utterances of claims such as“everything belongs to one of K1–K10,”the acceptance
that everything is one of these kinds is not among the facts about usage relevant to
selecting the meaning of the quantifier expressions of our language. But in which case
the extended meaning for the quantifierfits with use as well as the putatively actual
one—and since by hypothesis it is more natural, on the wholeitis the better
candidate for being the meaning of our quantifier expressions rather than the
putatively actual candidate.)
Since the position that certain ontological questions are“easy”is now not uncom-
mon, it might be worth briefly indicating similarities between the view I am attracted
to and others extant in the literature.
The most obvious similarity is with Schaffer (2009), who thinks that the interesting
questions in ontology concern grounding rather than existence.^63 He thinks that
there is an irreducible relation of grounding that can relate entities of all sorts of
ontological categories and that structures what there is. My main disagreement with
Schaffer, which will become clear in section 8.2, is that I do not think that his notion
of grounding is metaphysically fundamental. Rather, it does no work over and
above what is done by degrees of being and the other structuring relations (not
reducible to grounding!) that multi-category ontologies must recognize. Since all this
will be discussed in section 8.2, I will move to other views now. Suffice it to say
then that I more or less agree with Schaffer about the status of many ontological
questions, while I disagree with the underlying meta-metaphysics he uses to describe
their status.
I have already mentioned some of the work of Amie Thomasson (2007, 2015,
2016) earlier in this chapter; she is one of the most prominent and prolific propon-
ents of the easiness of ontological questions. Our positions diverge in several respects.
Most importantly, Thomasson does not recognize differences in ontological status
between entities, whereas I think it is crucial that we do! If we don’t recognize both
that holes and their hosts exist in different ways and that holes exist in a less robust
way than their hosts, we are not recognizing all the ontological facts. This is the
fundamentalontologicaldisagreement. But there are also smaller differences about
the philosophy of language. For example, I needn’t accept that the inference from
“there are particles arranged tablewise”to“there are tables”is conceptually or
analytically valid. I needn’t deny it either; it’s just not part of the view I advocate,
whereas it is arguably a central part of Thomasson’s view.
(^63) Interestingly, Norton (1977: 88–99) also argues that traditional ontological debates are not about
what things exist but rather are about which things can be reduced to other things, and which things cannot
be so reduced. This argument forms the basis for Norton’s complaint against Quine’s conception of
ontology. Norton (1977: 98) even employs a notion of ontological priority, although this notion does not
appear to be the same as Schaffer’s notion of entity grounding. That ontological questions are not simply
very general questions about what there is forms the basis for Norton’s complaint against Quine’s
conception of ontology.