Ontology after Carnap by Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe

Author:Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe [Blatti, Stephan & Lapointe, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199661985
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

6

Carnap and the Prospects for Easy Ontology

Amie Thomasson

After more than fifty years, metaontology has come back in fashion. And so we now see intensive discussions about whether or not ontological disputes are ‘merely verbal’, whether the meaning of the quantifier does or could vary in the mouths of disputants, and whether we can understand the quantifier (or a special ontologese quantifier) as having a fixed meaning in virtue of ‘carving the world at its logical joints’.

But in most of the recent discussion, there is a deflationary position that has been missed. The missed position is not some obscure newcomer, but rather a view along the lines of Carnap’s original form of ontological deflationism—that very deflationism that was thought to have been defeated by Quine as he inaugurated a renaissance for serious metaphysics.

But how could a Carnapian form of deflationism—probably the most prominent historical form of ontological deflationism—have been missed? And what difference would rediscovering it make to contemporary discussions in metaontology? Those are the questions I aim to answer in this chapter.

I’ll argue, first, that Carnap’s original position was often dismissed because it was wrongly associated with verificationism and anti-realism. But I will argue that there is a way to interpret Carnap’s view that does not rely on verificationism nor lead to anti-realism. Carnap’s view was then put aside and forgotten given the common assumption that Quine had won the Carnap–Quine debate and made the world safe for serious metaphysics. Later attempts to revive a deflationary position only made matters worse: Putnam’s deflationism linked the view to anti-realism, and while Hirsch rescued it from that association, he linked deflationism to a form of quantifier variance. Since then, quantifier variance has come to be considered the route deflationists must take. Putnam, Carnap, and Hirsch and other deflationists have all been lumped together as defenders of quantifier variance, and serious metaphysicians have set their sights on defending serious metaphysics by attacking quantifier variance or defending the idea that the quantifier is (or can be) univocal. I’ll argue, however, that Carnap in fact is not committed to quantifier variance in anything like Hirsch’s sense, and that he does not rely on it in his ways of deflating metaphysical debates. As a result, the contemporary focus in metametaphysics on quantifier variance is the product of a historical wrong turn, and is irrelevant to the prospects for evaluating a truly Carnapian approach.

In closing I sketch a contemporary neo-Carnapian form of deflationism (one which I develop and defend at much greater length elsewhere [2015]). I hope to show that the original and most promising deflationary position has been largely overlooked, and the prospects for a neo-Carnapian metaontology are really rather good.

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