>>24657017
Thanks for the Spade link. Will check that out some time.
>And, while I don't think this is explicit in Word and Object, his later views do make "objects" sort of arbitrary.
That he does. I mention it in my post, the one you responded to. Quine makes his structuralism kind of explicit in his later works. People do in fact deal with this either with a subjectivism and anti-realism about external metaphysical structure, or with a very plenitudinous ontology so that any description possible describes something. But as I mentioned in my last post, Lewisian naturalness kind of gets past that. Sider's extension of the notion is especially fruitful. I don't think we need Aristotelian or Platonic essences per se, but it's fine to make appeals to a sparse set of natural properties or universals. Lewisian naturalness is really a twin of Armstrongian sparseness, after all. Have you read Lewis' 1983 "New Work for a Theory of Universals"? I guess if you're the anon mentioning essence literature on Quine, you probably know of what neo-Aristotelians like Kit Fine, E.J. Lowe, Kathrin Koslicki, etc are up to. And of course David Armstrong.