If all goes well, next fall I will be taking a graduate class on “metaontology,” which means the project of trying to answer questions about ontological questions. I decided to be a go-getter and buy the main textbook for the course (the anthology Metametaphysics) several months in advance and do some thinking about the issues before the class even starts. If you’re a philosophy-type, I’d like your feedback; if you’re not, sit back and enjoy while I discuss whether you can do ontology by quickly scanning a room, and whether two pieces of gum are three objects.

The first quesiton we must ask if we are to embark on a metaontological investigation is this: what the hell is ontology? A very useful essay by Peter van Inawagen suggests that the term “ontology” has only become popular recently, and its current popularity can be attributed to two philosophers, Heidigger and Quine, who had two different definitions of “ontology.”

Heidigger’s definition, which is attested by Wikipedia, is that ontology is the study of being. The idea that we should study being is very old, and can be found in Aristotle, the Scholastics, and Hegel. Whenever I read such discussions, I invariably get the feeling that I have no idea whatever what they are talking about. The problem is that I have no concept of what “being” might possibly be as an abstract thing. When “being” is used as a noun, I generally can only understand what is being said if it is either (1) being used as short hand for some thing, as in “human being” or (2) being used as shorthand for the verb “to be,” as in Samuel Clarke’s “A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God,” which could be paraphrased “A Discourse Concerning the Question ‘Is there a God, and what are his attributes?’” The questions van Inwagen discusses in his essay are about being, and they are intelligible because they can be given verb paraphrases: for example, his thesis “being is the same as existence” may be paraphrased “to be is the same as to exist.” I am skeptical, however, of van Inawagen’s suggestion that he is talking about whatever Heidigger was talking about, because Heidigger’s discussions of being are not so readily paraphrased.

Quine’s definition of ontology is the attempts to answer the question “what is there?” This is attested by the SEP and David Chalmers’ contribution to the anthology. Kit Fine’s essay in the anthology suggests several examples of ontological questions that fit Quine’s definition: “do numbers exist?” “do chairs and tables exist?” and “do elementary particles exist?” This explanation of what ontology is is an improvement over Heidigger’s insofar as it is intelligible, but it has strange implications. For example, if I am sitting in the student union, and look down to discover that I am sitting in a chair, and that my laptop is resting on a table, I have discovered that there is a chair and a table. And, if I wonder whether there really be a plurality of chairs in tables, and decide to glance about the room to investigate this question, I may discover that there are indeed a plurality of such objects. I have thereby discovered an answer to an ontological question–”do chairs and tables exist?”

So, going with Quine, we can investigate ontological questions by visually scanning a room. Going with Quine, any scientist who has ever discovered that something exists has also made a contribution to ontology. However, no philosopher I have ever read has ever treated scientific work or visually scanning a room as paradigm cases of ontological inquiry. So there’s something wrong with the Quine-inspired way of putting the problem.

What, then, is an example of a piece of ontology? When trying to explain this to my girlfriend, I came up with the following impromptu example: I pulled out two pieces of chewing gum and put them on a ledge, and said, “Here’s an ontological claim: there are three things there: a piece of gum, another piece of gum, and a pair of pieces of gum.” At which point, my girlfriend burst out in uncontrolable laughter. Now, I do not know of any philosophers who would actually say this, but it was inspired by an idea that has at least been attributed to David Lewis: whenever you have two simples (things without parts), you have three things: one simple, another simple, and a pair of simples. The reason Lewis would not have said that the two pieces of gum were three things is that pieces of gum are made up of atoms, so, if I understand Lewis’ view correctly, he would have said that the two pieces of gum constituted a bajillion or so things.

What’s distinctive about this issue–the question of whether two pieces of gum are two things or three things or a bajillion things? For one thing, when philosophers are debating these issues, there are core facts which are just taken for granted: that there are two pieces of gum there. Actually, that’s not right, because on a view advocated by Peter van Inwagen, there were no pieces of gum there, merely elementary particles arranged in a chewing gummy way. But the core facts are still there, however hard it may be to state them in a way that’s neutral to all the possible philosophical views on this case. I think the distinction we need is something I’ve discussed before: Peter Unger’s distinction between substantial questions (questions about what I just called the “core facts,”) and insubstantial or–this is his preferred term, not mine–”inane” questions (any question that is not substantial). Thinking out metaontology reinforces the impression I got when I first ecountered Unger’s concept of “inane” a year ago: it picks out an important feature of a lot of philosophical discussions.

The big question in metaontology is supposed to be whether the questions of ontology have answers. This is a very strange thing to wonder if “do chairs and tables exist?” is an ontological question, but not so strange if the prime example of an ontological question is “do chairs and tables, as opposed to chairy and tably arrangements of elementary particles, exist?” It seems obvious that the first question has an answer, not so obvious that the second question does. Of course, if that intuition is right, you have to drop the assumption that adding an “as opposed to…” clause can’t take an answerable question and turn it into an unanswerable one, but I think this is plausible if you assume the question “do chairs exist?” is to be interpreted as a substantial question (in Unger’s sense) by default, and the the “as opposed to…” clause is an indicator that the question is to be interpreted as an inane question (in Unger’s sense).

In addition to this first impression, sort of different kinds of questions about what there is undermines one of the more notable defenses of mainstream ontology in the Metametaphysics anthology. The argument, from Theodore Sider, goes like this:

Questions framed in indispensible vocabulary are substantiative [have answers]; quantifiers [language like "there is" and "there are"] are indispensible; ontology is framed using quantifiers; so ontology is substantiative.

The first premise of this argument is ambiguous between “all questions…” and “some questions…” though clearly Sider has the first meaning in mind. But if we say that it’s only some questions with indispensible vocabulary that are substantiative, we only get the conclusion that some questions about what things there are have answers. And could be true if the question “are there chairs?” (Unger-substantial reading) had an answer, but “are there chairs, as opposed to elementary particles arranged chair-wise?” didn’t have an answer.