of individual existence since that will make the exposition a bit easier, but all of
what I say can be recaptured in terms of specific existence. My own preferred
metaphysics does not appeal to any fundamental kinds of existence that can be
expressed only via predicates. D. C. Williams (1962: 763)“dispensed”with exist-
ence in favor of the prior notion of something. I am happy to follow suit, provided
that we accommodate ways of being something. Perhaps in natural language,
modes of being are expressed via predicates rather than perfectly natural seman-
tically restricted quantifiers. But from a metaphysical perspective, the better lan-
guage is one in which they are expressed via the latter rather than the former—or so
I will argue in the chapters to come!
1.5.4 Metaphysical Naturalness and Truth in Reality
Although I have formulated ontological pluralism by appealing to a primitive notion
of naturalness that applies to sub-sentential expressions, one can formulate a similar
view by appealing to an alternative metaphysical framework. I have in mind the
framework of Kit Fine (2001, 2006), which draws a metaphysical distinction between
what is true and what isreallytrue. Fine’s framework is motivated by the observation
that frequently philosophers want to deny the reality of some domain of entities, such
as moral properties or mathematical objects, while upholding the literal truth of
existential claims about these entities. In order to do this consistently, we must be
able to
consistently...affirm that something is the case and yet deny that it is really the case. [We
require] ametaphysicalconception of reality, one that enables us to distinguish, within the
sphere of what is the case, between what is really the case and what is only apparently the case.
[Fine 2001: 2–3]
In order to make the distinction he cares about, Fine postulates a special operator,it
is really the case that(“R”).Ris not extensional, that is, for some true statementsP
andQ,R(P) is true whereasR(Q) is false. It might be that, for example, it is true that
properties exist without it being really true that they exist. On Fine’s view, not all
truths arereallytrue.
Consider a meta-ontology that recognizes two modes of being that correspond to
the semantically primitive quantifiers“∃ 1 ”and“∃ 2 ”. Suppose further that this meta-
ontology denies that the unrestricted existential quantifier is perfectly natural. How
can these facts be expressed in Fine’s system? Since“R”applies only to whole
sentences, we can’t simply preface these quantifiers with“R”to get the desired
result.^73 But we can get a desirable result in the following way: state that, for allΦ,
it’s false thatR(∃xΦ), but there is aΦand there is aΨsuch that it is true thatR(∃ 1 xΦ)
(^73) Recall that Sider’s naturalness operator operates at the sub-sentential level.