sort of object that it is. So, whenever something is part of an ontology, because it can be seen as a P (where 'P' is a sortal concept that defines what specific sort of pattern any P is seen as), then P must be discloseable within some broader context of activity (i.e. an empirical domain being governed by constitutive rules, such as the laws of physics, for instance). It may or may not be the case that for some P to exist as such (i.e. as the P that it is, where 'P' is a sortal concept) consists in its being internally arranged thus and so.

Replying to Un, just jovially...I believe if you are with David Lewis regarding possible worlds, all possible worlds exist, it's just this one that is actual. But really (sic) you sound like an Aristotelian at heart.

@Pierre-Normand Chess seems a bit hard to me, how about beans in a pod? What counts as a bean may well be somewhat vague and arbitrary; there may be partially developed bean nodules. But once we have decided what counts as a bean in this pod, it is clear enough that we can count the ones that count and arrive at a reliable 'five'.

This gives an ontology:

Bean, bean, bean bean, bean, five-beans-in-a-pod. It doesn't matter to me if you want to muddy things with that odd bean that is a sort of double, and that one at the end that is half-developed, it just leads to 'five to seven beans in a pod'.

Which is to say that though we must see a bean as a bean in order to count it as a bean, there is no 'seeing as' about how many beans make five.

So, whenever something is part of an ontology, because it can be seen as a P (where 'P' is a sortal concept that defines what specific sort of pattern any P is seen as), then P must be discloseable within some broader context of activity (i.e. an empirical domain being governed by constitutive rules, such as the laws of physics, for instance). It may or may not be the case that for some P to exist as such (i.e. as the P that it is, where 'P' is a sortal concept) consists in its being internally arranged thus and so. — Pierre-Normand

How am I to understand this 'exist as such', except as 'exist as stuff', as distinct from 'exist as a sortal concept': is this not the dualism of stuff and arrangement sneaked into the analysis without acknowledgement?

Which is to say that though we must see a bean as a bean in order to count it as a bean, there is no 'seeing as' about how many beans make five. — unenlightened

But there is a seeing as, a sortal concept, that makes something -- or rather singles it out as -- a bean. The question that can't possibly be answered through appeal to 'things as they are in themselves' is "How many objects are there in the pod?". Atoms are objets, so are bean parts, bacteria, and two beans stuck together may count as an object (for some purpose or other). Strip away all purpose and understanding (by us) and you dispense with all sortal concepts. But in that case there is no answer to how many "things" there are in the pod.

Frege got at this idea (in The Foundations of Arithmetic) when he proposed to define the concept of a number, understood as as expressing a specific count of something, as being signified by a second order functor that yields a truth value when saturated with a definite description (a first order functor). It then expresses the count of the objects that fall under the definite description. A definite description that single out material objects of a specific kind includes a sortal concept. The sentence "there are five beans in the pod" can then be analysed as "there are 5 x such that x ..." (a second order functor) saturated with the expression "...is a bean in the pod" (a first order predicate that includes the intelligible sortal concept of a bean). The concept of a pod merely restricts the scope of the quantifier in this example.

I'll respond to your second question later on...

How am I to understand this 'exist as such', except as 'exist as stuff', as distinct from 'exist as a sortal concept': is this not the dualism of stuff and arrangement sneaked into the analysis without acknowledgement? — unenlightened

I explained this to mean "exist as a P, where P is a sortal concept". It could be, for instance "exist as a bean". I didn't raise any issue about sortal concepts themselves 'existing'. What I was challenging is the idea (which you might not be strongly committed to) that for something to could as a P, quite generally, just is for something to have material parts, or constituents, and for those constituents to be arranged in the sort of pattern that makes them into a P. If this were the generalized explanation of a sortal concept, then every material object would be the object that it is only in virtue of its intrinsic, internal organization. But it often is the case that a material object is the object that it is in virtue of its functional role in a wider context, or some combination of its intrinsic arrangement and the existence of such a role. Consider, for instance, the concept of a planet (such that Saturn is one, but Plato isn't, because it didn't clear up its path, on one possible account of what it is for something to be a planet).

