Full Idea
Quine's advice is to countenance numbers iff the literal part of our theory quantifies over them; and to count the part of our theory that quantifies over numbers literal iff there turn out really to be numbers.
Gist of Idea
Quine is hopeless circular, deriving ontology from what is literal, and 'literal' from good ontology
Source
comment on Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953]) by Stephen Yablo - Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? XIII
Book Reference
Yablo,Stephen: 'Things: Philosophical Papers vol. 2' [OUP 2010], p.141
A Reaction
This sounds a bit devastating. Presumably it is indeed the choice of a best theory which results in the ontological commitment, so it is not much help to then read off the ontology from the theory.