(Guest Post by “Amie Thomasson”:http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/thomasson/index.htm.)

In Ordinary Objects, (OUP 2007) I argue—based on general considerations about reference and existence claims, as well as particular claims about the semantics of ‘object’—that there are problems with trying to formulate ‘deep’ ontological debates, considered as debates about what things or objects exist.

In his recent (5/21/08) NDPR review, Terry Horgan raises what he calls a “daunting regress problem” for the view about reference this argument is supposed to be based on:

bq. …if every singular or general term of our language that successfully refers is governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some presupposed category or categories, then terms referring to those very categories must themselves be governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some further, yet more general, presupposed category or categories — and so on, ad infinitum. But such an infinite regress of categories, with each category governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions involving yet more general categories, would seem to leave all the terms in our language without reference-grounding

Since many people have emailed me wondering how I reply, I wanted to post a brief response—many thanks to Brian for letting me post it here.

In fact, it’s not a reply so much as a clarification that is needed, since the ‘regress problem’ is based on a misunderstanding of my position. My view isn’t that, for any term to refer, it must be associated with a more general category or sort (or that, as Horgan puts it, that ‘any meaningful existence claim involves implicit restriction of the quantifier by some sortal that is more general than any predicate deployed in the claim itself’). My point was that the reference of nominative terms is only determinate to the extent that they’re associated with application conditions (and co-application conditions), and existence questions are to be addressed by determining whether the application conditions are fulfilled. The conditions might come via association with some fairly high-level category (e.g. of ‘dog’ with ‘animal’), but there’s no requirement that there always be a more general one (‘animal’, e.g., may just have its own application conditions).

The problem I raise in _Ordinary Objects_ for posing ‘deep ontological’ questions such as ‘how many things/objects there are’ is not (as Horgan seems to interpret it) that ‘thing’ and ‘object’ are highest categories (so that we can’t associate them with a higher one). Instead, the problem is that on the serious ontologist’s use, ‘thing’ and ‘object’ aren’t proper sortal or categorial terms at all—they don’t come with application and coapplication conditions that could make existence questions posed using them answerable. (If they are used in ways that do come with application and coapplication conditions, ontological disputes posed using these terms turn out to be merely verbal).

I hope readers of the review will also look back to the argument in the book&0150;while there might be problems to find there, the ‘regress problem’ isn’t one of them, since it rests on a misunderstanding of the argument.