RESUMO 03 | PALESTRA INTERNACIONAL

A tension in Frege’s ontological commitment

GREIMANN, Dirk | UFF, Germany

According to the standard conception of ontological commitment, which goes back to Quine, we are ontologically committed to acknowledge those and only those entities whose existence is a condition for the truth of our theories. Frege has sketched, in the context of his critique of the idealist interpretation of scientific language, a more complete approach according to which we are committed to accept also those entities whose existence is a condition for successful communication in science. He argued, for instance, that we must acknowledge a platonic realm of objective senses because the existence of such entities is a condition of the possibility to communicate non-trivial scientific discoveries. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and defend Frege’s approach. Its main thesis is that, although Frege’s criteria of ontological commitment are mostly obsolete, his general approach to derive our ontological commitments from both the truth and the success conditions of science discourse is correct. The argument is that the repudiation of semantic structures that must be presupposed in order to be able to communicate our theories leads to a kind of performative inconsistency that is analogous to the semantic inconsistency that arises when we deny the existence of the entities that are presupposed by the truth of our theories.