Abstract

In most of her publications, Amie Thomasson develops and defends what she calls a ‘easy’ approach to ontology, which leads to both a simple ontological realism and a form of metaontological deflationism. In her view, very roughly, the ontological judgment that some first-order claim properly describes worldly facts, or depicts what really exists, adds nothing to the first-order claim itself. With the former, one merely reaffirms the latter, without taking on any burden of more substantial explanations. For the latter is not supposed to avert to some deep or substantive criteria that might fail to be met. As a result, ontological questions are easy to answer, and ontological disputes are misguided. The aim of this paper is to offer an account that does justice to ontological discourse. This, though, without bearing the burden of substantial (i.e., represantionalist) standpoints. According to the proposed account, neither questions of that sort are trivial nor are ontological disputes misguided. Instead, ontological judgments serve a significant normative role in shaping and arranging our discursive practice. In particular, they play a distinctive kind of expressive function: that of expressing commitments to the adoption of conceptual structures within which alone descriptions may occur. Ontological discourse thus does not aim to describe, but rather, by showing what should and should not count as reasons or evidence, it articulates the conditions and common ground that make description possible.