Ontologies and Worlds

The first part of this article lays out what ontologies are and how they should be studied—in ways that precede, supersede, and otherwise route around not just the “ontological turn” but also its critics. The second part of this article offers an anthropological critique of Quine’s influential account of ontological commitment and a Quinean critique of certain anthropological commitments as to the existence and nature of possible worlds. As will be seen, we rework Quine’s metaontological dictum, “to be is to be the value of a variable,” into a more modest and ethnographically manageable form: to be is to become a value.