Superficialism in Ontology1
John Hawthorne · 2009
Abstract Taken at face value, ontological disputes are substantive disputes about how theworld is, albeit disputes which are difficult to resolve. Superficialists in ontology think that, at least for very many disputes of this sort, this face-value construal of them is incorrect: very often disputants are talking past one another, on account of having attached different meanings to the key terms of the debate. In particular, quantifiers can shift their meanings in such a way that, for very many ontological debates, the most reasonable account of the languages of the disputants reckons each to speak the truth. One upshot is that a good deal of the ontological enterprise is pointless. Debates between ontologists are frequently terminological, and so-called challenges to the common sense image of the world are at best shifts to a new way of speaking that does not challenge the common sense image after all.