콰인의 존재론적 언질 기준에 대한 비판적 검토

Abstract

Quine is a major representative of the tradition of analytic philosophy that derives from Frege and Russell. But Quine, as an analytic philosopher and logican, would overcome the prevailing hostility to metaphysics that pervaded analytical philosophy during the period when it was dominated by logical positivism and establish metaphysics as a science. Quine is just as hostile to the excesses of speculative and transcendent metaphysics as were the positivists. Quine would revitalize and rehabilitate metaphysics as ontology. Quine approaches this problem by the method of semantic ascent. By this strategy questions about the world are replaced with questions about language, that is, clarifying ontological commitments of ordinary discourse, philosophical statements or scientific theories. This can be done by reconstructing the formulation of the questions with which ontology deals in accordance with the guiding principles of morden logic. We seek to determine the ontological commitments embedded in such discourses or theories, the first thing we must be prepared to do is rewrite the relevant statements to disclose their underlying logical patterns. We could then be clear about what can be profitably inquired into, where legitimate differences arise among competing ontologies, and how one might proceed to try to resolve these differences. Quine calls it the criterion of ontological commitment. To sum up, Quine's famous statement, “To be is to be the value of a variable” serves as a criterion of ontological commitment. Accordding to this criterion, ontology is relative to specific theory. But Quine's criterion could not gained all analytic philosopher's wholehearted approval. So I will examine how Quine's criterion can be maintained succesfully despite of various kinds of criticism on it.