Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 127
saw, in barest outline, how such an explanation might go, at least for
the simplest kind of sentences. It is very hard to see how any naturalistic
explanation – an explanation along causal-scientific lines –
could make an appeal to properties, entities that are, supposedly, not
in space and time and not capable of causally interacting with us. 15
There is, of course, room for other sorts of questions to be raised
about Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. The two we
have discussed, however, at least indicate what that doctrine comes
to and why Quine holds it. One immediate consequence of the doctrine
is that talk of the ontological commitment of any body of informal
theory draws on the idea of a regimentation of that body
of theory, that is, a reformulation of it, actual or envisaged, into
the language of first-order logic. This does not mean that we cannot
talk about, say, the ontological commitments of Aristotelian physics:
With some intellectual imagination and sympathy, we can consider
what reformulation Aristotle himself might have accepted for his
view if he had had first-order logic at his disposal. It does, however,
mean that an author who rejects the idea of such a reformulation
entirely is simply refusing to answer the ontological question as we
understand it (or as Quine thinks we do, or should). Of course, we
can imagine what a reformulation might look like, in spite of the objections
of the author, but the imagined author himself is, on Quine’s
view of the matter, simply rejecting the question.
Another consequence of adopting Quine’s criterion is, of course,
that the ontological commitments of any body of discourse are dependent
on the way in which it is regimented (i.e., cast into the notation
of first-order logic). Informal discourse, taken as such, has no
definite ontology implicit in it, for there are various ways in which
it can be regimented. Let us see what Quine says on this matter 16 :
The common man’s ontology...isvague in its scope; we cannot tell in general
which...things to ascribe to a man’s ontology at all, which things to
count him as assuming. Should we regard grammar as decisive? Does every
noun demand some array of denotata? Surely not: the nominalizing of verbs
is often a mere stylistic variation. But where can we draw the line?
It is a wrong question; there is no line to draw. Bodies are assumed....
Beyond them there is a succession of dwindling analogies.
. . . [A] fenced ontology is just not implicit in ordinary language. The idea
of a boundary between being and nonbeing is a philosophical idea, an idea of
technical science in a broad sense....Ontological concern is not a correction
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