Carlota G. Llorente

Despite the fact that natural language has always been one of the most important resources for the study of ontology, many authors continue to regard it as a deceptive guide to the inquiry into what there is. The notion of natural language as a trap is carried over into contemporary metaontological studies, which typically reject natural language as ontologically committing. From a deflationary perspective, this paper aims to argue that ontological commitment occurs in natural languages, with implications for the linguistic relativity hypothesis. To this end, a view based on naturalized epistemology and other aspects of Quine’s philosophy is presented. The perspective of Natural Language Ontology proposed by Moltmann is also introduced, with the goal of offering a new approach that allows a specific analysis of the ontological commitments of natural languages. While Moltmann herself indicates some motivations for this, its potential attractiveness for the study of linguistic relativity will be emphasized here. Finally, it will be suggested that there may be a linguistic bias around the proposed criteria of ontological commitment.

Contemporary debates on metaontology focus on discussions between two main positions: realism and deflationism. Ontological realism claims to deal with an independent objective reality, while deflationism downgrades the seriousness of ontology. From a position close to deflationism, E. Hirsch suggests that certain debates in ontology are not substantive but “merely verbal”. From a proper deflationist position, however, it seems doubtful that any ontological dispute can be merely linguistic without further consequences. The aim of this article is to argue that no ontological debate can remain purely verbal. For this purpose, a brief introduction to Hirsch’s ideas will be presented, followed by three different arguments against “merely verbal” disputes: semantic, epistemic and ontological.