Examples Of The Individuation Objection To Quine

In his paper “On what there is,” Willard V. Quine attempts to refute Wyman’s view of unactualized possibles. According to Quine, an unactualized possible is an object that does not exist but it could have possibly existed. In order to deny this existence of these entities, Quine proposes three objections: the desert landscape objection, the individuation objection, and the impossiblia objection.
Quine’s first objection to unactualized possibles is his desert landscape objection. According to Quine, accepting an ontology that includes unactualized possibles “offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes” (23). This objection is nothing more than an aesthetic objection to Wyman’s ontology. According to Quine, any ontology that contains unactualized possibles should not be accepted because it offends Ockham’s razor in that it does not propose the simplest answer. Therefore, an ontology that includes unactualized possibles requires too many assumptions, and as such, it must be rejected because it is not aesthetically pleasing.
According to Quine, we have no reason to accept unactualized possibles because there are no criteria to distinguish possiblia. Different sentences may express the same thing, but if we cannot tell the propositions apart then we have no good reason to believe they exist. One might describe a possible fat man in the door and a possible bald man in the door, but it is impossible for us to know if these propositions describe one man or two. Therefore, we must not accept unactualized possibles because there are no criteria to individuate unactualized possiblia from each