The Departmental Colloquium

Vera Flocke

 New York University

Ontological Expressivism

Many debates in contemporary ontology appear to have a less than straightforwardly factual subject matter. Do some objects have parts, or is everything simple? Do numbers exist? Do only present objects exist, or are past and future objects equally real? Debates of these and similar questions do not proceed in the same way as scientific debates. Often there appears to be little or no progress, and it is unclear how one should arbitrate between conflicting answers to ontological questions. Philosophers therefore often dismiss ontological debates as pointless or merely verbal. However, in this article, I propose an alternative, expressivist analysis. On my view, utterances of quantified sentences in the context of ontological debates express noncognitive mental states. Starting from this idea, I develop a version of ontological expressivism in more detail that relies on the notion of a “circumstance of evaluation”, due to Kaplan (1989). On my view, when speakers assess whether numbers exist, they consider a circumstance of evaluation which determines the truth-value of the proposition that numbers exist. Using this notion, I suggest that “numbers exist”, uttered in the context of an ontological debate, expresses a noncognitive disposition to assess the truth of propositions by considering only circumstances of evaluation at which numbers exist.

 The lecture will be in English

December 18, 2018 | 12:30-14:00

Rabin Building 2001