Reinhardt Grossmann's Ontological Reduction

Abstract

This book [1] is concerned to evaluate various attempts at "ontological reduction" and to elaborate a general ontology. After an Introduction which, to some extent, offers an epistemological underpinning to the ontology, there are three main Parts. The first deals with numbers, attacks as misconceived various ontologically parsimonious discussions of their status, and advances Grossmann's own positive views about their nature. The second deals with properties and classes, mounts a similar attack upon ontological parsimony here, and uses an invigorating discussion of Russellian-style paradoxes as a basis for arguing that not every class determines a property and vice versa, thus further emphasizing their ontological distinctiveness. The third Part distinguishes various different senses of "part" and "whole" and argues that, in each case, it is mistaken to assume that one need include only the parts and not the whole in an inventory of what fundamentally there is. (Grossmann does not discuss the monistic elimination of the parts in favor of the whole, which is surely both historically and intellectually quite as significant an attempted "reduction".) In conclusion, there is a list of the basic ontological categories recognized by Grossmann. The book can be recommended both for the interest of Grossmann's own ontological position and for the subtle discussions of a host of theories, new and old, about the matters indicated, including the work of such philosophers as Frege, Russell, Quine, and Goodman. It seems to me that Grossmann's is often the voice of a highly sophisticated common sense objecting to a wide variety of wild, and on occasion shabby, claims, including those which rest upon such suppositions as that definitions of certain sorts can somehow summon entities into being or construct them, as opposed to simply identify them (cf. passages starting at each of p. 64, p. 90, and p. 102) or that one can define Xs as Ys of a certain sort and dispense with a distinct category of the former, simply because the latter have all those formal properties of theirs which need to be considered in performing certain sorts of calculation (cf. pp. 102ff). It must be said, on the other hand, that there is something a trifle rigid and dogmatic about Grossmann's style of philosophizing in this book. Argument often proceeds from merely 'stated premisses of a quite controversial nature (cf. pp. 87, 90, and 161), supported sometimes by an appeal to the "obvious facts of experience" (cf. pp. 9 and 152), when Grossmann must know that there are any number of philosophers who will deny that experience reveals any such thing to them.