Lukas Steinbrink

In this paper, the authors will bring together two topics in Sally Haslanger’s work that are of major importance to her overall philosophical projects: the ameliorative project and semantic externalism. They will introduce these topics in light of recent developments in the literature on conceptual engineering, and then address two concerns about the internal consistency of Haslanger’s own specific positions. The aim of the paper is to give a synoptic view of Haslanger’s extensive work on these topics in tandem with each other and to prompt Haslanger to clarify certain aspects of her former work.

In what follows, we provide a comprehensive summary of van Inwagen’s views on meta-ontology. We then expound two ways of challenging his proposed meta-ontology. First, we inquire whether the proposed Quinean method indeed provides reliable information as to what our ontological commitments are. We argue that it does not, as van Inwagen’s method tacitly presupposes the existence of an independent capacity to decide what our genuine commitments are (as opposed to mere byproducts of ordinary language). Second, we attempt to reconstruct van Inwagen’s idea of how ontological disputes are to be conducted once everybody’s ontological commitments are out in the open: How can rivaling ontologies be evaluated? We demonstrate that van Inwagen’s answer is incomplete, which is quite unfortunate, given the importance of the question.