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. Advocates of the term seek to distinguish 'ontology', which investigates what there is, from 'meta'-ontology, which investigates what we are asking when we ask what there is.