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Snowded: When will you get around to addressing the issue that all the listed sources are germane, and get away from personal judgments like ""I realise you don't understand how anyone could possibly disagree with you but..."" and ""I've probably read a lot more on this subject than you Brews"" . The underlying problem here is that you will not accept Van Inwagen's definition of meta-ontology in terms of the Carnap-Quine arguments over whether ontology is an empty subject. For some reason you feel that even when this is the topic, if the word meta-ontology is not explicitly stated, the subject is not what Van Inwagen was talking about. That is simply a misconcpetion on your part, and for example, Schaffer's paper is all about these very issues, even though the word 'meta'-ontology does not arise, and he uses the much broader term metaphysics, mainly because he wants to emphasize the connections to Aristotle. By the way, Aristotle didn't use the words 'ontology' or 'meta-ontolgy' either.    "