Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 5, MT25)

Abstract: "Ontological pluralists claim that there are multiple ways of being, e.g., one way of being for concrete entities and another way of being for abstract entities. This is usually spelled out quantificationally, i.e., as the claim that there are multiple irreducible quantifiers, e.g., one quantifier ranging over concrete entities and another over abstract entities. Standard ontological pluralism is horizontal: pluralists take their multiple irreducible quantifiers to be all first-order quantifiers, i.e., quantifiers binding variables in the position of singular terms. In this talk, I argue that the conception of reality advanced by higher-order metaphysicians constitutes an alternative and preferable way of spelling out the ontological pluralists' vision. The higher-orderists' pluralism is vertical rather than horizontal: the multiple ways of being recognized by higher-orderists correspond not to multiple first-order quantifiers, but to multiple quantifiers of different orders, e.g., first-order quantifiers binding variables in the position of singular terms and second-order quantifiers binding variables in the position predicates. I argue that vertical ontological pluralism does justice to some of the main motivations for ontological pluralism, while offering elegant responses to some major objections put forward against ontological pluralism, such as the notational variant objection and the logicality objection."