The Ontology of Philosophical Analysis

Abstract

In 1974 a collection of essays in honor of Gustav Bergmann appeared, bearing the title The Ontological Turn.I The choice of this title was appropriate and also, so far, prophetic. The most striking fact about recent philosophy in English has been its return to metaphysics. Suffice it to mention some works published during the last decade: Chisholm's Person and Object, Grossmann's Ontological Reduction, Armstrong's Universals and Scientific Realism, a well-known series of articles (including Thinking and the Structure of the World, Philosophia, 1974) by Castafieda, Sellars' Naturalism and Ontology, Hochberg's Thought, Fact, and Reference, Loux's Substance and Attribute, Rosenberg's Linguistic Representation, Wiggins' Sameness and Substance. (This list, of course, is meant to be only illustrative.) What could have been a more fitting title for a book of essays honoring the philosopher who in 1954 published The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism? Of course, outside philosophical analysis (analytic philosophy), meaning by this the part of British and American philosophy that took what Bergmann has called the turn, ontology was never abandoned. It would be parochial not to acknowledge that the return to it is really only an event within the development of philosophical analysis. And some of the peculiarities of some of the recent analytic ontologies may only be understood in the light of this fact. Perhaps the most noticeable of these peculiarities is a preoccupation with the search for definitions, usually forbiddingly formal and depressingly elaborate, of terms from ordinary language, the practice of what may be called the method of definition and counterexample. Some of its roots can be traced, I suspect, to the views of C. J. Ducasse, but doubtless its popularity in the last twenty years is due mainly to the influence of the so-called ordinary language philosophy of the previous generation. This is evident from the frequent appeals by its practitioners to their so-called indeed often called linguistic intuitions, which surely are nothing more than the philosophers' opinions about what one could or could not correctly say in a given