Consider, for instance, the concept of a planet (such that Saturn is one, but Plato isn't, because it didn't clear up its path, on one possible account of what it is for something to be a planet). — Pierre-Normand

Just so. What counts a planet changes according to how we decide to see things. Yet such changes in terminology do not, I maintain, change the ontology of the solar system; Pluto does not go off in a huff because we demoted it. Nor does it change how many planets make five.

In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive?

In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive?

Sounds a lil like that old P.K. Dick quote: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

Intimate relationships can - and often do - change as a result of how we think and talk about them. Do intimate relationships exist?

Intimate relationships can - and often do - change as a result of how we think and talk about them. Do relationships exist? — csalisbury

Well, I'll withdraw the definition, as it only fits one half of my dualism. But it's an unfair example, as an intimate relationship is composed to a considerable degree of how we talk and think about each other; it is misleading to say that they change as a result of what they are - though they certainly do, like radio-active elements.

I'd say you are good: intimate relationships don't exist. A relationship is not any state of the world. It's a logical expression expressed across many. An intimate relationship isn't formed by any one state, a hundred states of a person, or even ten billion states of a person. Intimate relationships are not objects. This is why trying to define what states of existence make a intimate relationships (or basically any other sort of relationship really) doesn't work. Such relationships can't be reduced to any one or multiple objects.

In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive? — unenlightened

This definition might be false and naive under one reading, and unobjectionable, though consistent with the kind of realist conceptualism that I take from Frege, Wiggins, McDowell, Hornsby, Putnam and Haugeland. Under the second reading, things indeed don't change just because we change how we talk about them. But that is true also of planets and intimate relationships. The intimate relationship of course changes if *participants* in it change how they talk about it, but that's just because how they talk about it is partially constitutive of it (just as how we exchange money is largely constitutive of the value that it has). How *other* people change the way they talk about it doesn't have any such impact, except inasmuch as it might disclose different features of the relationship they are witnessing (and, of course, the participants themselves can be influenced by this external gaze if they come to be aware of it). But this is just to say that how they (the non-participant observers) talk about the relationship between Pat and Chris, say, determine which features they are disclosing, not that they are changing those features.

The case of planets is more clear cut. How we talk about them determines (or rather singles out) some determinate concept of a planet (a sortal concept) under which we subsume some celestial bodies. Given one possible perspicuous understanding of the word 'planet', one according to which a planet must (among other things) have cleared out its path, Pluto isn't a planet. But this fact doesn't change when we change how we talk about planets. What changes is the reference of the word "planet" (the sortal concept referred to, also on the level of Bedeutung according to Frege) and hence, also, the truth value of the *sentence* "Pluto is a planet" (since the sentence now has a different meaning).

Most revealing of all might be the concept of a secondary quality. Wiggins and McDowell both defend what has been dubbed secondary quality realism. This realism undercuts both scientism and the fact/value dichotomy (also attacked by Putnam). Secondary qualities, such a color and smell, that we perceive, and ascribe to objects, also don't change when we change the way that we talk about them. Not always, in any case. Talking about them can induce changes in the brute shape of our sensibility and aesthetic appreciation. That can lead to a change in the reference of the words that we use to refer to secondary qualities. That much is easily granted (it is akin to redefining the word "planet" under the impetus of some new pragmatic scientific consideration).

For an object to be red just is for it to look red to normal observers under normal conditions. What counts as normal, in both cases, is tacitly part of the way we understand and use the concept in ordinary use. (This necessary tacit understanding is underlined in Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) It would be an error to view the perceptual concept thus defined as being subjective and our judgments about unchanging objects liable to change if, and when, the conditions of our sensibility change.

