Yablo (1998) holds that the distinction between quantified statements that are ontologically committing and those that are not—if it can be made out at all—will rest not on different readings of the quantifiers, but on the distinction between literal and figurative uses of language. Indeed, all parties agree that figurative language can fail to be ontologically committing; one can assert, truly, that she has butterflies in her stomach without thereby being committed to the existence of butterflies. But figurative language is very widespread, even in the sciences. A case can be made, for example, that ordinary talk of numbers is merely a pretense we engage in to more easily communicate facts about the concrete world; and similarly for talk of other abstract entities. The project of applying ontological commitment to ordinary language theories, then, is none too easy: it depends upon being able to demarcate language that is literal from language that is partly figurative; and it depends on there being a stripped-down core of ordinary language that, when interpreted literally, has the representational capacity for fully describing the world.