Concept

Meta-Ontology

Intro

Meta-ontology is the philosophical study of what we are doing when we ask the question "what exists?" It does not try to answer that question directly; it asks what kind of question it is, whether there is a single correct answer, and what counts as evidence for or against any candidate answer. If ontology is the inventory of being, meta-ontology is the audit of the inventorying procedure.

The discipline took its modern shape in the mid-twentieth century around a single dispute. W. V. O. Quine held that existence questions are real and substantive: to be is to be the value of a bound variable in our best total theory of the world. Rudolf Carnap held the opposite: existence questions are either trivial (settled within a chosen linguistic framework) or pseudo-questions (asked from outside any framework, where they have no determinate content). The Quine versus Carnap dispute is the founding moment of the field, and most contemporary positions are descendants of one side or a third option that splits the difference.

The contemporary field divides roughly into three families. Heavyweight realism (Quine, Sider, van Inwagen) holds that ontology is substantive, the world has joints, and our best inquiry can carve them. Deflationism (Carnap, Hirsch, Thomasson) holds that ontology is shallow, framework-relative, or settled by easy inferences from ordinary belief. Grounding-first metaphysics (Schaffer, Fine, Rosen) accepts that ontology is substantive but reorients the central question from what exists? to what grounds what?

Why this matters for Christian apologetics: whether claims like "God exists" are substantive worldview-deciding claims or framework-internal claims turns on which meta-ontological view is correct. The modal ontological argument presupposes heavyweight realism. Contemporary cosmological and contingency arguments often run on a grounding framework. Quantifier variance, if it succeeds, sidesteps the whole natural-theology tradition. The meta-ontological dispute is therefore prior to most of the standard natural-theology debates, and apologists who have not staked a position on it are arguing on borrowed ground.

In full

Meta-ontology is the branch of analytic metaphysics that investigates the nature, methodology, and substantive standing of ontological inquiry. Its central questions include: (1) the meaningfulness of existence questions (substantive vs. deflationary), (2) the interpretation of the existential quantifier (univocal vs. variant), (3) the criterion of ontological commitment (Quinean vs. alternative), (4) the relation between language and ontology (linguistic frameworks, conceptual schemes, the indeterminacy of translation), (5) the status of grounding and fundamentality (Schaffer, Fine, Rosen), and (6) the methodological role of common sense, scientific theorizing, and philosophical argument in fixing ontological commitments. The canonical contemporary anthology is David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, eds., Metametaphysics (Oxford 2009), which gathers the major positions in the post-2000 revival of the field.

The founding dispute: Quine vs. Carnap

Carnap's deflationism

Rudolf Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1950), draws his famous distinction between internal and external questions:

• Internal questions are existence questions asked within an already-adopted linguistic framework (the framework of numbers, of physical objects, of properties, of events). Internal questions have determinate answers, settled either trivially by the rules of the framework or empirically within it. "Are there prime numbers between 10 and 20?" is an internal question to the mathematical framework, answerable by calculation.
• External questions are existence questions asked from outside any framework, supposedly about the reality of the framework's objects in some framework-independent sense. "Do numbers really exist?" (as a metaphysical question, not a mathematical one) is supposed to be an external question. Carnap's verdict: external questions are pseudo-questions. They have no determinate content. The only substantive question they can be reformulated as is the pragmatic question of whether to adopt the framework, which is settled by efficiency and fruitfulness, not by metaphysical discovery.

The upshot: traditional ontology, which thinks itself to be discovering deep facts about what really exists, is confused. The real choice is between linguistic frameworks; the choice of framework is pragmatic, not factual.

Quine's substantivism

W. V. O. Quine, "On What There Is" (Review of Metaphysics, 1948), formulates the alternative. His central thesis: to be is to be the value of a bound variable. The ontological commitments of a theory are exactly the entities the theory must quantify over to be true. There is no deeper meta-ontological question than this; existence is univocal, framework-talk is a red herring, and the genuine task is to identify the most parsimonious and explanatorily powerful theory of the world and accept whatever it quantifies over.

