Hinst on Quine

Hinst, P. (1983). “Quines Ontologiekriterium.” Erkenntnis (1975), 19(1/3), 193–215.

I read and write philosophy every day, but rarely publish any work in progress here. I’d like to change that by adding brief notes on some of the papers and books that I’m reading. This is the first in what I hope is a series.

I read this paper partly because it’s central to my current project (understanding Quine’s metaontology and responses to it) but also just to practice my German. I found it worth reading even though I stumbled across it randomly, especially considering that as of this writing Google Scholar lists a single English language citation of this paper and four citations in total (one of which appears to be deranged AI slop).

The paper is divided into two parts. The first simply aims to give Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment a reasonably rigorous formulation. This is a fairly technical discussion in which Hinst develops a first candidate, notes that it generates much broader commitments than intended, and then formulates a more precise version.

The second part of the paper argues against Quine’s claim that the existential quantifier is ontologically significant. Hinst complains that the basic move in Quine’s Tarskian semantics here is to assume a particular interpretation of quantifiers in the metalanguage (not, if I understand correctly, one that is actually shared by Tarski himself!), without adequate justification. To interpret statements about the domain in the metalanguage in this way is a choice, and not forced on us on by any considerations that Quine appeals to. It’s that choice that makes the object language existential quantifier appear ontologically significant. If I understand correctly, this is not the point that we can interpret quantifiers substitutionally, but rather that the objectual interpretation of quanitifiers is not by itself committing. And the complaint is that taking them to be committing is an additional step, and one that requires argument.

Anyway, this is a point that I associate most with Jody Azzouni. See, e.g., p. xii and the appendix to the General Introduction of his Ontology Without Borders, where he stresses the same thing. At the moment, I can’t find the exact passage where Azzouni discusses the literature on this issue, but my recollection is that he thinks this is a widely neglected point. True, but Hinst’s paper is a nice and overlooked precedent for it.

Hinst concludes with a few observations about the failure (as he sees it) of Quine’s criterion: that since it fails it doesn’t provide him with a clear way to demarcate nominalism from alternatives; that with the collapse of Quine’s criterion we lose some of the motivation for the development of free logic. And finally, he advocates for a distinct regimented existence predicate, which he believes can handle negative existentials and other problems just as well.