Second, one might dig in one's heels and deny that ‘∃x Parent(x)’ is committed to children. One familiar gloss on “the ontological commitments of a theory” takes this to include only “what the theory says there is”. If “says” is interpreted narrowly, a theory that contained only ‘∃x Parent(x)’ does not say that children exist, even though this follows analytically from the theory. In defense of the view, one can point out that the intuitive judgment that ‘∃x Parent(x)’ is ontologically committed to children comes from including the definitions of ‘Parent(x)’ and ‘Child(x)’ as an unspoken part of the theory. (Compare the defense of the metalinguistic criterion in §1.4.) Thus, if we suppose the language contains, in addition to the unary predicate ‘Parent(x)’, the unary predicate ‘Child(x)’ and the binary predicate ‘Parent(x,y)’; and we suppose the theory contains, in addition to ‘∃x Parent(x)’, the sentences ‘∀x (Parent(x) if and only if ∃y Parent(x,y))’ and ‘∀x (Child(x) if and only if ∃y Parent(y,x))’, then the modal quantifier account gets the ontological commitments of the beefed-up theory right: for every world and sub-domain of the domain of that world such that the theory is true at that world with its variables ranging over that sub-domain, children are in the sub-domain. Perhaps the existence of children is an implicit commitment of ‘∃x Parent(x)’; but, on the view being considered, the quantifier account should not be required to capture all the implicit commitments of the theory.