Quine on Ontological Commitment in Light of Predicate-Functor Logic

Quine is renowned for offering a criterion of ontological commitment in terms of the values of bound variables. Simultaneously, however, Quine had a long-standing interest in formal systems that dispense with variables and quantifiers that permit variables to be explained away. The chapter seeks to resolve this often-neglected tension in a way that is sensitive to Quine’s allegiance to first-order logic, but is somewhat relaxed about the connection between semantics (/truth) and ontology.