© Gary Kemp and Andrew Lugg Quine on Ontology: Chapter 7 of Word and Object By Gary Kemp and Andrew Lugg I. W.V. Quine shifted his views about ontology significantly down the decades. Early and late he rejected Rudolf Carnap and his fellow positivists’ treatment of the philosophical question of what there is as a question about linguistic usage in favour of treating it, seemingly more traditionally, as a question on a par with any other question of what there is. But he also modified his view of how these questions, construed substantively as questions about what exists fundamentally, should be answered. Roughly speaking, he advocated one sort of answer up through 1960, another sort afterwards. The view he began with, a view he is still popularly credited with, was that what there is is the study of what our theory of the natural world, regimented in terms of predicate logic, tells us there is—more specifically what the values of its variables of range over. Later on he came round to think that our theory of the world can be interpreted in different ways and not, as he initially supposed, in just one way, i.e. that ontology is not an absolute, unconditional or all-or-nothing affair. Still later, he modified his view again, the new idea being that all that counts as far as the ontology of a theory goes is what contributes to the theory’s having the structure it has. In this final iteration of his view, our commitment to objects is nearly trivial, the ideological structure of the theory, encapsulated in its predicates, being what counts. Our topic is the concluding chapter of Quine of Word and Object (1960), with sidelong glances at Bertrand Russell’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s very different views and brief concluding remarks about Quine’s later thoughts on the subject. The chapter—‘Ontic Decision’—is transitional between the view that Quine began with, the one routinely attributed to him, and the various views he came to espouse later on. He was still committed to the idea of there being an ontology to be specified, one that answers the question: What is there? But his discussion is richer, more flexible, informal and open-minded (even to the extent of treating nominalism as a serious option) as well as more fiercely naturalistic than often noticed. Contrary to modern exponents of ‘Meta-ontology’, and very much in keeping with his idea that philosophy should take place in ‘medis rebus’, he does not take his answer to the philosophical question of what there is to be determined by a unitary method, by his naturalism, by the needs of regimentation, or by his extensionalism—as if it were simply matter of plugging in a method and calculating the results. Quine would regard the question ‘And what is your meta-ontology?’ as presuming too much a priori schematisation, or that an exact distillation could be abstracted out of the many competing pressures on display in his Chapter Seven. His discussion is largely predicated on his famous explication of ontological commitment in terms of the values of bound variables but he argues for it too, and treats other maxims as rules of thumb (Occam’s razor would be one), not ideas that are incapable of being overridden. The upshot of the nine sections of Chapter VII of Word and Object (§§48-56) is an ontology that admits physical objects and classes and abjures everything else – from sakes and behalves to intensional objects and unactualised possibles. In this material Quine echoes his longstanding view that physical objects are basic and sense data – understood as concrete