Table Of Contenti
Ontology Without Borders
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Ontology Without
Borders
Jody Azzouni
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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
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8 Focusing in on (Some of) the Real 194
9 Constructing “Objects” 224
General Conclusion 250
Bibliography 257
Index 269
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vi Contents
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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.
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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.)
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viii Acknowledgments
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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.
