Tom Swann Scrap Paper

To be sorted out and thought half through and put where it goes.

Can I remember what I talked with Jason about on

24/3/09

17/3/09 Committed to

10/3/09

Notes about and elaborating from meeting with Jason 3/3/09

Quine’s On What There Is on what our beliefs commit us to. To be reckoned to be As Schaffer puts it, Take your best theory, turn it into logic, ask what is quantified over, your answer tells you what you think there is. Is meant to be exhaustive. You are committed to this and only to this. Questions: Possibility of methodological circularity? Sounds like something Quine would like. Standards of bestness entirely external to questions of commitment? Even if we let the test for working out what we believe in be part of our best methods for theory in the general sense of working out what to believe, there remains the question of what forms of knowledge we should pursue and how they . Do we beg questions by our choice of bestness? What reasons can we have for taking say scientific knowledge to be What does Quine’s account of commitments Price? someone on what a commitment is over an above an assertioi

But main point of Quine’s test, on Schaffer style formulations, is that we are committed only to the existence of certain things as existentially quantified in our theories, not the existence also of their supposed and seperate properties. There is a red ball commits us to there is a ball but not to there is a thing that makes the ball red. Truthmaker literature denies this, hence talk of properties as parts of the world.

or This leads me to…

Interformulability of claims made in terms of different ontological categories? When people do ontology, understood as that part of metaphysics that asks what there is ‘really’ and in the most general sense and how it all relates to all the rest,