Ontology and Metaphysics
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Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
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Ontology and the
Ambitions of Metaphysics
Thomas Hofweber
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3
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for Rebecca
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Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
How to Read This Book xvi
. Ontology and Metaphysics
. Introduction
. Four Problems in Ontology
.. Numbers
.. Ordinary Objects
.. Properties
.. Propositions
. Two Kinds of Ontological Questions
. Three Puzzles About Ontology
.. Is Philosophical Ontology an Incoherent Project?
.. The First Puzzle: How Hard?
.. The Second Puzzle: How Important?
.. The Third Puzzle: How Philosophical?
. Towards a Solution
. Innocent Statements and Their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts
. The Trivial Arguments
. The Standard Solutions to the Metaphysical Puzzle
. Some Syntactic and Semantic Puzzles
.. The Number of Moons of Jupiter
.. Is Four
.. Substitution Failure
.. The Obviousness of the Equivalence
.. The Puzzle of Extravagance
. Solving the Syntactic and Semantic Puzzles
.. The Function of the Cleft Construction
.. Focus and Communication
.. Questions, Answers, and Focus
.. Another Look at the Loaded Counterparts: The Numbers Case
. Explaining the Focus Effect
.. The Argument Against the Standard Solutions
.. The Explanation
. A Solution to the Syntactic and Semantic Puzzles
.. Numbers
.. Properties
.. Propositions
.. Content Carving Without Tears
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viii contents
. On to the Second Step
. Appendix: Focus and Identity Statements
. Quantification
. The Significance of Quantification
. The (Fairly) Uncontroversial Facts About Quantifiers
.. The Structure of Quantified Noun Phrases
.. “There Is” Is Not a Quantifier
.. Singular and Plural Quantifiers
.. The Domain Conditions Reading
. Semantic Underspecification
. Quantifiers as a Source of Underspecification
.. How to Settle the Issue
.. The Communicative Function of Quantifiers
.. Inferential Role and Empty Terms
.. Some Examples
.. Inferential Role and Truth Conditions
.. How the Readings Are Related, but Different
. Compare and Contrast
.. Substitutional Quantification
.. Meinong and Non-Existent Objects
.. Carnap on Internal and External Questions
.. Lightweight and Heavyweight Quantifiers
. The Solution to the First Puzzle
. Appendix: Generalized Quantifiers
. Internalism, Externalism, and the Ontological Question
. Internalism and Externalism
. Towards a Solution to the Second and Third Puzzles
. Internalism and the Answer to the Ontological Question
. How to Settle the Issue
. Talk About Natural Numbers
. Frege’s Other Puzzle
. How the Puzzle Can’t Be Solved
. Number Determiners
.. Determiners and Quantifiers
.. Bare Determiners
.. Complex Determiners and Quantifiers
.. Arithmetic-Like Bare Determiner Statements
. Numbers and Arithmetic
.. Basic Arithmetical Statements
.. Learning Basic Arithmetic
.. Cognitive Type Coercion
.. Contrast: Other Kinds of Type Coercion
.. Other Arithmetical Operations
.. “Two” vs. “The Number Two” vs. “The Number of Fs”
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contents ix
. The Solution to Frege’s Other Puzzle
. Quantifying over Natural Numbers
. The Philosophy of Arithmetic
. Philosophical Problems About Arithmetic
.. The Central Tension
.. The Caesar Problem
.. The Application Problem
. Internalism and Ontological Independence
. The Adjectival Strategy and Second-Order Logic
. The Existence of Numbers and the Second Puzzle
. The Internalist Solutions to the Problems
.. Resolving the Tension
.. The Solution to the Caesar Problem
.. The Solution to the Application Problem
. Logicism Without Logic
. The Philosophy of Mathematics
. Ordinary Objects
. The Metaphysics of Ordinary Objects
. Talk About Ordinary Objects
. The Existence of Ordinary Objects
.. Perceptual Evidence
.. Scientific Evidence
.. Metaphysical Arguments as Further Evidence
. Metaphysical Questions About Objects
. Talk About Properties and Propositions
. That-Clauses and Property Nominalizations
. The Referential Picture of Language
. Semantic Facts and Semantic Values
. Evidence Against Referentiality
. Quantification over Properties and Propositions
. Inexpressible Properties and Propositions
. The Problem for Internalism
.. Inexpressible Properties and the Inductive Argument
.. Some Distinctions
.. The New Problem for Internalism
. The Solution to the Problem
. The Solution to the Second Puzzle
. Appendix : Further Arguments Against Internalism Using Expressibility
Considerations
.. Modified Inductive Arguments
.. Cardinality Arguments
. Appendix : Generalized Quantifiers, Once More
. Appendix : Revisiting the Internal–External Distinction
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. Ineffable Facts and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
. The Dark Vision
. Externalism and the Ineffable
.. Arguments for the Ineffable
.. The Hiddenness of the Ineffable
.. The Sub-Algebra Hypothesis
.. Ineffability and Modesty
. Internalism and the Ineffable
.. Internalism and the Effability Thesis
.. The Arguments for the Ineffable Revisited
.. The Internalist Picture of the Propositional
.. Conceptual Idealism Vindicated
. Objects, Properties, and the Problem of Universals
. The Problem of Universals: What It Is and Why It Matters
. Minimalist and Substantial Approaches
. The Internalist’s Solution to the Ontological Problem
. The Explanatory Version of the Problem of Universals
.. Good and Bad Explanatory Tasks
.. Candidates for an Explanation
. The Internalist Solution to the Explanatory Problem
. A World of Only Objects
. A Defense of a Restricted Nominalism
. The Philosophical Project of Ontology
. Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics
. The Question of the Domain and the Third Puzzle
. The Philosophical Project
. Objections and Refinements
. Esoteric and Egalitarian Metaphysics
. Against Esoteric Metaphysics
. Fine on Reality
. Compare and Contrast
.. Esoteric Questions and Esoteric Answers
.. Mathematics as Egalitarian Inquiry
.. Esoteric Stepping Stones
. Metaphysical Priority
.. Some Egalitarian Notions of Priority
.. Fundamentality and Explanation
.. Are There Egalitarian, but Primitive, Notions of Metaphysical Priority?
. Resisting the Temptation of Esoteric Metaphysics
. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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Preface
This book hopes to make progress on a number of metaphysical problems that are
closely tied to ontological questions. The key to making progress in this area, I will
argue, is to have a better understanding of ontology itself: what questions it is supposed
to answer, how these questions can be answered, who should answer them, and for
what the answer matters. Our main focus will be ontological questions about natural
numbers, ordinary objects, properties, and propositions, and the corresponding,
larger metaphysical debates about the philosophy of arithmetic, the metaphysics of
material objects, the problem of universals, and the picture of reality as the totality of
facts. An overriding concern related to solving these problems will be what ambitions
metaphysics can have in answering questions about what the world is like. In the end
I will defend that metaphysics has more work to do than most philosophers think, but
less than most metaphysicians think.
In outline, this book proceeds as follows:
Chapter discusses four examples of metaphysical debates that are closely tied to
ontological questions. These four examples will be our main examples throughout:
natural numbers, ordinary objects, properties, and propositions. It then raises three
puzzles about how we should understand these ontological questions and how meta-
physical problems could possibly be so closely tied to them. Our overall goal will be
to solve the metaphysical problems by understanding the puzzles that ontology gives
rise to.
Chapter starts to solve the first puzzle by looking at the relationship between
ordinary non-metaphysical statements and apparently equivalent ones that are about
numbers, properties, propositions, truth, and other metaphysically loaded things.
These pairs of statements play a crucial role in trivial arguments for the existence of
numbers, properties, and propositions, and solving the first puzzle is closely tied to
understanding these arguments.
Chapter discusses quantification in natural language and how it is tied to onto-
logical questions. I propose, on the basis of considerations about ordinary communi-
cation, that quantifiers are polysemous, with one reading that is tied to ontology and
another reading that isn’t. This second reading is spelled out in more detail and the
idea is generalized to generalized quantifiers in an appendix to the chapter. At the end
of this chapter we will be in a position to solve the first puzzle.
Chapter outlines a strategy for answering ontological questions. It distinguishes
internalism from externalism about a domain of discourse, and spells out why it is
crucial to find out which one is correct. This chapter concludes the first part of this
book. After having seen what needs to be done to make progress, it is now time to try
to do that for our four cases.
