Ontologia e indispensabilità in W. V. Quine

It would seem that for Quine all objects are mere posits of our epistemic and linguistic resources. This view might seem paradoxical, given that Quine declares himself to be a realist. However, Quine also argues that the contrast between mere posits and real objects is illusory because we are unavoidably confined to our conceptual scheme ‒ the scheme that allows us to talk about the world. For us, only the indispensable entities that fall within our epistemic, linguistic and scientific conceptual scheme are real, and the roots of these entities are psychological and evolutionary. The Quinean ontological perspective thus appears as a form of epistemic and internal realism. [Publisher's text]