About forgetting an old girlfriend and meeting a new girlfriend in Hawaii, sure; about getting to the Greek, of course; about losing one's virginity or even knocking a woman up, why not; but engagement — a sign of commitment, an object of sentiment, and a cause for lots of fussy details — is, as such, sexless and juiceless, and leaves many male viewers cold.
Following Gilbert Ryle's (1931) influential criticisms of Meinong's theory of non-existent objects, the theory of descriptions has been taken as a model for avoiding ontological commitment to objects, and so logical constructions in general are often seen as being chiefly used to eliminate purported entities.
Though Mr. Varnedoe allows that the show had some "very particular problems," its stated ambitions did accurately reflect the general sensibilities of its organizer: a pursuit of specifics in generalities, a commitment to objects and the people who make them, a search for connections between high art and the stuff of everyday life.
But even if we restrict our attention to ontological commitment to objects, there is no reason to think that Frege's criterion is necessary as well as sufficient.
For one thing, just as Frege took singular terms to be a vehicle for commitment to objects, he took incomplete expressions to be a vehicle of commitment to concepts and (more generally) functions.
It is not uncommon to respond to indispensability arguments for the existence of objects of a certain kind by means of a paraphrase strategy, which if successful, would show how to make do without the ontological commitment to objects of the offending kind.
Not everyone is attracted to other humans - there are believed to be around 40 "objectum sexuals" in the world who feel attraction, arousal, love and even commitment for an object instead.
18. Pure quantificational logic because, for Quine, the use of a name carries no commitment to the object allegedly named by it.
The deflationary nominalists not only avoid the commitment to mathematical objects, they also claim that such objects have no properties whatsoever.
Working with the museum, our interpretive role was guided by the institution's commitment to keeping objects authentic and contemporaneous, no matter how large or small: photographs, documentary films, paintings, posters, even observations and reflections.
No commitment to mathematical objects is, in principle, made.
