The Study On Quine's Ontology

Ontology, as the core and essence of occidental philosophy, is a unique form of occidental philosophy, whose ultimate goal is to find the world's ultimate existence and to explain the world. In the history of philosophy, different interpretations of ontology were given by different philosophers in different times.Quine believed that one important task of philosophy was to prove how to make the theory about the world more simple, clear and systematic. In order to do this, with the strategy of semantic ascent, he used the logic as a background framework to investigate ontology from the perspective of logic and language. He distinguished between two following types of questions. One was about the existence issues of ontology, that is, the question about what actually exist in the world. The other one was about the issues of ontological commitment, that is, the question about what exist in the world according to a certain theory. With the strategy of semantic ascent, Quine transferred the center of ontological research from the existence issues into commitment issues. He pointed out that, generally speaking, the existence of a certain thing in the world was independent on people's use of language, while the existence of a certain thing in people's speaking was dependent on the use of language. At that time when the anti-metaphysical was popular, the value of Quine's ontology received people's attention immediately after this new and peculiar ontology was proposed, and then it influenced widely and far-reaching. The present article attempts to analyze the ideological connotation and then to make further interpretation of ontology from the perspective of logic and language.The article contains four parts. In the first part, through tracing the source of ontology, the status of ontology in occidental philosophy and the development of ontology are clarified. The goals and difficulties of the traditional ontology are revealed, and theoretical background in which Quine proposed his ontology is also introduced; The second part of this article is to discuss the doctrine of ontological commitment which includes the following three well-known criteria:the first one is identification criterion of ontological commitment, that is, "Existence is to be the value of bound variable"; the second one is acceptability criterion of ontological commitment, that is, "if there is no identity, there is no entity"; the third one is selection criterion of ontologics, that is, "a pragmatic selection criteria". With these three criteria, Quine eventually made the selection of ontology become the selection of theoretical systems and language forms. In the third part of this article, ontology is studied in the whole philosophical system of Quine. The relationships, such as between ontology and naturalistic view of language, between ontology and the meaning of behaviorism theory, between ontology and the indeterminacy of radical translation, and so on, are analyzed in detail to complete the interpretation of ontological relativity. In the fourth part of this article, from the other perspectives rather than Quine's perspective, the value and limitations of Quine's ontological thoughts are assessed to get some inspiration.