A model-theoretic criterion of ontology (Q1202493)

No Anglo-American philosopher in our century has attracted more attention to the problem of explicating being than has Quine. His own explication is put forward as a criterion for deciding what kinds of entity are ``countenanced'' in espousing a formalized theory. Thus he relativizes ontology to theories. Since Quine propounded his criterion, a fertile systematization of the theory of meaning and reference has come into its own under the name of model theory. From this point of view, a theory may be thought of as constituted by a language and a set of admissible models. Thus the relativization of ontology to theories may be further refined into a relativization to models. My basic explicandum, then, is existence in a model. The explicatum I propose is first approximated as membership in the model's domain. Since this criterion takes account not so much of what is quantified over as what is referred to, it resembles Bergmann's criterion in some ways more than it does Quine's. For certain standard theories, however, the two criteria coincide.