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Full Idea
Quine's test for ontological commitment ignores the fact that there are often implicit commitments to certain kinds of entities even where we are not yet quantifying over them.
Gist of Idea
You can be implicitly committed to something without quantifying over it
Source
comment on Willard Quine (Existence and Quantification [1966]) by Amie L. Thomasson - Ordinary Objects 09.4
Book Ref
Thomasson,Amie L.: 'Ordinary Objects' [OUP 2010], p.167
A Reaction
Put this with the obvious problem (of which Quine is aware) that we don't quantify over 'sakes' in 'for the sake of the children', and quantification and commitment have been rather clearly pulled apart.
Related Idea
Idea 14489 Theories do not avoid commitment to entities by avoiding certain terms or concepts [Thomasson]
| 5745 | Quine says quantified modal logic creates nonsense, bad ontology, and false essentialism [Melia on Quine] |
| 8789 | Various strategies try to deal with the ontological commitments of second-order logic [Hale/Wright on Quine] |
| 4216 | Express a theory in first-order predicate logic; its ontology is the types of bound variable needed for truth [Quine, by Lowe] |
| 14490 | You can be implicitly committed to something without quantifying over it [Thomasson on Quine] |
| 16966 | Philosophers tend to distinguish broad 'being' from narrower 'existence' - but I reject that [Quine] |
| 18966 | Ontological commitment of theories only arise if they are classically quantified [Quine] |
| 16961 | In formal terms, a category is the range of some style of variables [Quine] |
| 16963 | Existence is implied by the quantifiers, not by the constants [Quine] |
| 16964 | Theories are committed to objects of which some of its predicates must be true [Quine] |
| 16965 | All we have of general existence is what existential quantifiers express [Quine] |