A Quinean Critique of Ostrich Nominalism
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)March 2012, Volume 12, No. 6, pp. 1-21
: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact [email protected] to use this work in a way not covered by the license.
For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.
Abstract
Ostrich nominalists often cite Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment in order to claim that their view is more parsimonious than rival positions in ontology such as realism. We show that Quine’s criterion, properly understood, does not support this claim. Indeed, we show that ostrich nominalism has a far more profligate ontology than realism.
