Summary Of On What There Is - 1234 Words

1. Quine in his paper titled â€Å"On What There Is† (Kim, Sosa, Korman, 2012, p. 7-15) aims to provide an account of two different ontologies and suggests that his answer is the better answer to the ontological problem. Ontology deals with the question of what there is. The problem is understanding what the right answer is. In this response, I will explain Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment and his response to McX’s argument for the existence of universals. McX is a fictitious philosopher created for taking a position on an ontology different from his own. Simply put, Quine’s criterion for ontological commitment is that statements must use bound variables because names are not enough to commit us to an ontology. That is to say,†¦show more content†¦Quine would disagree and respond that skies, cars, and t-shirts discuss particular objects and blue things are predicates of those objects. There does not need to be some universal aspect for the existence of blue to have meaning. All we need to do is use bound variables and make an ontological commitment saying that there is something that is a car and blue. Quine avoids confronting the argument about the existence of universals by disregarding McX’s argument. 2. In order to explain and evaluate the view that a concrete particular is a combination of its features and a substratum. We must first define what these terms mean. A concrete particular is a spatiotemporal individual entity that has causal powers. To put this another way, concrete particulars exist within space and time with one location. A specific concrete particular cannot exist in more than one location at a time. For example, a concrete particular could be a book. The view that these particulars are combinations of is features and substratum is a way to quantify how they exist. Features are the characteristics a substance has. For example, a book has a feature of rectangularity. A substratum or a box theory of concrete particulars suggest that concrete particulars are a combination of its features and contained by their location. To put this another way, a substratum adds order to the set of features while having location as the container that separates a single book particul ar from other similar