Quantification, Substitution, and Conceptual Content

Abstract

The simplest statement of the goal of this paper is as providing an account of ontological commitment, of saying what it is to perform a speech act in natural language which commits one to the existence of an object. Since I shall presuppose without argument the Quinean doctrine that it is sentences properly regimented as (objectual) existential quantifications which carry such ontological commitment, offering such an account amounts to no more than offering an account of what it is for a sentence of a natural language to have the content of -or to entail some other sentence having the content of-an objectual existential claim. Nonetheless, such will be quite a large enough project for one paper. I do not argue that the account I give here is the only viable account of objectual quantificational purport - of what it is for a claim to commit one to the existence of an object. I believe that no other candidate has actually been produced, and that there are far deeper obstacles to offering one than is typically appreciated, but to argue for that would require addressing the question from the perspective of each of the many current approaches to semantics. This too is more than I propose to undertake, confining myself, again without argument, to a single controversial view in the philosophy of language. The view in question is one I call inferentialism. It is a view which arises out of the work of Sellars and receives its most detailed treatment in Brandom's Making It Explicit. Thus, my goal is simply to show what such a normative inferentialist ought to say about the content of quantificational - hence, ontological commitment incurring - claims. This is a pressing issue for any sort of inferentialist, since there is reason to think