This would be to misconstrue the definitional relationship between looking red and being red, rather in the way Russell's (or Quine's) definite description analysis of ordinary proper names misconstrues the naming relationship between names and objects. It misidentifies the modal character of the relationship. This has been highlighted by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Putnam (implicitly) and Wiggins (explicitly) have brought Kripke's insight to bear on the case of secondary qualities. Just as, when one uses the proper name "Gödel" to refer to Gödel, the Fregean sense of the mane can't be expressed with a definite description, even though such a description may (or may not) have been used to secure the reference of the name when it was first introduced into the language, the sense of the predicate "red" doesn't either reduce to the sense of the definite description "looks read to us". It is rather the reference of the predicate (the sensible quality) that is thereby fixed. The upshot is that "...being red" as predicated of particular objects yields perfectly objective judgments. We may change the way we use the predicate "...is red" (which would amount to changing the reference of the predicate), and, indeed, do so under the impetus of a change in the shape of our brute sensibility, aesthetic appreciation, and/or discriminatory abilities. But that would amount to changing the concept being used, that is, not (necessarily) a change in judgment, but a change in topic. (It can also occur that the conception was revised, and hence also the judgment, but that is beyond the present point).

Naive realists believe that there is a fact/value dichotomy, where values are placed on the side of our contingent sensibilities and understandings. They thus believe science ought to be tasked with peeling off (or explaining away) the appearances that our use of secondary quality concepts yield. What would remain of reality after mere appearances (to us) have been thus peeled of is the objective world as it is in itself. But if the dichotomy is illusory, as I believe it is, then the peeling off leaves nothing.

Naive realists believe that there is a fact/value dichotomy, where values are placed on the side of our contingent sensibilities and understandings. They thus believe science ought to be tasked with peeling off (or explaining away) the appearances that our use of secondary quality concepts yield. What would remain of reality after mere appearances (to us) have been thus peeled of is the objective world as it is in itself. But if the dichotomy is illusory, as I believe it is, then the peeling off leaves nothing. — Pierre-Normand

The problem is naive and direct realism doesn't realism advocate this. The peeling is only present when it has been presumed that reality (things-in-themselves) has a nature which is separate to appearances (things which appear). For the naive and direct realist, this separation doesn't exist. Reality is (in part) as it appears. Things-in-themselves, objects as the are, appear to us. That's the naive and direct realist's position. We experience (partly) what is there.

The "peeling off" is actually an indirect realist/anti-realist position, whether appearance are considered to have nothing to do with the nature of independent objects. Claims of the naive and direct realist are literally being ignored, in favour of those prescribed by to them those of indirect realist/anti-realist position. The indirect realist/anti-realists are inserting there own position of separation between appearances and objects, and then claiming it is what the naive and direct realist argues.

Yes, you are right. I misused the term "naive realist". I meant to refer to the stance of some scientific realists, who I believe to be naive ;-). However the label "scientific realist" could also be applied to people who simply argue that theoretical entities are real and not just explanatory. But that would also make me a scientific realist. And since I am a direct realist, I also am likely to be charged with "naive realism". So, all those labels are banana peels; which is why I am attempting to articulate the underlying issues as explicitly as possible whenever I can. In any case, what I was mainly objecting to (and mislabeled) was eliminative and/or reductionist materialism/physicalism; i.e. scientism. What I am advocating instead is (McDowell's) relaxed naturalism.

A relationship is not any state of the world. It's a logical expression expressed across many. An intimate relationship isn't formed by any one state, a hundred states of a person, or even ten billion states of a person. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I simply do not buy this at all. Relationships are certainly states of the world, and one cannot talk at all without them. To say that the cat is on the mat is to affirm the reality of the cat, the mat, and their relation. 'On' cannot be merely a logical as opposed to an ontological term because the cat is not necessarily on the mat, but is sometimes in the bushes.

But a relation is not another thing, either; one cannot count - cat, mat, and on, and come up with 3 things. This works quite well too for abstracts like 'the orbit of Mars', which I take to be perfectly real and to consist of the spatiotemporal
relationship between Mars and the other celestial bodies.

This realism undercuts both scientism and the fact/value dichotomy (also attacked by Putnam). Secondary qualities, such a color and smell, that we perceive, and ascribe to objects, also don't change when we change the way that we talk about them. Not always, in any case. Talking about them can induce changes in the brute shape of our sensibility and aesthetic appreciation. That can lead to a change in the reference of the words that we use to refer to secondary qualities. — Pierre-Normand

I'd be interested to hear a bit more about this undercutting of the fact/value dichotomy. I'm inclined to say that values are (real) relations between observer and observed. Thus it might be that under evolution or gene therapy the human eye developed forth and fifth types of cones in the retina. This would give the potential for colour perception and terminology to be transformed from a three dimensional to a five dimensional range. At which, one suspects that 'red' would simply be inadequate to describe most of what is currently seen as red. Likewise, if we all became colourblind, colour terms would drop out of use, to be replaced by a more complex textural terminology. All this without changing the substance of London buses and poppies in the least.

