ABSTRACT
The ‘easy approach to ontology’ maintains that many existence questions that are contested in metaphysics are actually easy to answer via trivial inferences that take us from an uncontroversial premise, via a conceptual truth, to a conclusion about what exists. Such arguments have often been dismissed or treated as paradoxical – in part because they conflict with the neo-Quinean way of addressing existence questions by seeking the best ‘total theory’ and determining what it must quantify over. Easy arguments are important not merely because they seem to answer questions about whether properties, numbers, propositions, and things of many other sorts exist, but also they call into question a way of approaching existence questions that was so dominant as to be virtually unquestioned for decades. This chapter reviews the history of easy arguments and explains their importance both to first-order ontological debates and to meta-ontological questions – where they seem to bring the prospect of demystifying metaphysics, and turning attention away from existence questions. It also reviews major objections to easy arguments, along with paths that have been used in replying to these objections.
