Can Semantics Guide Ontology?
Katherine Ritchie · Australasian Journal of Philosophy · 2015
Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide ontology. Here, I argue that semantics can, at best, serve as a partial guide to ontological commitment. If semantics were to be our guide, semantic data and semantic treatments would need to be taken seriously. Through an examination of plurals and their treatments, I argue that there can be multiple, equally semantically adequate, treatments of a natural language theory. Further, such treatments can attribute different ontological commitments to a theory. Given this, I argue that semantics can fail to deliver determinate ontological commitments and determinate answers to ontological questions, more generally.