It is shown that we express ontological commitments in English purely by means of Gricean implicatures. That is, when we commit ourselves to the existence of bears as we do in conversation when we assert “There are bears,” or “Bears exist,” this is not because of the meaning (the semantics) of the phrase “there is” nor of the word “exist.” Rather it is because the sentences in which these words appear often exhibit implicatures that speakers and their audience experience as the assertion of ontological commitments. Alternative views of the linguistic phenomena, that these phrases are ambiguous or polysemous, are shown to face serious counterexamples. Positions that take phrases such as “real,” “taking place,” “obtains,” and so on to involve ontological commitment by virtue of their meanings are also undercut by the use of counterexamples.