 Work on category distinctions also has other applications in assessing traditional debates in metaphysics. Thomasson (2007) argues that various mistakes and puzzlements in ontology can be traced to the mistaken use of category-neutral existential and quantificational claims. A great many arguments in ontology rely on claims about whether, in various situations, there is some object present (or how many objects there are), where the term ‘object’ must be used in a category-neutral way for the argument to go through (Thomasson 2007, 112–118). But if existential and quantificational claims must tacitly presuppose some category or categories of entity over which we are quantifying, then such arguments go astray. Thomasson (2007) gives independent grounds for thinking that all quantification must at least tacitly presuppose a category or categories of entity over which we are quantifying, and argues that adopting that view provides the uniform basis for dissolving a number of problems supposed to arise with accepting an ontology of ordinary objects. Jonah Goldwater (2021) argues that the arguments standardly given for being eliminativist about a certain kind of entity all rely on mistaken principles or judgments about ontological categories, to which the right response is typically to rectify these mistakes about categories, not to eliminate the entities. This analysis, Goldwater argues, provides a kind of indirect support for ‘permissivist’ ontologies, that would accept the existence of numbers, properties, holes, or other entities to which metaphysicians have often sought to avoid commitment.