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xii preface
Chapter starts with the first case: natural numbers. It investigates what we do when
we talk about natural numbers in ordinary conversations as well as in mathematics.
A proposal is made about why number words systematically play a double role in
natural language and what their semantic function is. Chapter attempts to solve
various problems in the philosophy of arithmetic in light of the account of talk about
natural numbers developed in chapter .
Chapter focuses on the metaphysics of ordinary objects, our second case. It
considers what we do when we talk about objects and defends that we have good
empirical reasons for an affirmative answer to the ontological question about ordinary
objects.
Chapter investigates talk about properties and propositions, our remaining two
cases, as well as some general issues in semantics. Chapter deals with the most
important objection to the account proposed in chapter . Chapter considers
whether there could be ineffable facts and how reality, understood as all that is the
case, relates to reality, understood as all there is. Chapter attempts to make progress
on the problem of universals and on metaphysical questions about properties more
generally. This concludes the second part of the book, which deals with ontological
questions and the metaphysical problems they are closely tied to. In this part a solution
to the second puzzle about ontology will be proposed.
In the third, and final, part we return to ontology and metaphysics more generally.
In chapter I try to find out whether ontological questions should properly be seen as
metaphysical ones, and how metaphysical questions relate to questions in other parts
of inquiry. Here we will see a solution to our third and final puzzle about ontology.
Chapter criticizes approaches to metaphysics that hold that metaphysics has a
unified subject matter that is, in one form or another, tied to what is fundamental or
some kind of metaphysical priority. A brief concluding chapter sums up and looks
ahead.
The position defended in this book, and the solutions advocated for the various
metaphysical problems, are based on a number of core ideas and theses, which will be
more fully articulated, explained, and defended in the chapters to come. They include:
. The polysemy of quantifiers. Quantifiers in natural language have more than
one reading, and we have a need for each of them in ordinary everyday
communication.
. The non-referentiality of certain singular terms. Expressions that syntactically are
like names can have very different semantic functions from names.
. Reference free discourse. Some domains of discourse systematically do not involve
any attempts at reference at all.
. Rationalist arithmetic. A rationalist philosophy of arithmetic based on an
empirical defense of natural number talk as a reference free discourse.
. A world of only objects. There are material objects, but no properties, no facts,
and no natural numbers.
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. The effability thesis. Every truth can be stated by us, in our present language.
. Conceptual idealism without ontological idealism. Reality, as the totality of things,
is independent of us, but reality, as the totality of facts, is not.
. A domain for metaphysics. Some questions of fact are properly addressed in
metaphysics, and some ontological questions are among them.
. Autonomy without freedom. Ontological questions in the domain of metaphysics
all have the same answer.
The view defended here draws upon some ideas put forth in various papers I wrote
over the last several years. The present book is an attempt to put these ideas together, to
develop them properly, to show how they are connected, to work out a coherent picture
of metaphysics and the role of ontology in it, and, in particular, to make progress on a
series of metaphysical problems. A few chapters are based on previously published
papers, but most are new. In particular, chapter is based on Hofweber (a),
chapter on Hofweber (a), chapter on parts of Hofweber (a), and parts
of chapter overlap with parts of Hofweber (a). In each case the material has
been updated and revised. The remaining nine chapters are new, although on a few
occasions a smaller section overlaps with a section from a previously published paper,
and sometimes ideas defended in the new chapters come up here or there in earlier
work. In particular, chapter is a much more detailed development of the criticism
of esoteric metaphysics outlined in Hofweber (a), and chapter does the same
for the view of quantification defended in Hofweber (b) and Hofweber (b).
The overall setup is inspired by Hofweber (b). Of course, no knowledge of any of
these papers is presupposed in the following.
All the readers of drafts of this book agreed on two things: first, it is too long for
anyone to be expected to read it all the way through, and, second, I really need to
say more about X (although there was a wide disagreement about what X should be).
I agree with this as well. I didn’t intend this to be a long book. To the contrary, I
planned on a short and snappy one, but it didn’t turn out that way. It became clear to
me that to do this properly I needed to start from scratch and motivate the problems
I hope to solve, to more properly develop the aspects of the overall view tied to
considerations about language, to include a discussion of all of the four cases that
are now included, to deal with the most important objections, and so on. Once the
manuscript got sufficiently long, I had to make it even longer to make the individual
chapters reasonably self-contained. This adds up to a lot of pages overall, and to many
large-scale philosophical debates engaged in a single book. It is natural to think that
I am trying to do too many things in one book, but for the overall position to come
into view these topics need to be addressed side by side. It is crucial, it seems to me, to
discuss all four of our cases of metaphysical problems tied to ontological ones, to set up
the general puzzles about ontology, to properly develop the account of quantifiers, the
larger picture of metaphysics, and so on. They all need to be in one book for the story
to come together. There is a shockingly long list of topics which I had to cut from being
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xiv preface
discussed here, several of which were nicely written up, or so I thought, but deleted
to save space. What remains is what I feel needs to be there. I know it is too long for
anyone to be expected to read it all the way through, but I can’t make it shorter without
losing the big picture or having big gaps in the argument. In fact, I can assure you that
if you read it all the way through you will agree with the others who have done so that
(a) it is too long, but (b) I really need to say more about X. And as I said, I agree with
this as well.
This book does, and I believe needs to, discuss many large-scale philosophical
topics together: the nature of metaphysics, ontology, the semantics of quantifiers,
focus and syntax, number words in natural language, the philosophy of arithmetic,
perceptual beliefs, the problem of universals, idealism, ineffable facts, and several
others. Collectively the literature on these topics is beyond vast and it would be
impossible to do justice to all of it. This book doesn’t aim to do the impossible. It just
can’t be done to argue in each case why this alternative view is wrong, or why that
objection will go nowhere, or how the present position is different from another one.
All these are worthwhile things to do, but it being impossible to do them all should
not prohibit us from talking about all these topics together. In my discussion of the
literature I focused on the cases that struck me as especially relevant and important.
I submitted what I thought was pretty close to a final version of this book to OUP
in . Since then it has gone through several rounds of revisions in response to
substantial comments from six referees and many other philosophers. During those
revisions I changed the overall setup, dropped some chapters, added some new ones,
rewrote various parts, while the larger view remained stubbornly the same. I have tried
to keep up with the literature that appeared in the meantime and to incorporate it in
the text when possible, but often all I could do is mention a major new book or article
in a footnote rather than discuss it in the detail it deserves, and I suspect for many I did
not even do that. The emphasis of the cited literature is consequently often less on the
very latest, but more on what was most vivid when the basic things were put in place.
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Acknowledgments
Over the years I received help from many people with this project. Some helped me to
get it started and to get it on the right track, some to wrap it up, some saved me from
clear mistakes along the way, some had great objections that led to improvements.
Some helped me for a long time, some only in a short email exchange or a single
conversation. My sincere thanks to all of you! There surely must be others, but for
each of the following I can still pinpoint where or how they helped, although I
won’t try to spell it out case by case. My thanks to Bob Adams, Jody Azzouni, Kent
Bach, Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Dorit Bar-On, Jefferson Barlew, Karen Bennett,
Johan van Benthem, Jason Bowers, Otávio Bueno, Shamik Dasgupta, Catharine Diehl,
Matti Eklund, Anthony Everett, Sol Feferman, Katharina Felka, Hartry Field, Krasi
Filcheva, Kit Fine, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Charles Goodman, Tristan Haze, Randy
Hendrick, Eli Hirsch, Andreas Kemmerling, Boris Kment, Joshua Knobe, Toni Koch,
Dan Korman, Matt Kotzen, Robert Kraut, Phil Kremer, Wolfgang Künne, Marc Lange,
Pat Lewtas, Bill Lycan, Matt McGrath, Friederike Moltmann, Ram Neta, Jill North, Jeff
Pelletier, John Perry, Jesse Prinz, Michael Raven, Agustín Rayo, Mike Resnik, Tobias
Rosefeldt, Richard Samuels, Jonathan Schaffer, Kevin Scharp, Stephen Schiffer, Ben-
jamin Schnieder, Robert Schwartzkopff, Ted Sider, Allan Silverman, Keith Simmons,
Peter Simons, Rob Smithson, Rich Thomason, Amie Thomasson, Martin Thomson-
Jones, David Velleman, Lisa Vogt, Warren Whipple, Al Wilson, Julia Zakkou, Ed Zalta,
and surely several more.
