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The Role of Existential Quantification in Scientific Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2017

Suki Finn
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Abstract

Scientific realism holds that the terms in our scientific theories refer and that we should believe in their existence. This presupposes a certain understanding of quantification, namely that it is ontologically committing, which I challenge in this paper. I argue that the ontological loading of the quantifiers is smuggled in through restricting the domains of quantification, without which it is clear to see that quantifiers are ontologically neutral. Once we remove domain restrictions, domains of quantification can include non-existent things, as they do in scientific theorizing. Scientific realism would therefore require redefining without presupposing a view of ontologically committing quantification.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 351 - 367
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

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References

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2 I take that this is standard scientific realism. For examples that follow this definition see Smart, J.J.C., Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963)Google Scholar; Boyd, R.N., ‘On the Current Status of the Issue of Scientific Realism’, Erkenntnis 19 (1983), 45–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Devitt, M., Realism and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Kukla, A., Studies in Scientific Realism (Oxford: OUP, 1991)Google Scholar; Niiniluoto, I., Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford: OUP, 1999)Google Scholar; Psillos, S., Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar; Chakravartty, A., A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 I am not claiming that Quinean's do hold a biconditional reading of NE, but rather that they need to in order to motivate TB or else there is a lack of argument for why quantification is taken to be existentially committing. It does nevertheless seem that they may hold the biconditional reading given that they seem to hold that non-existents lack determinate identity conditions and things with determinate identity conditions are existent things. I discuss this further in section 2.3.

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11 Though I focus on English, since quantificational logic is meant to be a formalization of idioms in a range of natural languages, my discussion has a global scope across other languages too.

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24 Special thanks goes to Mary Leng, Keith Allen, Tom Stoneham, Francesco Berto, and Graham Priest, for their very helpful comments, and to the audiences of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium 2015 (University of Amsterdam), the 1st Epistemology of Metaphysics workshop (University of Helsinki), and the Mind and Reason group at the University of York, where I presented this paper.