It is important to note at the start that Quine's criterion is descriptive; it should not be confused with the prescriptive account of ontological commitment that is part of his general method of ontology. That method, roughly, is this: first, regiment the competing theories in first-order predicate logic; second, determine which of these theories is epistemically best (where what counts as “epistemically best” depends in part on pragmatic features such as simplicity and fruitfulness); third, choose the epistemically best theory.  We can then say: one is ontologically committed to those entities that are needed as values of the bound variables for this chosen epistemically best theory to be true. Put like this, the account may seem circular: ontological commitment depends on what theories are best, which depends in part on the simplicity, and so the ontological commitments, of those theories. But there is no circularity in Quine's ontological method. The above account of ontological commitment is prescriptive, and applies to persons, not to theories. What entities we ought to commit ourselves to depends on a prior descriptive account of what entities theories are committed to. The prescriptive account of ontological commitment serves as a crucial premise in the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for the existence of abstract entities (the locus classicus is Putnam 1971). This article, however, will focus entirely on descriptive criteria of ontological commitment.