I owe a special debt to six anonymous referees whose comments together were the
length of a decent size book and which led to many substantial changes. My thanks
to Peter Momtchiloff for finding these terrific referees, somehow persuading them to
take on this task, and his long-standing support of this project.
Some parts of this book are based on material published previously, as detailed in the
Preface. I would like to thank Duke University Press and Oxford University Press for
permission to reuse the material. Thanks to the Philosophers’ Imprint for not requiring
any permission to reuse one’s work. My thanks also to those who volunteered their
time and skill to give us LATEX and TexShop, which were used to write this book.
Finally, special thanks to Rebecca Walker for lots and lots of all kinds of things.
I dedicate this book to you, with gratitude for our life together.
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How to Read This Book
Obviously, the proper answer is: cover to cover. It is written with one main line of
argument in mind, starting with the motivation of a problem, and ending with a
proposed solution, going over four main cases in the middle, each of which has an
important role in the overall story. The next best thing would be to read the early
chapters – and then to read the chapters on just one of our four main cases, before
returning to the general discussion of metaphysics in chapter . Unless you have a
particular interest in one of the four cases, I think it might be best to focus on the
case of arithmetic and thus chapters and , skipping chapters –. Anyone who is
not tempted to understand metaphysics as being concerned with fundamental reality
or metaphysical grounding can also skip chapter , which criticizes these approaches.
So, a second best route to the main ideas of this book would be to read chapters – and
then chapter . If that is still too much, I would recommend reading a chapter on the
topic that interests you most. I put in an effort to make the discussion of the various
separate topics reasonably self-contained, and so I hope individual chapters can be
read by themselves with some benefit. Thus anyone who would like to focus simply
on quantification (chapter ), the philosophy of arithmetic (chapter ), the problem of
universals (chapter ), the ineffable (chapter ), the critique of esoteric metaphysics
(chapter ), or any other chapter, will hopefully find that to be a possibility. A few
chapters have one or more appendixes that deal with further issues from that chapter.
They are important, but they can be skipped without loss of the overall argument by
anyone satisfied enough with the treatment of the issue in that chapter. But before
spending too much time on deciding on which parts to read and which parts to skip,
let’s just start from the beginning and see where it goes from there.
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Ontology and Metaphysics
. Introduction
The grandest and most ambitious part of philosophy is metaphysics: the project
of finding out, within philosophy, what reality is like in general. A central part of
metaphysics is ontology: the project of finding out what kinds of things make up
reality, what exists, or what there is. Metaphysics could thus roughly be divided into
two parts. The first is ontology, which is supposed to tell us what there is in general, or
what kinds of things make up reality. The second is the rest of metaphysics, which
is supposed to tell us, among others, what these things are like in various general
ways. Many of the great philosophical problems are problems in metaphysics. And
many of these are closely tied to problems in ontology. We will see some examples
shortly.
There also is a long tradition in philosophy to find metaphysics and ontology
suspect. Prominent worries are that metaphysical statements are meaningless, or that
metaphysical investigations won’t lead to knowledge. But such worries are usually
based on a very strict requirement for something to be meaningful or to be knowledge,
a requirement so strict that most other things wouldn’t be meaningful or knowledge
either. I don’t find much to worry about in these objections, but there is another
worry which I think is terribly serious. It casts doubt on metaphysics in general, or
at least suggests we don’t quite understand what we are supposed to do when we
engage in metaphysics. This worry isn’t that the question isn’t meaningful or that the
answer can’t be known, but rather the opposite: the questions are perfectly meaningful,
but the answers are already known. There is no work for metaphysics to do, the
worry goes, since whatever work there is supposed to be done, it has already been
done elsewhere. The allegedly deep questions that metaphysics, in particular ontology,
hoped to answer have long been answered and their depth was an illusion. The depth
was an illusion not because the questions are somehow defective, or in some way
relative, but because they are perfectly non-defective and objective questions that
have long been answered rather trivially in other parts of inquiry. A prime example
of this situation, to be discussed in detail shortly, is the ontology of mathematical
objects. The metaphysician seems to want to know whether there are any mathematical
objects: things like numbers. But the mathematician has proven long ago that there are
infinitely many prime numbers, and thus that there are numbers.
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ontology and metaphysics
This worry, once properly spelled out, suggests that the project of metaphysics and
ontology isn’t as well defined as one should hope. In light of this worry one might be
tempted to give up on metaphysics, but this would be premature, since there are two
promising ways to defend it. One way to it is to hold that metaphysics has a distinct
and unified subject matter that is sufficiently separate from other parts of inquiry.
Metaphysics is not supposed to find out what reality is like in general after all, but
instead what reality is ultimately or fundamentally like. And these notions are to be
taken in a metaphysical sense, which makes sure that those questions aren’t trivially
answered in other parts of inquiry. A second way to defend metaphysics is to hold
that once we pay close attention to what we try to do when we do ontology and
metaphysics, and how we articulate the questions we hope to ask, then we can see
that these questions are neither trivial nor already answered. This second approach
doesn’t require a distinct subject matter for metaphysics, but instead a careful study
of the language we employ and the goals we have when we ask the relevant questions.
Both approaches defend metaphysics, but they do so in different ways. Both hold that
metaphysics can have real ambitions to contribute to inquiry, but their ambitions will
be different. Whichever defense one adopts will lead to rather different versions of
what the discipline should aim to do, and how its problems are to be solved. We will
discuss both approaches in detail, but I will defend the second one in this book.
Thinking about metaphysics as a discipline is often an anti-metaphysical activity.
Many philosophers who wondered about metaphysics as a whole did so in order to
reject metaphysics, with the logical positivists being the prime example. But this does
not have to be so. There are real puzzles about metaphysics and ontology, and their
discussion needn’t be tied to attempts to reject metaphysics. Those fond of metaphysics
often react to questions about metaphysics in general negatively, taking them to be
an attempt to demand some outside justification for a practice that is doing well by
its own standards. Their motto is: don’t ask what metaphysics is supposed to do, or
how it is possible to do that, just do metaphysics. But both of those attitudes are
mistaken. Thinking about problems for ontology and metaphysics in general is not
anti-metaphysical, but instead the key for answering some of the most important
metaphysical and ontological questions, or so I hope to argue in this book. The goal
in the following will be to show that we can make progress on a number of significant
metaphysical problems that are tied to ontology by first thinking about metaphysics
and ontology in general. I will argue that a crucial obstacle to finding a solution to these
problems has been a mistaken conception about what ontology is supposed to do
and how it is supposed to be done. Once we correct this error we will be able to
see the answer to several ontological questions, and consequently to a series of larger
metaphysical questions.
Throughout this book we will focus on four ontological problems which are closely
tied to four large-scale metaphysical debates. These problems are our focus because of
their significance within metaphysics and because they bring out a variety of different
ways a metaphysical problem can turn out. As we will see, two of them are similar to
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ontology and metaphysics
each other, but the other two are different from all the others. What we will conclude
about these four ontological problems in particular can’t be expected to carry over to
any other ontological problems, but what we will conclude about ontology applies to
ontology in general. But before we can get there we have to briefly reintroduce the
ontological problems we will focus on, as well as the metaphysical questions they are
tied to.
. Four Problems in Ontology
Often, but not always, metaphysical problems are closely tied to problems in ontology.
In this section we will consider four cases where this seems to be the case. I will
motivate the metaphysical problems and their connection to ontological questions
from scratch in a way that is quite common, but that we will need to critically evaluate
in the following. Some of this might seem a bit elementary, but bear with me. I will
argue below that although some of this is exactly right, some of it is completely wrong.
.. Numbers
A good example of the connection of large-scale philosophical questions to issues in
ontology is the philosophy of mathematics. Mathematics is philosophically puzzling
in a number of ways. First of all, it is a discipline that is highly objective. The results it
achieves should be accepted by everyone, no matter what one’s cultural background,
preference, or opinions. Mathematics is not alone in this regard, of course. Other
disciplines are equally objective. The natural sciences, which try to find out various
things about the natural world, often have that feature as well. And this suggests that
mathematics might be objective for a similar reason that the natural sciences are
objective. The latter aim to correctly describe a certain aspect of the natural world,
which in turn exists independently of us and our opinions. In this sense particle
physics aims to correctly describe subatomic particles, biology aims to describe living
things, and so on. These are all objective disciplines since the objects they aim to
describe, as well as their features, exist independently of us and our opinions. But if
mathematical objectivity is understood along these lines, then what part of reality does
it aim to describe? It is tempting to think that it aims to describe its own, distinct part
of reality: mathematical objects. These objects would likely be neither in space nor
time, and quite different from ordinary objects we normally interact with. But if they
exist independently of us and mathematics aims to describe them, then no wonder
mathematics is so objective.