I'd be interested to hear a bit more about this undercutting of the fact/value dichotomy. — unenlightened

I'll make a few more comments later on, but meanwhile let me just provide some of the most relevant references. There is, of course, Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. (Some of the "other essays" are quite relevant to the topic at hand, in addition to the titular one). McDowell's Values and Secondary Qualities (reprinted in Mind, Value and Reality) is a response to John Mackie that presses this analogy. Also relevant in the same volume (MV&R) are Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World and Projection and Truth in Ethics. Finally, but non exhaustively, are David Wiggins' A Sensible Subjectivism (reprinted in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value) as well as his recently published Truth, Pragmatism and Morality, a commentary on, and refinement of, Putnam's attack on the dichotomy.

I'm late to the party, but here's my attempt at a summary of what's going on here:

The paper is basically broken into two parts. The first is an attack on what might be called 'ontological substantiality' - the idea that we can parse in any kind of substantial way – as if one were God deciding before he made the universe – what kinds of things are, or are not. The second part of the paper will go on to argue that if we cannot grant this substantialist conception of ontology, then we ought to instead grant what might be called a ‘relativized ontology’, wherein what is, is relativized in accordance to whatever we happen to be speaking about at the time, and hence, to language – or what Quine will later call ‘a semantical plane’.

Anyway, Quine begins by wrestling with the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’. First, he notes that it’s not a simple case of declaring that certain things are not, without in fact implicitly admitting that they are (there’s a performative contradiction in doing so, as it were). He continues by noting that one way to avoid these paradoxes is to leave behind the is/is-not distinction, and instead cleave a distinction internal to being itself, wherein what is, is either thought about in terms of actuality on the one hand, and possibility on the other. Quine rather quickly dispatches this line of thought with the wonderful passage about the possible fat men in the doorway. And to further drive the point home, he then tries to see what happens when the realm of possible is expanded to include the contradictory (like the ‘round square’ Copula on Berkeley collage). This too doesn’t end well.

Having done with his destruction of substantialist ontologies, Quine now turns to sketching out his deflationary, relativized one. The basic idea is simple: that using words to mean something does not commit one to positing the being of that thing. Stated baldly by Quine: “we no longer labour under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term.” It is in fact Russell’s theory of descriptions which allows Quine to make this move, insofar as per Russell, any singular terms can be ‘analyzed out’ in terms of bound variables like ‘something, ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’, such that when we speak of ‘X’, all we are committed to saying is something like: ‘there is a something, X, of which we are speaking about’.

This, in turn, allows Quine to bypass the paradox of speaking about that which ‘is not’: to say that something ‘is not’ is simply to say that there is nothing which satisfies the thing X, of which we are speaking about. Cashing out the is/is-not distinction in this way is important because it deprives the motivation of projects like Wyman’s, which have to recourse to possible entities in order to deal with the paradox of not-Being, here now diffused by Quine. As Quine puts it, “we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is …. But we do not commit ourselves to ontology containing Pegasus when we say that Pegasus is not”. Simple.

Anyway, in holding to this view, it is important for Quine that names become reducible to descriptions. Only in this way can Russell’s theory hold for singular terms. This is important to take note of because in future developments, this idea will be challenged (like @schmik pointed out) by those like Kripke, for whom names are in fact irreducible to descriptions, and require a ‘primal baptism’ that fixes their referents in all possible worlds. As the paper stands however, Quine sees no issue with reducing names to descriptions, writing that “Names are, in fact, immaterial to the ontological issue … whatever we say with the help of names can be said in a language which shuns names altogether.”

