Abstract

Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It combined Quine's doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” with Davidson's own apparently anti‐Quinean views on semantics and logical form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth‐conditional analysis of certain English sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and the quantifiers' domains include entities of a certain sort. Then, assuming that some of the relevant sentences are true, it follows that there exist entities of that sort. This chapter expounds Davidson's extended defense of that method, and then considers and tries to rebut five potential objections to it.