On the other hand, the method with which mathematics achieves its results seems
to be in prima facie tension with it having mathematical objects as its subject matter.
Mathematics achieves results paradigmatically with proofs, and these proofs can
in general be carried out with one’s eyes and ears closed, by just thinking. But if
mathematics is about some objects that exist independently of us, how can we find
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out about them by just thinking? There might thus be a better way to think of the
source of mathematical objectivity, one that can live with there being no mathematical
objects, and the following is one way this might go. When we carry out the proofs we
all rely on certain assumptions, certain principles, or axioms, at least implicitly, that
characterize the subject matter about which we hope to carry out proofs. But wouldn’t
those assumptions alone be enough to account for the objectivity of mathematics?
Wouldn’t it be enough if we all shared the assumptions that are the starting points
of our proofs? If the objectivity can come from our shared assumptions, then the
mathematical objects might simply fall out of the picture. Mathematics thus might not
aim to describe a certain part of reality after all, but do something else. And whatever
else that is more precisely, it might make clear that thinking alone is enough to achieve
mathematical results, that mathematics is fully objective, while nonetheless there are
no mathematical objects that mathematics aims to describe.
These are two large-scale views in the philosophy of mathematics that are closely
tied to the ontological question of whether or not there are any mathematical objects
in the first place. If reality contains some special part of mathematical objects, then
this is what mathematics will have to capture correctly in order for its results to be
true. But if there are no such objects, then this is not how mathematics and the source
of its objectivity are to be understood. A crucial dividing line in the philosophy of
mathematics is thus what one says in answer to the question
() Are there mathematical objects?
If one says “yes” one will be in one camp, if one says “no” one will be in a different one.
In the following, for reasons that will become clear later, we will in particular
focus on the philosophy of arithmetic, the mathematical discipline that deals with the
natural numbers. Here the general questions are just the same, but the mathematical
objects, if there are any, that arithmetic would be about are special objects: natural
numbers. A crucial question for the philosophy of arithmetic is thus the question
() Are there natural numbers?
However one answers this question will put one in one of two camps about how to
understand the philosophy of arithmetic. Progress in the philosophy of arithmetic is
thus tied to finding the answer to this ontological question.
.. Ordinary Objects
The objects we interact with most in everyday life are artifacts like tables and chairs,
biological organisms like human beings and trees, and inanimate natural objects like
rocks. All these are midsize objects, which can in principle be divided up into smaller
pieces from which they are made up or composed. Even though we think of the world
as containing such objects, there are a number of worries about whether this is indeed
correct. One of them is tied to how the midsize objects relate to the things from which
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they are built up. All these objects are made up from smaller parts like atoms. But do we
really have good reason to think that there are these objects besides the atoms, or is all
there is just the atoms arranged in certain ways? The main alternative to the standard
view that there are ordinary objects is some version of atomism, that is, a view that
holds that there are just the simplest things, but nothing that is built up from them, in
particular no tables. There are some good arguments that suggest a form of atomism is
true: doesn’t science support that all there is is the subatomic, physical world? Don’t the
atoms do all the work when it comes to causing things, including our experiences, and
so anything in addition to them, like tables, are just extra baggage? Isn’t it somewhat
arbitrary and mainly due to us which collections of atoms we call “an object” and thus
put together into a unit? Doesn’t thinking about the world in terms of ordinary objects
reflect more on our thinking than on how the world actually is? Whether the atomist
or the ordinary conception of the material world is correct seems to be closely tied to
an ontological question, the question
() Are there (ordinary) objects?
If the answer is “yes”, then one large-scale picture of the material world is correct; if
the answer is “no”, then a very different one is correct.
.. Properties
The world, as we commonly think of it, contains at least ordinary objects. Whether
this conception of the world is accurate in the end is up for dispute, as we just saw
above, but even if it is correct there is a further question about whether or not that
is all there is. Are there just particular things, or is there more? One of the most
compelling arguments for there being more is simply the following argument. The
particular things are a certain way. Some are red, some are green. Those that are
red have something in common: being red. So, there is something all red things
have in common. But what is that thing? Not another particular red thing, which
has a particular location, but something different from and separate from all the
red things. It is a property or universal. It is something that all the red things
share, that they partake in, or somehow relate to. Thus reality contains more than
just particulars, it also contains universals which those particulars share, or so the
argument goes.
But if there really are properties or universals beside individuals, then where are
they and how do they relate to the individuals that have them? To say how this
relationship is supposed to go has been notoriously difficult for those who believe
in such universals. If the universal is where the thing is that has it, then it seems
that universals are at more than one place at a time. If the universal is somewhere
else, maybe outside of space and time, then it seems to leave the object by itself as a
completely featureless thing or bare particular. And it leaves the question open how
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these bare particulars relate to the universals which are somewhere totally different.
Maybe then the world consists just of individuals, and not also properties that they
have in common. But does that mean that individuals have nothing in common? Do
red roses not all have one thing in common: being red, that is, the property or universal
of being red?
This group of questions is one of the oldest and most widely discussed problems of
all of metaphysics: the problem of universals. There are subtly different versions of what
the problem is more precisely, but in a nutshell it is the problem of saying (a) whether
there are besides individuals also other things which are the properties that they have,
and (b) if so, what these properties are, where they are, and how they relate to the
individuals that have them.
The problem of universals is related to another one, which seems even more
important. It is the problem of whether there is an objectively best description of the
world in the following sense. We describe the world with sentences that are mostly of
a subject–predicate form. In the simplest case the subject term picks out an individual
that we are making a claim about, and the predicate specifies what we claim of the
individual. So, “Fido is a dog” says something of Fido, namely that he is a dog.
Predicates group things together. There are many other things besides Fido of which it
can be truly said as well that they are a dog. But among all the different ways in which
things can be grouped together by the predicates we use in our language, are there
some that are objectively better than others, ones that the world itself suggests, not
simply that we prefer? This is, of course, a little metaphorical, but one could see how
it might be made sense of by talking about properties. If there are properties, if the
world contains them beside the individuals that have them, then it might seem that
the world recommends our grouping things together with predicates the same way it
groups them together with properties. If there is a property of being a dog, one that
groups all and only the dogs together, then it might be a good idea to have a predicate
in our language that expresses just that property, and that groups things together in the
same way. In particular, maybe only some predicates express properties, which would
make these predicates special. With predicates we can group things together any way
we want, but properties are how the world itself groups things together. But if there
are no properties, if the world contains just individuals, then it would seem that it is
up to us, and us alone, to group things together. The world remains silent on which
things go together, we can take our pick.
Whether the world we live in is a world of only individuals and whether there is a
distinguished description of it are questions that are closely related to the question of
whether or not there are any properties besides the individuals. One crucial dividing
line in understanding the world of individuals is thus what the answer is to this
question:
() Are there properties?
This is a question in ontology and one of central importance for metaphysics.
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.. Propositions
It is natural to hold that thoughts involve at least two things. One is the person, who
is thinking the thought. The other is the content of the thought, that is, what one is
thinking. When I think that Obama is the president then I am the thinker, and the
content of the thought is that Obama is the president. These contents are generally
also called propositions. Thus when I think that Obama is the president I have a
thought that has the proposition that Obama is the president as its content. Contents
or propositions give rise to two related philosophical debates.
First there is the question of whether thinking indeed involves relating to some thing
which is the content of one’s thought, and if so, how we mange to relate to such things
as propositions. Propositions presumably are not ordinary objects, so the question
remains how I manage to relate to this one when I have one thought and that other one
when I have a different thought. More importantly, one might think that this picture of
the contents of thoughts as relating to propositions is mistaken. An alternative would
be to hold that our thoughts have contents, but we do not relate to things which are
contents. So, when I think that Obama is the president I relate only to Obama, and
think of him that he is the president, not to some other thing which is a content. On
such a picture there would be no such things as contents to which we relate, even
though our thoughts have contents in the sense that they are contentful.
