On What There Is.¶
Quine, W. V. O. (1948). On What There Is. Review of Metaphysics, 2(5), 21-38.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Abstraction
- This is especially dangerous in domains where the abstraction has become standard (the "file" concept in computing, the "species" concept in biology) — revising the abstraction feels like attacking the term itself, making established abstractions resistant to improvement. Common failure mode: Defending the name of an established abstraction even when the underlying selection has stopped serving its purpose; treating ontological commitments as if they were neutral labels rather than loaded choices; reifying an abstraction so thoroughly that alternative projections become invisible or seem heretical.
This sourceAnalyzes ontological commitment: to quantify over and name entities (numbers, universals, propositions) is to commit to their existence in one's conceptual scheme
- This is especially dangerous in domains where the abstraction has become standard (the "file" concept in computing, the "species" concept in biology) — revising the abstraction feels like attacking the term itself, making established abstractions resistant to improvement. Common failure mode: Defending the name of an established abstraction even when the underlying selection has stopped serving its purpose; treating ontological commitments as if they were neutral labels rather than loaded choices; reifying an abstraction so thoroughly that alternative projections become invisible or seem heretical.
- Ontology
- Ontology is the systematic specification of what there is — the inventory of basic entity types, the identity and individuation criteria that distinguish them, and the dependency relations (mereological, grounding, supervenience) that structure them into a coherent framework.
This sourceAnalyzes ontological commitment: when we abstract and name entities (numbers, universals, propositions), we commit to their existence in our conceptual scheme. Establishes that abstraction carries philosophical burden — named abstractions impose ontological commitments.
- Ontology is the systematic specification of what there is — the inventory of basic entity types, the identity and individuation criteria that distinguish them, and the dependency relations (mereological, grounding, supervenience) that structure them into a coherent framework.
Domain-specific¶
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
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