Metaontology and Inconsistent Concepts

Abstract

Recent years has seen a surge of new interest and research into neo-Carnapian and deflationary approaches to ontology; it has become increasingly viable to maintain that ontological debates are merely verbal (Hirsch 2011), thoroughly trivial or metalinguistic (Thomasson 2015; 2017), or have no objective or determinate answers (Chalmers 2009). The deflationary stance is in stark opposition to the self-conception of ambitious ontologists, who envision ontological inquiry as the attempt to uncover the fundamental structure of reality (Sider 2009; 2011). In this thesis I argue that the widespread disagreement about the nature of ontology can be better made sense of on the hypothesis that our ordinary concept of existence is defective. Drawing on Scharp’s (2013) theory of inconsistent concepts, I propose that our pre-theoretical concept of existence is, in fact, inconsistent: its application conditions are such that in some cases, we can correctly judge that the concept both applies and disapplies to a given object. This has the implication that our ordinary concept of existence fails to reliably track a unique property or structure in the world, as there is no corresponding property or structure which could be both instantiated and uninstantiated at the same time. Consequently, ontological debates are frequently defective as they fail to be about a determinate or substantive subject matter. Nonetheless, instead of deflating ontological debates, I argue that the insight that the concept of existence is defective does not undermine the possibility of substantive ontological inquiry; we can use conceptual engineering to revise or replace our pre-theoretical concept of existence, and then re-formulate the ontological questions of interest.