A second issue connected to propositions is not directly about the contents of
thoughts, but “the propositional” more broadly. The proposition that Obama is the
president is closely tied to the truth, or the fact, that Obama is the president. If there
are such things as propositions then it is not unreasonable to think that there are such
things as truths or facts. The world then would not simply contain objects and possibly
also properties, but in addition also facts or truths. And if the world contains such
things then this might suggest a certain form of realism: what can in principle be truly
said about the world is already contained in the world itself, as one of its building
blocks. To say something truly is just to say something which is a truth, and what
truths there are is something that is a part of what there is in general. The truths are
all there already, so to speak, and we can only hope to capture as many of them as
possible. But if the world contains only material objects, say, then there are no such
things as propositions, and no such things as facts or truths. We will still be able to
think truly about the world, and say true things about it, but the world itself does not
contain any truths or facts. And this suggests a rather different picture of what we do
when we aim to describe the world. This contrast might be made clear when we think
about whether it could in principle be that there are some truths that creatures like us
could never say or think. If facts or truths exist as part of the world, then they are just
there, waiting to be thought. It might well be that we can get all of them in the end, but
since they are just there, as an independent part of the world, it would be reasonable
to expect that we can not get them all. Some might well be completely beyond us, that
is beyond what creatures like us can think or say. On the other hand, if the world does
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not contain any such facts or truths or propositions, then this might be very different.
What can in principle be thought is not directly tied to what propositions are part of
the world, and so it might be tied to us in a way that we can think everything there is
to think.
The questions how we manage to have thoughts with contents and whether we can
think all there is to think are tied to an ontological question:
() Are there propositions?
Whatever one says in answer to this question will lead to different views of the contents
of thought and its limits.
All these large-scale metaphysical issues discussed over the last couple of pages thus
seem to be closely tied to ontological questions. To solve these problems seems to
require an answer to the ontological questions. We will need to see in the following
whether this is correct. That is, we will need to see whether the ontological questions
indeed do have a central role in these debates, what this role might be, and, in
particular, how we should understand the ontological questions more precisely. As
we will see shortly, to give ontological questions a central role in metaphysics is
problematic, as are the ontological questions in the first place. To understand the
metaphysical problems outlined better we will need to understand ontology better.
And once we do that we will be in a position to answer these metaphysical questions,
or so I hope to show. But first we need to look at ontology more closely.
. Two Kinds of Ontological Questions
Although the precise statement of the questions that ontology is trying to answer
is not clear, and subject to controversy, we can still approach it with a first stab as
follows. Ontology first and foremost tries to find out what there is, what the stuff
is that reality contains. But things don’t end there. Whenever one holds that reality
contains certain things, a number of further questions immediately arise. The problem
of universals is a good example, but others would do just as well. If one holds that
there are universals, then the question suggests itself what they are like, in general.
Are they concrete or abstract, are they everywhere their instances are or nowhere at
all, and so on. These kinds of questions are generally taken to be part of ontology a
bit more broadly conceived, and to respect this it is useful to distinguish two kinds
of questions that are commonly asked in ontology. First there is the question about
whether there are the relevant things at all, whether reality contains any of them. Then,
assuming the answer to this question is affirmative, there is the question of what these
things are like in the most general way. Some problems in ontology focus more on the
first of these questions, some focus more on the second. We can thus distinguish the
primary ontological question about some kind of thing F, from the secondary ontological
question. For both of them there will be a real issue about how they should properly
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be expressed, something we will discuss shortly. But a natural first try is simply this:
the primary ontological question about Fs is the question of whether there are any.
(POQ) The primary ontological question about Fs: are there Fs?
If the answer is “no” then this would seem to settle the issue and no further questions
about Fs would follow. But if the answer is “yes” then it seems natural to follow up with
a request for more information about what these things are in general like.
(SOQ) The secondary ontological question about Fs: what are Fs in general like?
Some philosophical problems in ontology are primary ontological questions, some
are secondary ontological questions. Sometimes the two questions get mixed together.
The problem of universals is often stated as the problem of saying whether there are
any universals, and if so how they relate to the particulars that have them. Much
of the work that is actually carried out is usually in the part that deals with the
secondary ontological question, in part to justify the answer one gives about the
primary ontological question. So, if one says “yes” to the primary question, then one
better have some answer to the secondary ontological question. And even though it is
easy to say “yes” to the primary ontological question, it turns out to be hard to answer
the secondary ontological question in a satisfactory way. Sometimes the secondary
ontological question comes first in the order of inquiry. We might first determine
what ordinary objects would have to be like, if there were any, and then use this
characterization to argue that there aren’t any, since nothing is or can be like that.
Secondary ontological questions also overlap metaphysics more broadly understood,
in the way that goes beyond ontology. Here there are not clear dividing lines, and it
is simply a matter of from which angle one approaches a set of issues. Still, we will
in the following at first focus mostly on the primary ontological questions, and only
return to the secondary ones a little later. It will turn out that a proper understanding
of the primary ontological question is what is central for the answer to both and for
metaphysics more broadly.
. Three Puzzles About Ontology
.. Is Philosophical Ontology an Incoherent Project?
That something is not quite right with ontology as we normally think of it can be seen
quite easily. Consider again the question about whether there are any mathematical
objects, and its relationship to the philosophy of mathematics. The project of a philoso-
phy of mathematics was intended to be a philosophical investigation of mathematics
from the outside. We philosophers want to understand mathematics from a philo-
sophical point of view. We take a look at mathematics with all its great achievements
and results, accept them just like any insider would, but wonder about mathematics.
We don’t want to change it or to challenge its achievements, but to understand it. And
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when we try to do this we think that our understanding of mathematics is tied to what
we should think the answer to certain questions is, including the question of whether
or not mathematics aims to describe an independently existing domain of things—the
mathematical objects—which are the source of mathematical objectivity, the subject
matter of mathematics, and so on. And thus a crucial fork in the road is what one
says is the answer to the question of whether or not there are any mathematical
objects. And that question is intended to be part of the philosophical project of
trying to understand mathematics, to see what it looks like from a philosophical
point of view.
But this project seems to be completely incoherent. One can’t coherently accept
the results of mathematics, but still wonder whether there are mathematical objects.
Mathematical objects are paradigmatically things like numbers, functions, or sets. But
the results of mathematics themselves imply that there are mathematical objects such
as numbers, functions, or sets. Take Euclid’s Theorem, which was proven about ,
years ago and has been beyond question ever since. It states that
() There are infinitely many prime numbers.
This immediately implies that there are infinitely many numbers, and thus that there
are numbers. But how then can we ask whether there are mathematical objects, things
like numbers, without thereby also questioning the results of mathematics? It just
seems incoherent to have this philosophical stance, and to engage in the project of
trying to understand mathematics from the outside by asking such questions.
But on the other hand it seems perfectly coherent, and philosophers have been
doing it for quite a while with a strong sense of a meaningful project. They want to
know whether mathematics aims to describe a special part of reality: the mathematical
objects. And this is tied to the question of whether or not there are such objects in the
first place, whether or not reality contains besides the ordinary stuff in space and time
also other things that mathematics is about, things like numbers. What should we
think about this situation?
The situation is actually even worse for the philosophical project than I just made it
out to be. If we wonder whether or not there are any natural numbers, we don’t have
to rely on mathematics to conclude that there are such numbers. We can conclude this
already from the fact that I have two hands, and thus the number of my hands is two,
and thus there is at least one number: the number of my hands, i.e. two. Can I really
answer the ontological question about mathematical objects by drawing a couple of
trivial inferences from the fact that I have two hands? Even worse still, can’t I simply
conclude that there are numbers by giving examples of them: the number two is one,
the number three is another?
Ontology was intended to be part of a metaphysical project that asks a further
question, one that goes beyond the questions that are addressed, and often answered,
within a discipline or domain of discourse that the metaphysician tries to theorize
about. Metaphysics so understood was ambitious in that it had further facts to uncover
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than those that were already investigated in the discipline it was trying to understand.
And these further facts were further in the sense that those from within the discipline
did not themselves settle the corresponding questions. There was really more work to
do, and ambitious metaphysics set out to do it. But how the ontological questions can
be seen as ambitious metaphysics in this sense is just what seems to be incoherent.
The question we philosophers want to answer is apparently already answered within
mathematics itself. Whether the philosophical project of ontology is coherent, what
question it is supposed to answer, and whether these questions can play an important
role in the philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics in general is what we hope to
make progress on in this book.
