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Full Idea
The route to the existence of properties via ontological commitment provides little information about what properties are like.
Gist of Idea
Accepting properties by ontological commitment tells you very little about them
Source
Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §22)
Book Ref
-: 'Mind' [-], p.59
A Reaction
NIce point, and rather important, I would say. I could hardly be committed to something for the sole reason that I had expressed a statement which contained an ontological commitment. Start from the reason for making the statement.
10642 | Second-order quantifiers are committed to concepts, as first-order commits to objects [Frege, by Linnebo] |
16964 | Theories are committed to objects of which some of its predicates must be true [Quine] |
16021 | Quine says we can expand predicates easily (ideology), but not names (ontology) [Quine, by Noonan] |
10747 | Accepting properties by ontological commitment tells you very little about them [Oliver] |
10748 | Reference is not the only way for a predicate to have ontological commitment [Oliver] |