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‘Everything’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2009

Gila Sher
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Richard Tieszen
Affiliation:
San José State University, California
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Summary

Ontology, as Aristotle conceived it, is the most general of sciences. The other sciences are specialized, restricting their attention to some proper part of reality. It remains for ontology to take account of everything there is.

The question I would like us to investigate here is not a problem in ontology, but a problem in the meta-theory of ontology. I want to know whether, given the limits of logic and language, a science such as ontology is even possible, there being some reason to fear that we lack the conceptual resources to formulate a fully general science, because we have no any way reliably to ensure that our quantifiers range over everything there is. Even if we succeed in convincing ourselves that there is no logical impediment to the development of a fully general science, it will remain to be seen whether such a science has anything interesting to tell us. It could happen that the fully general truths are too abstract to be very important, and it could also happen that the fully general truths are beyond our epistemic reach, so that, while we are privileged to know rather a lot about our immediate surroundings, we are not in a position to know much of anything about the universe as a whole. But first things first.

The logical worry comes from the interplay of context and quantification. Often we use such words as ‘each’, ‘any’, ‘every’, ‘all’, ‘anyone’, ‘everyone’, and ‘everything’ without intending to talk about everyone and everything.

Type
Chapter
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Between Logic and Intuition
Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons
, pp. 54 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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  • ‘Everything’
  • Edited by Gila Sher, University of California, San Diego, Richard Tieszen, San José State University, California
  • Book: Between Logic and Intuition
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570681.005
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  • ‘Everything’
  • Edited by Gila Sher, University of California, San Diego, Richard Tieszen, San José State University, California
  • Book: Between Logic and Intuition
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570681.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • ‘Everything’
  • Edited by Gila Sher, University of California, San Diego, Richard Tieszen, San José State University, California
  • Book: Between Logic and Intuition
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570681.005
Available formats
×