There are really several different aspects of this worry. They concern both the
philosophical project of asking ontological questions, as well as giving the answer to
these questions a significant role in one’s philosophical account of a certain discipline
or domain of discourse. There are issues about whether we expressed the question we
wanted to ask properly, how it could be that this question is answered the way it seems
to be answered, what the answer matters for, and why any of this should be seen as
answering a philosophical question. It is good to bring out the different aspects of this
issue more clearly. I will in the following isolate three puzzles that, as I will argue, are
especially important. These puzzles will be with us for most of this book, and to solve
them will require quite a bit of work in each case. The three puzzles are in essence
three different aspects of the worry outlined above. Not all of them apply equally to
all ontological questions, but the fact that each one of them applies to some important
ontological questions should give rise to the worry that we don’t understand ontology
until we understand each of them better.
.. The First Puzzle: How Hard?
Ontological questions are naturally stated as questions about what stuff reality con-
tains, what exists, or what there is. Among the important ontological questions are
those about numbers, properties, and propositions, which are central to a variety of
philosophical debates. The first puzzle arises when we ask
(Q) How hard is it to answer ontological questions?
in particular the ones considering these three cases. This question has two apparently
equally good, but contrary answers.
answer : very hard
Ontological questions are questions about what reality contains. There is no easy way
to figure this out. In fact, it might seem too hard for philosophy even to attempt. After
all, some of these things might be abstract and outside of space and time. How could
philosophy hope to establish that there are such things? Maybe one can argue that
there are such things if the best theory of the world as a whole requires there to be
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such things. But figuring that out is at least as hard as figuring out what the best theory
of the world as a whole is. And most of that won’t be work for philosophy to do. So,
answering ontological questions is very hard.
answer : trivial
The questions of whether or not there are numbers, properties, or propositions can
all be answered trivially in the affirmative. There are trivial arguments that establish
that there are numbers, properties, and propositions, and these arguments use only
completely uncontroversial premises, and just a couple of easy steps of inference. Here
are some examples:
() a. Jupiter has four moons.1
b. Thus: the number of moons of Jupiter is four.
c. Thus: there is a number which is the number of moons of Jupiter, namely
four.
d. Thus: there are numbers, among them the number four.
() a. Fido is a dog.
b. Thus: it’s true that Fido is a dog.
c. Thus: something is true, namely that Fido is a dog.
d. Thus: there are propositions, among them the proposition that Fido is a
dog.
() a. Fido is a dog.
b. Thus: Fido has the property, or feature, of being a dog.
c. Thus: there is a property Fido has, namely being a dog.
d. Thus: there are properties, among them the property of being a dog.
Of course, each of these arguments can be disputed. Each of them involves several
steps where a philosopher can, and has, come along and deny that it is a valid
inference. But let’s be honest: are there really any easier and more compelling argu-
ments anywhere in philosophy? Is there really anything we can establish more easily?
The questions of whether there are numbers, properties, or propositions are trivial,
the answer is obviously: yes. And that this is so can be seen, among other ways, by the
above trivial arguments. Nothing could be easier than to see that there are numbers,
properties, and propositions. These trivial arguments don’t carry over to all ontological
questions. For example, there seems to be no analogous argument for there being
ordinary objects, and we should try to understand where this difference comes from.
But that there are such trivial arguments for answers to some ontological questions is
enough to give rise to a puzzle about ontology.
1 Jupiter in fact has more than four moons. Nonetheless, I will use this example, as do many others, since
it is a classic example of Frege’s, from his Frege ().
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upshot of the first puzzle
The first puzzle highlights an issue that often arises in ontological debates. On the
one hand, ontological debates seem to be deep and substantial debates. Whether or
not there are mathematical objects such as numbers seems to be a deep philosophical
question connected to the nature of mathematics and the source of its objectivity. But
on the other hand, it is completely trivial that there are numbers. Of course there are
numbers. The number two is one, and the number three is another. And similarly for
properties. On the one hand, the question of whether or not there are properties is a
deep philosophical question about the nature of individuals and their features: how
they go together and what the world is made from more generally. But on the other
hand, it is a completely trivial question. Of course there are properties. Being a cat is
one, and being a dog is another. What should we take away from this?
One lesson we might take away from all this is that something is wrong with the
trivial arguments. We will investigate in some detail in chapters and whether this is
correct. But if the arguments are good, what else could the lesson be? Besides worrying
about the trivial arguments, there are two other natural reactions. First we might think
that the fact that it was so trivial to answer the question shows that the question is not
fully factive, in some sense to be spelled out. We can’t find anything out about reality
that easily, and so what we found out when we answered the question trivially was
something less factive or objective than traditionally thought. Such a line will lead
to a larger anti-realism about ontology, in particular in cases like the ones discussed
here that seem to allow for a trivial answer to the ontological questions. How such an
anti-realism could be understood more precisely, and whether it is even coherent, is
a further question, but the trivial arguments can certainly be seen to motivate such a
position.2
A second reaction is to wonder whether we articulated the ontological questions
properly. Above we articulated what we wanted to ask, the ontological question about
Fs, with
() Are there Fs?
But maybe that isn’t right. Maybe what we are trying to find out when we do ontology
and metaphysics is not whether there are such things, but something else? Maybe we
were misled into expressing the question we want to ask in a certain colloquial way, and
that misarticulated question was trivially answered. But how else should we express
the question we want to ask? Most naturally, we should look back at how ontology was
motivated. Here we used expressions like “make up reality,” or “exists,” and thus maybe
we should instead try to ask the question as follows:
() Are numbers part of what makes up reality?
2 See Chalmers () or Kraut () for such broadly anti-realist positions.
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or
() Do numbers exist?
or maybe simply
() Are there really numbers?
But it is not so clear how much progress that would be. The first question seems almost
a bit strange (what else would they be part of if there are any in the first place?), and
the second and third are not clearly different from what we had before. How could it
be that there are numbers, but they don’t exist, or that there are numbers, but there
aren’t really numbers? It is not clear that by putting things this way we get any more
substantial questions. Furthermore, couldn’t we have stated Euclid’s Theorem above
just as well as the result that infinitely many prime numbers exist? Such attempts at
a reformulation of the question might be on to something, but the above proposals
so far won’t be the solution. What we can conclude, however, is this: philosophers try
to ask certain questions that naturally get grouped together in the discipline we call
“ontology.” We can call these questions ontological questions. Ontological questions
generally are directed at certain cases, like numbers, objects, properties, or the like. We
can call them the ontological question about numbers, the ontological question about
objects, and so on. What we have to find out is thus this: what are the ontological
questions (about numbers/properties, etc.)? That is to say, how should we properly
express these questions that we want to ask? To make progress on this we should in
particular see whether or not the trivial arguments are indeed valid. If they are not
valid, then maybe the question we wanted to ask is properly stated as (). But if they
are valid, then it would seem that either ontology is trivial (for these cases), since ()
is trivially answered, or the question has to be stated in some other non-trivial way, or
some form of anti-realism is true about ontology. To solve the first puzzle requires in
part to find out what question we are trying to answer when we do ontology.
.. The Second Puzzle: How Important?
Our second puzzle about ontology arises from there being two apparently equally
good, but contrary, answers to the question of what hangs on the answer to the
ontological questions turning out one way or another. There are two apparently equally
good, but contrary, answers to the question:
(Q) How important are ontological questions?
That is, how important is it, not just for philosophy or metaphysics, but in the larger
scheme of things, for what the answers to these ontological questions turn out to be.
answer : not very important
Although ontology is a central part of metaphysics, and metaphysics is a central part
of philosophy, we should admit that in the larger scheme of things philosophy is not
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ontology and metaphysics
the most important part of inquiry. Whatever one in the end thinks of the value of
a moral philosophy, or political philosophy, metaphysics won’t have that importance,
and ontology certainly will be even less important. Even those among us who work in
metaphysics see some justification for the lack of multi-million dollar research funding
for our field, even though such sums are frequently given to such projects as finding
out how viruses attack cells, what subatomic particles there are, the Hubble Space
Telescope, or even finding out how to factor large numbers. Philosophical questions
might be questions that force themselves on to all human beings, but pursuing them
is a luxury that we are fortunate enough to be able to afford. But like all luxuries, they
are not very important.
answer : very important
In the introduction to his book Psychosemantics Jerry Fodor discusses whether or not
belief–desire psychology, i.e. the explanation of our behavior in terms of our beliefs
and desires, is correct. He writes:
The main moral is supposed to be that we have, as things now stand, no decisive reason to doubt
that very many common sense belief/desire explanations are—literally—true. Which is just as
well, because if common sense intentional psychology were to collapse that would be, beyond
comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species; if we’re that wrong
about the mind, then that’s the wrongest that we’ve ever been about anything. The collapse of
the supernatural, for example, didn’t compare; theism never came close to being as intimately
involved in our thought and our practice—especially our practice—as belief/desire explanation
is. [ . . . ] We’ll be in deep, deep trouble if we have to give it up. Fodor (: xii)
Fodor has a point here. If it turns out that we don’t have beliefs and desires, and thus
the proper explanation of what we do does not involve them, then this would shake our
conception of ourselves in a profound way. It really would be an intellectual disaster.
