Underlying Chisholm’s efforts here was a methodological view about ontological commitment. Suppose there is a certain statement that we take to be true; suppose that statement seems to require the existence of entities of a certain type. We then must admit entities of that type into our ontology unless we can find a way of paraphrasing the statement in such a way as to preserve our original meaning, but to avoid any implication of the existence of the entities in question. As Chisholm puts it: