 While interesting, original, and elegant, this position has its problems. Difficulties with carrying out the translation program that Beardsley is committed to aside, linguistic phenomenalism is little more than an attempt to enjoy the benefits of a reductive, sense-data ontology without paying the price for it. Reductive translations have commitments; there would be little point in proposing and defending an elaborate, difficult, counterintuitive, and otherwise inexplicable translation program, even in schematic form, unless it had some point beyond translation for the sake of translation. There’s either an ontology and a philosophical purpose behind such translations—and there certainly seems to be both (an adequate reductive translation of ‘p’ as ‘q’ entails commitment only to the entities mentioned in ‘q’)—or there is not—in which case the possibility of such translations may be of interest to linguists and those who like odd parlor games but no one else. In short, arguing that one can, in principle, avoid speaking of one sort of entity in favor of another is indirect ontology if it’s philosophy at all, and avoiding taking an explicit stand on ontology doesn’t change the fact. Beardsley would thus seem to be committed to phenomenalism, despite his explicit claim that aesthetic objects aren’t presentations.