But what if it turns out, in ontology, that there are no propositions? Then there are
no such things as contents. In particular, there is no such content as the content that
snow is white. But if there is no such content, how can anyone have a thought with
the content that snow is white? You can’t, literally, have a thought for which its content
is missing. But all beliefs and desires, the building blocks of belief–desire psychology,
have to have contents. If there are no propositions, then there are no contents, and
thus there are no beliefs and desires. And so belief–desire psychology cannot be true.
If ontology goes one way, the greatest intellectual catastrophe of our species is right
around the corner.
Motivating the threat of disaster this way is, of course, not philosophically innocent.
For example, there are attempts to separate the ascription of beliefs and desires with
taking them to be relations to contents or propositions.3 But the threat of a disaster
is quite real since such approaches are generally considered to be a minority view,
3 Some examples of such theories are the syntactic relational theory of Davidson () and the multiple
relation theory of Russell () and Moltmann (b).
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ontology and metaphysics
one which might well turn out to be incorrect. If belief relates us to propositions, as
it seems to, then the negative answer to an ontological question leads to the greatest
intellectual catastrophe in human history, as Fodor put it. Ontological questions can
thus be extremely important.
Things are even worse when it comes to ordinary objects. If it turns out that there are
no ordinary objects, then not only are there no tables and chairs, there are none of us
either. If all there is is just atoms in the void then we don’t exist, since we are not atoms.
Even though the non-existence of propositions might lead to the greatest intellectual
catastrophe in human history, the non-existence of ordinary objects would be worse,
since it guarantees that there are no humans and thus there is little human history.
And similarly, although less dramatically, for numbers. If it turns out in ontology
that there are no numbers after all, then there are no prime numbers, and no even
numbers, and no odd numbers, and so on. And if there are no prime numbers, then
it is false that there are infinitely many prime numbers, something Euclid thought he
established with his famous proof. And similarly almost all of mathematics is false.
And if mathematics is false, then so is a lot of physics and economics and biology,
since they all rely on mathematics. Thus if the ontological question about numbers
goes one way, then everything else goes down the drain. The ontological question is
thus of unparalleled significance. Everything depends on it.
upshot of the second puzzle
The second puzzle raises the issue of whether the truth of ordinary and scientific
statements depends on the ontological questions having a certain answer. It seems that
the truth of belief–desire psychology requires a certain position in ontology: the view
that propositions exist. Without propositions belief–desire psychology can’t be true,
since it depends on the truth of belief and desire ascriptions, which in turn seems to
depend on the existence of propositions. And so a certain ontological position seems to
be required for it to be true. Similarly for mathematics, and the mathematical sciences.
If there are no mathematical objects, then there are no numbers, and thus mathematics
can’t be true. And neither can be any of the other disciplines that rely on mathematics.
So, it seems that all these sciences depend on the ontological question to turn out one
way rather than another.
The second puzzle raises the question of whether this is indeed true. Does our
ordinary, everyday talk as well as our more systematic theorizing require the truth of a
certain position in ontology? On the one hand, it is tempting to think that ontological
questions are somewhat independent from our ordinary way of describing the world. It
is tempting to think that we can accept all of mathematics and still have the ontological
questions about mathematical objects left open. The ontological question can plausibly
be seen as not being settled within mathematics itself as it was intended. Whether this
intention pans out remains to be seen.
How then should we understand the relationship between our everyday and scien-
tific ways of describing the world and the philosophical project of ontology? To find
out more about this we need to solve the second puzzle.
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ontology and metaphysics
The second puzzle is also closely related to the question of the source of the
objectivity in a particular domain of discourse. If arithmetic, for example, is about
an ontology of mathematical objects, the numbers, then they could be the source
of mathematical objectivity. They might exist independently of us, and adjudicate
impartially all mathematical disputes. But if our arithmetical talk in everyday life
as well as mathematics does not require an ontology of numbers, and if its truth is
independent of their being such an ontology, then it won’t be the source of arithmetical
objectivity. To solve the second puzzle requires us to also make headway on this issue.
.. The Third Puzzle: How Philosophical?
Finally, there is a third puzzle, which is not unrelated to the other two, of course, but
brings out another aspect of how we should understand ontology as a philosopher’s
project, one that in a sense is the hardest one, and that we will only be able to resolve
towards the end of this book. This puzzle arises from there being two apparently
equally good, but contrary, answers to the question:
(Q) How philosophical are ontological questions?
answer : very philosophical
Ontology is a central part of metaphysics, which is paradigmatically a philosophical
discipline. Although the question of whether there are any electrons might well not
be one for philosophy to figure out, nonetheless settling the ontological questions
about numbers, properties, or propositions one way or another is to take sides in
a long-standing philosophical debate. These questions are closely tied to traditional
philosophical questions like the problem of universals, the source of mathematical
objectivity, the limits of thought, and so on. Solving them would be real progress
in philosophy. And the best attempts to solve them have been in philosophy. The
existence of universals, say, has been debated in philosophy for a long time, and isn’t
debated anywhere else. These questions are thus philosophical through and through.
answer : not at all
The question of whether or not there are numbers is easily settled in mathematics, not
philosophy. An answer to this question is implied by, among any others, what is widely
regarded as one of the most securely established results in all of inquiry: that there are
infinitely many prime numbers. This implication is equally beyond question, and thus
that there are numbers, even infinitely many of them, has been established long ago
by mathematical means. It is a result of mathematics, not a question for philosophy.
And similarly for the other questions. Materials science has established, by scientific
means, that there are some features, or properties, of alloys that make these metals
more resistant to corrosion, but more susceptible to fracture. What these features,
or properties, are is known in this field. But there being such properties of alloys
implies that there are properties. Thus that there are properties has been established
in materials science, as well as basically any other scientific discipline. It is a result of
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ontology and metaphysics
science, not philosophy. And similarly for there being ordinary objects, like bars of
metal. The question of whether or not there are numbers, objects, or properties is not
a philosophical one at all. It is one that has long been settled in the sciences.
upshot of the third puzzle
The third puzzle makes vivid that there is a real issue about why the ontological
questions we are trying to ask in philosophy aren’t already answered elsewhere. If the
question just is “Are there numbers?” then why isn’t this question already answered in
mathematics? And since mathematics establishes its results with close to certainty, why
would anyone think there is still an open question about the ontology of numbers? Are
philosophers so confused that they are trying to answer questions whose answers are
immediately implied by the most securely established mathematical results? Although
it might be tempting to some to take this line, it doesn’t quite capture how the
question about the ontology of numbers was intended. And it doesn’t resolve whether
or not this intention gets at something. What we wanted to ask when we ask about
an ontology of numbers was supposed to be a question from the outside, about
mathematics as a whole. The question we intended to ask was not intended to be
answered within mathematics. It was intended to be a question that is still open
even after we accept all of mathematics as it is. But you can’t always get what you
want and we have reason to think that this intention is illusionary. The question “Are
there any mathematical objects?” seems to be settled within mathematics, since it
establishes that there are numbers, and numbers are mathematical objects. Ontology
and metaphysics were intended to be ambitious in that they have questions of fact left
over for themselves, ones that aren’t answered in mathematics or elsewhere. Whether
ontology and metaphysics, seen as philosophical projects, can live up to this ambition
is the issue raised by the third puzzle.
. Towards a Solution
To make progress on all this we need to solve the three puzzles ontology gives rise
to. But it won’t simply be enough to take sides on the puzzles. It isn’t enough to
insist, for example, that ontology is trivial, not important, and not philosophical, even
if this were true. What we need to understand is how these puzzles arise and how
ontology naturally gives rise to this puzzling situation. After all, many philosophers
feel compelled to articulate the question they want to ask when they wonder about
the source of the objectivity of arithmetic with the words “Are there numbers?,” even
though that seems to be a completely trivial mathematical question. We need to
understand not only how we should articulate the question we want to ask in ontology,
but also why we naturally articulate it the way we do in light of its having an apparently
obvious answer. Taking sides on the puzzles is not enough, we need to understand why
and how both sides arise.
