The Quest of Higher Order Criteria for Meta-ontology: Metaphysics Vindicated

Ontology has become a respectable subject for analytic philosophers to pursue, thanks to its divorce from traditional metaphysics and the translation of existential claims into the idiom of quantification theory, along classic Quinean lines. Such a strategy is the standard paradigm for ontological commitment and it is usually presented as the best reply to Carnap’s veto of existential questions as “external”, metaphysical questions. This rehabilitation of ontology as a discipline has recently been disputed by both deflationists and neo-Aristotelians, but generally the “metaphysical” challenge within the quantification model, when disagreement in ontology occurs remains unquestioned. How can we regulate the possibilities of different evaluations in meta-ontology and what is, if any, the general framework of such an evaluation? Are there higher-order criteria and are they consistent? My proposal is that the relativity of metaphysical options has not been avoided, but rather moved to a background, often implicit, theory.