Written answers - FINAL EXAM Flashcards
Who is Quine’s method designed to catch?
cheaters who engage in ‘philosophical double-talk, which would repudiate an ontology while simultaneously enjoying its benefits’
What are the two problem with Domains
a. First issue – working backwards (reverse engineering a domain)
b. Second issue – comparing theories (one aspect of comparison are the ontological commitments, i.e., what do the theories say exist)
How does Quine’s method work - what are the three steps
- Settle which sentences the theory takes to be true
- Regiment these sentences into canonical notion - formal language
- Then determine what are the ontological commitments that need to be quantified over
Advantages of Quine’s theory
o We can work backwards
o We can compare and contrast theories in terms of the plausibility of their ontological commitments
o Addresses commitment issues – we can upon this basis make ontological commitments with more assurance
Paraphrase technique, how does it work?
Changes the structure of the claim so it seemingly is not committed to the thing it was committed to
by paraphrasing the sentence you can avoid quantifying over ontological commitments
Make a commitment to cheese, then DESCRIBE a PREDICATE to the cheese - ‘perforated’
What are two problems with Quine’s method?
1 – QUINE’s method only ascribes commitment via existential quantifiers… NOT universal
2 – regimentation can be stilted
Why are names not adequate for Quine?
They are eliminable
For Quine, one is only ontologically committed to things if…
One is ontologically committed to things if and only if your theory either entails or includes an existential sentence where the objects have to be a value of the existentially bound variable
how would you say “There exists an empty set.” in Quine’s method
\exists z \, (\text{EmptySet}(z))
