What kinds of things are there and how are they related? Weighty questions, indeed, but no concern of mine as a linguist trying to understand natural language. Nevertheless, anyone who deals with the semantics of natural language is driven to ask questions that mimic those just given: What do people talk as if there is? What kinds of things and relations among them does one need in Order to exhibit the structure of meanings that natural languages seem to have? Questions of this latter sort lead us into natural language metaphysics. In this paper, I want to show how we are driven to such questions when we try to give a serious account of the semantics of natural language and I want to say something about possible answers. Linguistics, like any other field of inquiry, lives off of puzzles. Why can we say this and not that? If I say a certain sentence, does that commit me to the truth of certain other sentences? Why does no language do this and every language do that? Why do languages that put the verb at the end of the clause overwhelmingly tend to use postpositions rather than prepositions? Why are Dutch weten, German wissen (‘know’) etymologically related to Latin video (‘see’) (cf. Greek oida ‘know’, present in meaning but perfect in form, thus historically ‘I have seen’)? Linguists, like other seekers after understanding, usually follow the maxim: Divide and conquer! That is, we try to understand complex phenomena like those just...