Quine's program: (a) translate any candidate theory into first-order predicate logic; (b) read off the values its bound variables range over; (c) those values are the theory's ontology. The result is a substantive, single, framework-independent question: what do our best theories say there is?

The Quine-Carnap dispute is the founding meta-ontological dispute. Every contemporary position is, in some way, a descendant of one side or a synthesis of the two.

Contemporary positions

Heavyweight realism (Quinean)

Existence questions are real, substantive, framework-independent. The world has a fundamental structure. Our inquiry can succeed or fail at carving it.

• Peter van Inwagen, "Meta-Ontology" (Erkenntnis 1998); Existence: Essays in Ontology (Cambridge 2014). Defends a strict Quinean methodology against more recent challengers. Existence is univocal; the existential quantifier has a single meaning; "there are" in "there are tables" means the same as "there are" in "there are numbers."
• Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford 2011). The most ambitious recent heavyweight-realist program. Sider's central thesis: not only does the world have fundamental structure, but our quantifiers themselves can be more or less fundamental. The world's structure includes a privileged way of carving up reality into objects; getting metaphysics right requires using the quantifier that tracks that structure. "Joint-carving" is the central methodological norm.
• Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons (Oxford 2001), heavyweight realism deployed in defense of an eliminativist ontology of composite objects.

Deflationism (Carnapian descendants)

Existence questions are shallow, framework-relative, or settled by trivial inferences.

• Eli Hirsch, Quantifier Variance and Realism (Oxford 2011). The position called quantifier variance: there are multiple equally good meanings of "exists," corresponding to different ways of carving the world into objects. Disputes between (e.g.) mereological universalists and nihilists are merely verbal: they are using different equally legitimate meanings of "exists." The Carnap revival in contemporary form.
• Amie Thomasson, Ordinary Objects (Oxford 2007), Ontology Made Easy (Oxford 2015). The position called easy ontology. Existence questions are answerable by trivial inferences from undisputed truths. "There is a table here" follows easily from "This piece of wood is shaped table-wise and used for sitting at." Heavyweight metaphysical disputes about whether tables really exist are confused; the questions have easy answers, and the dispute reflects a misunderstanding of the questions.
• Stephen Yablo, "A Paradox of Existence" (in Hofweber & Tomberlin, eds., Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, CSLI 2000) and subsequent work. Existence claims are often fictionalist: useful pretense rather than literal truth. A modest deflationary alternative.

Grounding-first metaphysics (third way)

Accepts that ontology is substantive but reorients the central question.

• Jonathan Schaffer, "On What Grounds What" (in Chalmers, Manley, Wasserman, eds., Metametaphysics, Oxford 2009). The central meta-ontological question is not what exists? but what grounds what? Schaffer argues that the existence question is shallow (in a different sense than the deflationists mean: shallow because uncontroversial, not because confused), while the grounding question is the deep one. His priority monism holds that the cosmos as a whole is fundamental, and all proper parts are grounded in it.
• Kit Fine, "The Question of Ontology" (in Chalmers, Manley, Wasserman, eds., Metametaphysics, 2009). Distinguishes existence simpliciter from existence-in-reality. Fine's framework grounds the contemporary technical literature on grounding (the because relation in metaphysics).
• Gideon Rosen, "Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction" (in Hale & Hoffmann, eds., Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology, Oxford 2010). Foundational paper for the contemporary grounding literature.
• Karen Bennett, Making Things Up (Oxford 2017). Develops the grounding framework with attention to building-relations more generally.

