Ontology Without Borders

321 Pages·2017·2.317 MB·English

by  Jody Azzouni

i
Ontology Without Borders
ii
iii
Ontology Without
Borders
Jody Azzouni
3
iv
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 062255– 8
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
General Introduction ix
PART I | Ontological Commitment
1 Transcendence and Immanence  3
2 The Transcendence of the Natural- Language
“Exist” When Used to Assert or Deny Ontological
Commitment  30
3 Ontological Neutrality in Natural Languages  55
4 Truth and Bivalence  73
5 Applications of Neutrality  100
Conclusion to Part I  129
PART II | What There Is
Introduction to Part II  135
6 The Master Argument Against Ontological
Borders  143
7 Feature- Characterization Languages  171
vi
8 Focusing in on (Some of) the Real  194
9 Constructing “Objects”  224
General Conclusion  250
Bibliography  257
Index  269
|
vi Contents
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M
y thanks to my seminar class on objects (Spring 2014), where
we studied the “penultimate” version of this book while I worked
up yet another final version— and not for the last time, it turned
out. I’m indebted not only to the attending students but also to everyone else
who graciously sat in. In an order innocent of significance, my thanks to
Anthony Adrian, Stefano Boscolo, Pedro Carné, Nat Carter, Corey Dethier,
Dave Gottlieb, Justis Koon, David Laprade, George E. Smith, and Isaac
Wilhelm. I thank Otávio Bueno and Jeff McConnell for discussions on these
topics over several years; I thank Yvonne Raley for several valuable (emailed)
suggestions in June and July 2014, and John Collins for the same, plus
another valuable email in January 2016. I thank Eric Dean for pages of help-
ful detailed, and substantial, comments on the entire manuscript in late 2015
and in the first half of 2016, while I was doing final preparations.
Some help is targeted enough to acknowledge with footnotes, but most
came in ineffable or global ways hard to be footnote-s pecific about. For
example, chapter 6 came under pressure during several classes. The result
was substantial modifications in presentation and content. Chapter 7 is also
material generated because members of the class requested additional details
about feature- presentation languages. George Smith was especially con-
cerned (and helpful) about how relations are interpreted in these languages.
Valuable suggestions from several members of the class (among them
Corey Dethier, Dave Gottlieb, Justis Koon, and Isaac Wilhelm) induced me
to remove items. But you can’t thank someone by dropping footnotes into
what’s otherwise the middle of nowhere: Thanks to So-a nd- so for a much-
needed lacuna right here.
viii
I especially want to thank Michael Glanzberg for a very generous set of
searching comments, questions, and objections. While working on the man-
uscript (during the winter of 2015 and the spring of 2016), I rewrote a great
deal of it as a result. (There are footnotes to this effect throughout the book.)
My thanks to an anonymous referee who reviewed the book for Oxford in
2015 for raising several concerns that I responded to.
I thank both the Philosophy Department and the Deans of Arts and
Sciences at Tufts University for introducing a special program of classes that
incorporate students into the professor’s research process. I hope my stu-
dents found this as valuable as I did. (Back in 1994, I thanked the Philosophy
Department at Tufts for providing a near- perfect environment in which to do
philosophy. Remarkably, this is still true.)
|
viii Acknowledgments
xi
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
I.1 Ontological Neutrality
One theme of my earlier work is that the quantifiers of formal languages
and the corresponding terms of natural languages are ontologically neutral.
Quantifiers don’t require ontological commitments to what they quantify
over. Call this quantifier neutralism.1 Quantifier neutralism is an empirical
thesis when applied to natural languages: it’s sensitive to language-u sage
evidence. For formal languages, however, quantifier neutralism is a theo-
rem: nothing about formal languages, or the semantics for such languages,
forces an ontologically committing interpretation of their quantifiers. (I’m
excluding, of course, stipulatively imposing an ontological interpretation on
formal quantifiers; but this doesn’t require a special kind of semantics.) In
the appendix to this introduction, I sketch the proof of quantifier neutralism
for various formal languages and their many possible semantics; I also dis-
cuss the usage evidence for the quantifier neutralism thesis when it’s applied
to natural languages.
I first endorsed, in Azzouni (1994), an ontology- free interpretation
of first- order formal languages— even when accompanied by standard
objectual (Tarskian) semantics. I there characterized mathematical prac-
tice as families of formal axiom systems that don’t require ontological
commitments.
1 I owe this label to William Lane Craig (2011). It was used earlier to describe my position (or

positions seen as resembling it), but Craig was the first to directly press me to adopt it.