and it is true thatR(∃ 2 xΨ).“∃ 1 ”and“∃ 2 ”figure in statements that are true in reality,
whereas“∃”does not. Perhaps other, more sophisticated meta-ontologies could be
treated in a similar fashion.^74
A different, and perhaps more radical way, to think of ontological pluralism in this
context is as the view that there is more than one“true in reality”operator: each
mode of being corresponds to a different way of being“true in reality”; better put,
each mode of being corresponds to a different kind of reality in which something
might be true.
In the chapters that follow, I will continue to make use of naturalness rather than
Kit Fine’s notion of truth in reality, or some variant of it.^75 But that is not because
I think that this is ultimately the best way to understand modes of being. My
preferred view identifies naturalness with a distinctively ontological phenomenon:
a property is natural to the extent that it exists. The relation between naturalness and
existence is the focus of chapter 7. For now, though, I will continue to speak in terms
of naturalness.
The upshot of these reflections is that it is highly unlikely that we can give
necessary and sufficient conditions for a theory to count as an instance of
ontological pluralism. But really, would that make the doctrine any different
than any other interesting philosophical doctrine? Since all of the versions of
ontological pluralism that I will discussin the successive chapters are clear cases
of ontological pluralism, I am untroubled by the fact that I have not yet provided
necessary and sufficient conditions that a view must meet in order to be a version
of ontological pluralism.
So in some sense, I accept what Caplan (2011) calls“ontological superpluralism,”
at least to this extent: the various versions of ontological pluralism are more inter-
esting than the question of what they each have in common, and we are more likely
to make philosophical progress by examining the merits and demerits of individual
versions of ontological pluralism rather than ontological pluralism in general. This is
why in the succeeding chapters we will examine various applications or instances of
ontological pluralism rather than attempt further to answer the question of what it is
to be a version of ontological pluralism.
1.6 Chapter Summary
In this chapter, I developed a version of ontological pluralism that appealed to
semantically primitive restricted quantification and naturalness. I also articulated
(^74) Note that this way of construing modes of being seems to rule out a maximally general mode of being,
but strictly what it rules out is that the quantifier of ordinary language corresponds to one. I’m OK with this
result (as will be discussed in chapters 4 and 5). 75
We’ll discuss truth in reality a bit more in section 5.4.