Easy Ontology and its Consequences
Amie L. Thomasson · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
The easy approach to ontology suggested by Stephen Schiffer’s work on pleonastic transformations holds that some disputed existence questions can be answered by trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises. This chapter aims to clarify the relations among different forms of the easy approach and the consequences of the approach. Defenders and critics often assume that the entities we come to accept on the basis of trivial inferences are in some sense “cheap” or “lightweight,” or that the existence claims should be taken as somehow deflated. The author argues, however, that easy arguments actually give us a reason to accept straightforward first-order realism about the entities in question. The approach, however, also leads to a meta-ontological deflationism that shows something to be amiss in hard ontological debates. Properly understood, the easy approach to ontology may present the biggest threat to serious ontology, and the greatest hope for clarifying the epistemology of metaphysics.