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Ontology Downgraded All The Way
Author(s) -
Georgalis Nicholas
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0114.00082
Subject(s) - quine , philosophy , scientific realism , epistemology , ontology , realism , commensurability (mathematics) , naturalism , metaphysics , transcendental number , mathematics , geometry
Willard Quine has recently defended his brand of scientific realism and naturalism (1992). He has expanded his defense (1993, 1996), utilizing observation sentences in their holophrastic guise. He also argues that the latter bear “... significantly on the epistemology of ontology” and provide for the commensurability of theories. I argue that they fail in all these tasks. Further, Quine’s long‐standing commitment to a kind of scientific realism, on the one hand, and his frequent employment of proxy functions and the rejection of transcendental metaphysics, on the other, constitute an untenable position. A consistent Quinean must abandon scientific realism and ontology.