To the degree that names are reducible to descriptions however, this will allow Quine to pronounce the paper’s ultimate point, which is that “to be is to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” A most concise statement of what it is to be as there’s ever been. Concluding, Quine then affirms that if this is the case, our differing ontological commitments in turn entail that we can have different ‘conceptual schemes’ when it comes to talking about ontology. It is the convergence or divergence of our conceptual schemes which allow us to find – or not find – common ground by which to make arguments. As such, “ontological controversy… tends into controversy over language”. Again this is important because this too will be challenged down the track by those like Davidson, who will aim to do away with ‘the very idea of a conceptual scheme’.

But circling back to Quine, the upshot the reference to different conceptual schemes is the pluralistic thought that “what ontology to actually adopt still stands open, and the obvious counsel is tolerance and an experimental spirit” (although Quine does end by suggesting that the ‘epistemological point of view’ – one among a variety of others – holds a certain priority).

Lots of critical comments to make, but this'll do for now.

Lots of critical comments to make, but this'll do for now. — StreetlightX

This post strikes me as an excellent summary, much better than I could have done myself. I thought for a second that you had misconstrued Quines' treatment of proper names because of your phrasing ("there is a something, X, of which we are speaking about"), which is a bit hard to parse as a definite description, but you cleared that up later on. I'm looking forward to reading your critical commentary.

Thanks Pierre! Yeah, I did fumble over that a little, and in hindsight I would probably phrase that differently. Anyway, some initial commentary: among the things I like here - apart from Quine's wonderful writing style - is Quine's implicit 'autonomizing' of language, as it were, construing it as a domain unto it's own without needing to 'mirror' the world. To have ontological commitments to some kind of thing or another is just to say that some kind of thing or another is. Ontology is relativized to 'the semantical plane', which, in turn, becomes decoupled from 'things' in order to operate autonomously. This impulse will also be taken up by Davidson - and, independently, by much of the 'continental tradition' - who will try to do away with 'representational' function of language, treating it on it's own terms.

I do wonder, though, about the 'voluntarist' - or perhaps better, rationalist - terms in which Quine frames this autonomy. In the following passage for example, the common denominator is that our ontological commitments follow as a result of our saying that such and such 'are': "We commit ourselves to an ontology containing numbers when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is." But if - and I am inclined to make this move - 'saying' is simply one type of action among others, can we not implicitly commit ourselves to ontologies in our ways of acting? Can one say, in a political vein, that a city commits itself to an ontology of home owners when it chooses to ignore the building of facilities to accommodate the homeless (or even, implement 'anti-homeless' features, like spikes on flat surfaces, as has been done in certain cities?).

To make a move like this of course is to once again 'substantialize' ontology in a way that Quine would probably find unpalatable, relativizing ontology not to language, but to a broader realm of 'significance' more generally. One consequence of making a move like this would also be to relativize language itself as one type of sense-making apparatus among others (which might include, to continue with our example, the structuring of movement and rest by our architectural and planning decisions, which can in turn structure the intelligibility of the populations who reside in a certain territory). Anyway, the point is: do our ontological commitments need to operate at the level of explicit enunciation (at the level of 'saying' that such and such is), or can they operate also at the level of implicit commitment, at the level of behavior, action, habit, and practice more generally? And if there is indeed a reason to make such a distinction, what in Quine would authorize it?

I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to @Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence.

It appears that "ontology" may be defined rather more broadly than the study of what there is, but I question whether a city can be said to commit itself to a particular ontology when it makes land use decisions; or whether it's at all useful to characterize such a commitment as ontological in nature. In what sense is the city committing itself to an ontology by doing so, instead of or distinct from something else? It would seem it would be making a value judgment, or acting out of a desire for revenue through property taxes, for example, or due to prejudice of some kind. Do such things depend upon a particular ontology beyond an acceptance of, e.g., the existence of people, dwellings, money?

I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence. — StreetlightX

I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before.

Okay, I think this creates its own kind of horrors, where claims of or representations of things are taken to have all the power of what traditionally was taken to be those things themselves. So the age-old phenomenon of crocodile tears is impossible because there is no disingenuousness when to be represented as evil, oppressive, oppressed, etc. is the same as being any of those things.

