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Full Idea
Quine charges quantified modal systems of logic with giving rise to unintended sense or nonsense, committing us to an incomprehensible ontology, and entailing an implausible or unsustainable Aristotelian essentialism.
Clarification
'Quantified modal systems' use quantifiers in possible worlds instead of necessity/possibility
Gist of Idea
Quine says quantified modal logic creates nonsense, bad ontology, and false essentialism
Source
comment on Willard Quine (Existence and Quantification [1966]) by Joseph Melia - Modality Ch.3
Book Ref
Melia,Joseph: 'Modality' [Acumen 2003], p.63
A Reaction
A nice summary. Personally I like essentialism in accounts of science (see Nature|Laws of Nature|Essentialism), so would like to save it in metaphysics. Possible worlds ontology may be very surprising, rather than 'incomprehensible'.
| 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] |