A Minimalist Pluralist Approach to the Substantivity of Ontological Disputes

Delia Belleri is a Ramón y Cajal researcher (tenure-track) at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council. Previously, she held a tenure-track professorship at the University of Lisbon and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Uppsala University. Her research spans analytic philosophy of language—including the semantics–pragmatics distinction, conceptual engineering, and conceptual change—as well as ontology and metaontology, with a focus on ontological pluralism and the metaphilosophy of ontological disputes.

Titre de l'exposé: A Minimalist Pluralist Approach to the Substantivity of Ontological Disputes

Résumé: The aim of this talk is to present and articulate minimal inflationism, the view that ontological disputes can be “minimally substantive”. The idea of being “minimally substantive” consists of (i) a semantic element (meaningfulness and non-verbality, or at least the capacity to affect ontological commitments) and (ii) an epistemic element (epistemic non-defectiveness articulated in pluralist terms, for either justification or truth (or both)). Meaningfulness and the capacity to affect ontological commitments are illustrated with the help of some case studies, and defended against possible objections. Furthermore, a pluralist approach to justification and truth is suggested as a way of rescuing the epistemic viability of ontological disputes, again appealing to the same case studies. Overall, the idea is to make sense of two contrasting intuitions: that ontological disputes are substantive, but also that they give rise to a plurality of sensible positions whose disagreement is difficult to settle.