Mixed and intermediate positions

• David Chalmers, "Ontological Anti-Realism" (in Metametaphysics, 2009). A sophisticated argument that some ontological disputes are substantive (those about the fundamental structure) while others are merely verbal (those about derivative entities).
• Cian Dorr, "There Are No Abstract Objects" (in Sider, Hawthorne, Zimmerman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell 2008). Heavyweight nominalism, illustrating that one can be a heavyweight realist about the question while taking strongly deflationary first-order positions.
• Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionalism (Oxford 2001) and Writing the Book of the World. The leading sustained defense of heavyweight realism in contemporary metaphysics.

The substantive ontological disputes meta-ontology adjudicates

Meta-ontological positions deliver different verdicts on which first-order ontological disputes are substantive:

Apologetic stakes

Meta-ontology is prior to most standard natural-theology debates in the following sense: the apologist's argument framework presupposes a meta-ontological position, often without acknowledgement.

• The modal ontological argument (Modal Ontological Argument) presupposes heavyweight realism about modality and existence. If quantifier variance about "exists" is correct, the argument can be neutralized by pointing out that "a maximally great being exists in every possible world" is true in one quantifier-meaning and false in another, with no fact of the matter selecting between them.
• Contemporary cosmological arguments (the contingency arguments of Alexander Pruss, Joshua Rasmussen, and Robert Koons) typically run on a grounding framework. Their force depends on the substantive standing of grounding-talk, which Schaffer, Fine, and Rosen defend and which deflationists challenge.
• Quinean naturalist apologetics (the worldview-comparison strategy: which total theory of the world is best?) sits comfortably within heavyweight realism. The apologetic case becomes: when you weigh up which theory of reality best explains the data, theism wins. This presupposes that the comparison is substantive and that "best theory" has a meaningful answer.
• Carnapian deflationism, taken seriously, would dissolve much of the natural-theology project. If "God exists" is an internal question to a theistic framework, it is settled by the framework's rules; if it is an external question, it is a pseudo-question whose only substantive content is the pragmatic question should we adopt the theistic framework? The deflationary apologist might still make that pragmatic case, but it is no longer a metaphysical argument for theism. It is closer to William James's pragmatic defense.

The deeper point: most natural-theology debates are downstream of meta-ontology, and Christian philosophers who do not have a meta-ontological commitment are arguing on borrowed ground that an opponent could pull out from under them.

The Christian-philosophical tradition has typically (often implicitly) operated within a heavyweight-realist framework with grounding-style commitments. This is true of Thomas Aquinas (the actus essendi tradition), of Alvin Plantinga (the modal ontological argument and the broader Reformed-epistemology program), and of contemporary analytic theists (Pruss, Rasmussen, Koons, Swinburne). The compatibility of Christian apologetics with deflationary meta-ontologies is largely an open question and a worthwhile research direction.

Open questions and live disputes

• Is the Quine-Carnap dispute itself substantive? Sider says yes (heavyweight realism applied to meta-ontology); Hirsch says it might be verbal (the meta-meta dispute regresses).
• Can quantifier variance be coherently formulated? Sider's Writing the Book of the World argues no; Hirsch's Quantifier Variance and Realism argues yes. The technical literature is dense and ongoing.
• What is the relationship between grounding and existence? Schaffer, Fine, Rosen all give different accounts. The unified theory is not yet in hand.
• Does meta-ontology require a privileged language? Sider says yes (the language of fundamentality, written in joint-carving quantifiers); deflationists say no.
• What is the relationship between meta-ontology and natural science? Quinean naturalists hold that ontology should track science; Sider, Lowe, and others hold that metaphysics has its own methodological resources.

See also

• Modal Ontological Argument, for the heavyweight-realist deployment in apologetics.
• Metaphysics, the parent discipline.
• Philosophy, the broader hub.
• Naturalism and Materialism, substantive ontological positions meta-ontology adjudicates.
• Universals, a first-order ontological dispute meta-ontology evaluates.
• Idealism, an alternative ontological framework.
• Free Will and Determinism, a debate where grounding-style claims often surface.
• Methodological Naturalism, a meta-ontological methodological commitment.
• Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism, the debate-prep argument deploying meta-ontology in apologetics.