 Meta-ontology

Meta-ontology is a term of recent origin first used by Peter van Inwagen in analyzing Willard Van Orman Quine's critique of Rudolf Carnap's metaphysics, where Quine introduced a formal technique for determining the ontological commitments in a comparison of ontologies.Thomas Hofweber, while acknowledging that the use of the term is controversial, suggests that, although strictly construed meta-ontology is a separate metatheory of ontology, the field of ontology can be more broadly construed as containing its metatheory.