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ontology and metaphysics
It should seem promising that if we could solve these three puzzles, and understand
how they arise, then we would be in a good position to find out what role ontology
should play in metaphysics, and whether metaphysics can be ambitious in the way
we hoped: that it asks further questions, not immediately answered in other parts of
inquiry, but still significant questions of fact. A promising strategy to achieve this is
thus to look at the three puzzles, to see how they arise and to try to solve them. This
is the strategy I will pursue in this book. I hope to make the case that it is the right
strategy by showing that it indeed bears fruit: a solution to these puzzles illuminates
not just ontology, but also the extent of the proper ambitions of metaphysics and the
place of ontology in it.
The three puzzles increase in difficulty in the order given above, and a solution to
the later ones will depend on a solution to the earlier ones. We will need to solve the
first puzzle first, before we can attempt the second one, and we will need to solve that
one before we can move on to the third one. We need to know first what the ontological
questions are before we can see how important they are, and what depends on their
answer. And only after we know that can we hope to see what the philosophical project
can be that is connected to them.
I will thus start with the first puzzle. To understand how it arises we should look at
the trivial inferences that apparently allow us to conclude from ordinary statements
that there are numbers, properties, and propositions. These trivial inferences can be
broken down into two parts. The first is the part where we conclude, for example, that
the number of moons is four from the premise that there are four moons. The second
is the part where we draw the conclusion that there is a number from that the number
of moons is four. Both of these inferences deserve a rather detailed discussion. This
will be our point of departure for the next two chapters: chapter will discuss the
first inference, chapter will discuss the second one. At the end of chapter we will
be able to solve the first puzzle, and we will have made substantial progress towards
understanding how to articulate an ontological question properly. It will then be time
to move on towards solving the second puzzle and to understand how ontological
questions relate to the objectivity of a domain of discourse. The middle part of this
book will deal in some detail with what we do when we talk about numbers, objects,
properties, and propositions. We will see what the solution to the second puzzle
is for our four cases by the end of chapter , and it will be different for different
cases. It will then be time to think about the status of ontology as a philosophical
discipline, and about how metaphysics relates to other parts of inquiry. We will see
the solution to the third puzzle in chapter . By then I hope to have made the case
that metaphysics can indeed have the ambition to ask further questions of fact, that
these questions sometimes are ontological ones, that they are, just as we originally
thought, just questions like “Are there numbers?,” what the answer to that question is,
and why it all matters. But in order to get there we need to first try to solve the first
puzzle.
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Innocent Statements and Their
Metaphysically Loaded
Counterparts
. The Trivial Arguments
Our first puzzle about ontology is a puzzle about how easy it is to answer ontological
questions.1 Such questions are questions like
() Are there numbers?
which are taken to be deep, substantial, and important philosophical questions. But,
on the other hand, it seems that there are trivial arguments that immediately imply an
answer to that question. In particular, it seems that this question can be answered so
trivially that even if one wasn’t surprised by the answer, one should be surprised by
just how trivial it was to get it. There are arguments that answer question () in the
affirmative that rely only on completely uncontroversial premises, and they establish
this conclusion in two apparently completely trivial steps. These arguments are the
main topic of this chapter. There are a variety of lessons that could be drawn from
these arguments. One is that the question () is indeed trivial, but it is not the one
that we should ask in ontology.2 Or one might hold that the arguments are not valid.3
Or one might hold that ontology is trivial after all.4 Or one might hold that the whole
project of ontology is confused in some way.5 I will draw a different conclusion below.
To see what one should conclude from these arguments, we will have to look at them
in more detail. In doing this we will have to start investigating what we do when
we talk about numbers, objects, properties, and propositions. We will at first, in this
chapter, only look at a very limited range of cases of such talk, a range that will expand
significantly in later chapters. The cases we will look at now are especially significant
1 This chapter is based on Hofweber (a). The overlapping material in it has, however, been revised,
updated, and reorganized.
2 See, for example, Fine (), Dorr (), Fine (), Schaffer (b), and many others.
3 See Field (a) or Yablo ().
4 See, for example, Schiffer () for properties and propositions, Frege () and Wright () for
numbers, and Thomasson () for ordinary objects, and Thomasson () for ontology more broadly.
5 See, paradigmatically, Carnap ().
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innocent statements
for the question of how to solve the first puzzle and how to understand the trivial
arguments. We will look at the general case in the chapters to follow, which will be
central for solving the second puzzle about how important ontology is.
The simplest and most striking arguments that there are numbers, properties,
and propositions, all have the same form. They start out with only one premise: a
completely trivial and everyday statement that seems to have nothing to do with
metaphysics. I will call such statements innocent statements, since they are apparently
completely free of any metaphysical baggage. Examples include:
(Fdog) Fido is a dog.6
(Jm) Jupiter has four moons.
and basically every other ordinary, everyday statement. The argument then moves to
one or more of the what I’ll call metaphysically loaded counterparts of the innocent
statements. These are statements that are apparently equivalent to them, and obviously
so, but that introduce things that don’t seem so metaphysically innocent any more:
numbers, properties, propositions, and truth:
(Fprop) Fido has the property of being a dog.
(trueF) It’s true that Fido is a dog.
(Nis) The number of moons of Jupiter is four.
Once these are established it seems to require only a further trivial inference to bring
in quantification. Once we know that Fido has the property of being a dog then we
know that there is a property that he has, namely being a dog. So, after the inference
from an innocent statement to one of its metaphysically loaded counterparts a second
step takes us from the metaphysically loaded counterparts to a quantified statement:
() There is a property Fido has, namely being a dog.
() Something is true, namely that Fido is a dog.
() There is a number, which is the number of moons of Jupiter, namely four.
And once we have established that, it seems completely trivial to conclude that there
are numbers, properties, and propositions.
If the ontological question about numbers just is the question of whether there
are numbers then it would seem that this ontological question is indeed trivially
answered. Before we draw any conclusions about what the ontological questions really
are, or whether ontology is trivial in these three cases, let’s have a closer look at
the trivial arguments. These arguments are of interest quite independently of the
6 Examples that are used frequently will receive mnemonic labels, to make their identification easier
below. Other examples will simply be numbered.
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innocent statements
larger issues about the status of metaphysics, since they do give rise to a number
of puzzles that are independent of metaphysics. These are puzzles about language,
and understanding them, I will argue, is the key to understanding the puzzles about
metaphysics. Stephen Schiffer has called the inferences from innocent statements to
their metaphysically loaded counterparts something-from-nothing transformations in
Schiffer (). Whether they involve a transformation of some kind or merely an
inference is up for debate, but somehow we seem to be able to infer, from nothing, that
there are such things as numbers, properties, or propositions. The question is whether,
and how, we can get something from nothing.
We need to carefully look at the trivial arguments to make progress on this issue,
and we will do so one step at a time. First we will investigate the inference from an
innocent statement to one of its metaphysically loaded counterparts in this chapter.
Then we will look at the second step of the trivial arguments in chapter : the inference
from the metaphysically loaded counterpart to a quantified statement. After that we
will be in a position to solve the first puzzle.
. The Standard Solutions to the Metaphysical Puzzle
The metaphysical puzzle is to say how we could possibly get such easy answers to such
substantial questions, which is closely connected to the question of how we could
possibly get something from nothing in the trivial arguments. This question has a
number of straightforward attempts at an answer. The first answer is this:
A The trivial arguments are not valid. They appear valid, however, for one of
several reasons.
Among those reasons that make the arguments appear to be valid, even though they
are not, could be a connection to fictionalism. If the metaphysically loaded statement is
not literally true, but only true given that there are numbers/ properties/propositions
at all, then this might well explain why the argument seems to be valid. We might slide
between what is literally true, the innocent statement, and what is only true given the
fiction that there are numbers. A version of this was defended by Hartry Field in Field
(a), and by Stephen Yablo in Yablo ().7
On the other hand, one might think that the trivial arguments are valid, and draw
one of several possible conclusions from that. One might conclude that since the
premises are clearly true, we only use innocent statements, thus the questions that
ontology tries to ask are indeed trivially answered:
A The trivial arguments are valid. The questions of ontology are thus easily
answered.
7 Yablo changed his mind about this. A more recent account of his is in Yablo (). His most recent
view is in Yablo ().
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