On What There Is.

Quine, W. V. O. (1948). On What There Is. Review of Metaphysics, 2(5), 21-38.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1948

Volume

2

Issue

5

Pages

21-38

Link

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20123117

Cited from

philosophy

Cited by

4 citations across 4 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: a theory is committed to exactly those entities its bound variables must range over for its statements to be true ("to be is to be the value of a variable"), while the use of names is no criterion of commitment.

• 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.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Quine frames the ontological problem as "What is there?" and presses identity conditions on putative entities, but gives no inventory, grounding or supervenience account.

    “A curious thing about the ontological problem is its sim plicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables : "What is there ?"”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Domain-specific

• Plato's Beard
  • The attempt to deny an entity then appears to reintroduce it as an idea, subsistent object, unrealized possibility, or other ontological item.

Mechanisms

• Ontology Revision Session
  • It is the mechanism that respects ontological commitment

    This sourceLocates a theory's ontological commitments in the entities over which its bound variables must range.

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 4 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.

• https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PHS634/Quine-1948.pdf ×1
• https://philpapers.org/rec/QUIOWT ×1

Registry ID ref:7a4086962fb6 · see in the full table