Some liberals of course still cling to the notion that material conditions (like not having food) make you poor, but this has already been abandoned for gender, and not the gender ontoogy has exploded because it is as large as anyone cares to say it is. So second-wave feminists who silly them thought that gender oppression was a material status with concrete effects that superseded ~*identity*~ and ~*representation*~, are dead. And I bet you poverty will follow at some point: who is going to be the first rich kid to ~*identify*~ as poor?

It appears that "ontology" may be defined rather more broadly than the study of what there is, but I question whether a city can be said to commit itself to a particular ontology when it makes land use decisions; or whether it's at all useful to characterize such a commitment as ontological in nature. In what sense is the city committing itself to an ontology by doing so, instead of or distinct from something else? It would seem it would be making a value judgment, or acting out of a desire for revenue through property taxes, for example, or due to prejudice of some kind. Do such things depend upon a particular ontology beyond an acceptance of, e.g., the existence of people, dwellings, money? — Ciceronianus the White

In what sense wouldn't it be doing so? Call it a value judgement if you like: this would just to be say that our ontologies are based on value judgements; call it a desire for revenue through property taxes: this could just be to say that a particular ontology is motivated by such a desire. When Quine simply defines 'the ontological problem' as 'what is there', nothing in the question motivates a response in terms of our saying 'such and such is'. When, as a disabled person, a city doesn't build the ramps and elevators required to access otherwise "public" space, is not your very existence (or being, as Quine is wont to say) being in some way denied? When, as a gay person, your ability to express your desire is curbed by draconian laws that make "sodomy" a felony, is not the same at work? Perhaps you think this is overwrought, but some of the largest political movements in history - over race, over gender, over class - have been born from just this impulse to wring social and cultural existence out from systems which do not acknowledge them to exist in some way or another.

Quine, at the end of the paper, speaks of how our differing conceptual schemes might enable or disable our ability "to communicate successfully on such topics as politics, weather, and, in particular, language." But why construe 'communication' so narrowly, to our 'saying' things? Is protest not communication? Are petitions not communication? When the population took to the streets in the Ukraine at freedom square, they weren't just hanging around for a bit of fun. I don't think anything in principle limits 'ontology' to a practice conducted by (what tends to be) old white men writing about other, deader, old white men and the philosophical tracts they produce. It seems to me perfectly intelligible to speak about 'the ontology of modernity', or 'the ontology of capitalism' and so on, as is in fact the case in many areas of study.

I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before. — The Great Whatever

Yeah, this sort of 'identity politics' has been disparaged for quite some time, where identification and recognition is construed to be the sort of be all and end all of politics. I agree that when taken as such it's generally pretty fucking disastrous for all involved, but on the other hand, it does make for a good starting point. When the Oscars executive governing board looks like this:



And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idris Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on.

And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idirs Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on. — StreetlightX

But the Oscars don't matter. They have no artistic importance, anyway.

They matter to the degree that people think they matter (Quine would agree!).

So why is the solution, on behalf of people afraid they will not exist if people the same color as them are not awarded statuettes, to stop caring about the Oscars?

Instead, the response is to demand entry into the institution that has admitted it doesn't much care for them. So the message seems to be: we are only worthwhile insofar as worthless institutions accept us.

I don't know, the Oscars seems to me to be the epitome of dumb / decadent identity politics. They're literally nothing but that.

And it seems to me to be a reductio. Premise; things matter to the extent people think they do. But people think the Oscars matter, even though they don't. Therefore, the premise is false.

The thing is, as dumb as the Oscars may be, a lot of really dumb people are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the dumb decisions dumb institutions make when those dumb institutions are seen as having some sort of cultural authority (which so many dumb people imagine the Oscars to have.) And these dumb people are the same dumb people who occupy positions of power or influence in other dumb institutions (whether as DA or as jury member.) So as dumb as the dumb Oscars may be, they still have legitimate influence on things that actually matter (unlike the dumb oscars.)

I don't know how much you talk to non-academics, but it's very clear that, for many of them, their perceptions of other races (whether that means white or black or latino or asian or whatever) has a whole lot to do with how they're portrayed in film and television. And, for better or for worse, what type of performers wins oscars is directly correlated with what roles are allowed to be considered 'serious', and which people are allowed to play such roles.

Unfortunately, your average jury member likes Hollywood more than Cioran, as dumb as that may make him.