[3.6.] Willard Van Orman Quine.^[1]

 

·         The most influential and best known analytic philosopher of the latter half of the 20^th century.

·         Born 1908 in Akron, Ohio.

·         Received a BA in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1930.

·         Studied with A.N. Whitehead at Harvard [the same Whitehead who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Russell] and received the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932.

·         During the 1932-33 academic year, he went to Europe on a fellowship; he spent five months in Vienna and attended meetings of the Vienna Circle; he also visited Prague, where he had conversations with Carnap.

·         He became close friends with Carnap and helped bring him to the US in the 1930s.

·         He became an instructor at Harvard in 1936 and continued to teach there until he retired in 1978 (except during WWII, during which he served in the Navy); he held the Edgar Pierce Chair in Philosophy from 1956 until 2000.

·         He was the uncle of Robert Quine, rock guitarist and a founding member of the Voidoids (#80 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time!)

·         He died on Christmas day 2000, in Boston, at age 92; he remained a prolific writer into his 90s.

 

We will be reading Quine’s 1948 article, “On What There Is.”

 

[3.6.1.] Plato’s Beard: The Problem of Non-Being.

 

Quine considers a problem he calls Plato’s Beard, a.k.a. “the Platonic riddle of non-being”:

 

“Non-being must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?” (133)

 

This is similar to a problem dealt with by Frege and Russell: how can talk about non-existent things be meaningful?

 

Frege (“On Sense and Reference,” 1892): even though there is no such person as Odysseus, the sentence “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep” is meaningful, in part because “Odysseus” expresses a sense.

 

Russell (“On Denoting,” 1905): even though there is no present king of France, the sentence “The present king of France is bald” is meaningful because it can be translated into a sentence that has no non-referring terms (by itself, the denoting phrase “the present king of France” has no meaning).

 

Quine asks: how is it that a sentence containing “Pegasus” can be meaningful?

 

In jokingly calling this problem “Plato’s Beard,” Quine has in mind...

 

Ockham’s Razor: do not multiply entities beyond necessity ["entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter"].

 

In other words, make your ontology only as complicated as it needs to be to accommodate the evidence. Do not admit entities (or types of entity) into your ontology unless it is necessary to do so in order to account for the evidence at hand.

 

This idea derives from William of Ockham (c.1287 - 1347), one of the most important philosophers of the medieval period.^[2]

·         “Occam” is another accepted spelling.

·         Although Ockham’s Razor is an idea found in Ockham’s work, the formulation given above occurs nowhere in his writings.

 

Presumably, Quine thinks we should keep Ockham’s Razor at hand when we’re attempting to “untangle” Plato’s Beard.

 

This is reflected in what Quine describes as his “taste for desert landscapes” (134), i.e., his preference for keeping his ontology as simple and sparse as possible.

 

Quine considers answers given by two fictional philosophers, McX and Wyman, and then criticizes each of them.

 

Both McX and Wyman believe that Pegasus “must be” (in some sense of “be”), because otherwise even the sentence “Pegasus is not” would be nonsense.

 

Thus, take Pegasus. If Pegasus were not ... we should not be talking about anything when we use the word; therefore it would be nonsense to say even that Pegasus is not. Thinking to show thus that the denial of Pegasus cannot be coherently maintained, [they conclude] that Pegasus is. (133)

 

But McX and Wyman mean different things by the claim that Pegasus must be...

 

 

[3.6.1.1.] McX’s Answer.

 

“Pegasus is an idea in men’s minds.”

 

In the sentence “Pegasus is a winged horse,” the word “Pegasus” does refer to something that is: a mental entity, the idea of a winged horse.

 

Quine’s criticism: “[t]his mental entity is not what people are talking about when they deny Pegasus.” (133) I.e., when people say “Pegasus does not exist,” they are not denying the existence of the idea of Pegasus. They are denying the existence of Pegasus, a flesh-and-blood winged horse.

 

 

[3.6.1.2.] Wyman’s Answer.

 

“Pegasus is an unactualized possible.”

 

Although Pegasus does not exist, he has another sort of being: unactualized possibility, or subsistence. When we say that Pegasus does not exist, what we are saying is true and meaningful. Pegasus, something which has only unactualized possibility, does not exist, i.e., he does not have actual existence. But Pegasus nevertheless subsists.^[3]

 

Quine’s objections:

 

1.      Wyman is misusing the word “exist” by stretching it too far from its normal use.

·         As Wyman uses the word, it is legitimate for him to say that even though X does not exist, nonetheless X still is.

·         Quine says that normal people use the word differently: when they say that something does not exist, they mean to imply that it is not. The non-existence of X does not leave room for X to be in some way other than existence.

·         So Quine thinks that “exist” ought to be used to talk about being (in general), so that anything that does not exist, is not, period.

 

2.      Wyman has created an ontological “slum.” By allowing for the being (in some sense) of Pegasus, Wyman has adopted a standard of accepting things into his ontology which is too low. If we allow Pegasus into our ontology, then all sorts of crazy things will come running in after him:

 

Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Or, finally, is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselves and distinct from one another? (134)

 

 

[3.6.1.3.] “No Entity Without Identity.”

 

The last two sentences of that quotation foreshadow a famous doctrine of Quine’s that appears more explicitly in his later writings:

 

“No entity without identity.”^[4] We should allow a type of entity into our ontology only if we can give identity conditions for it.

 

identity conditions (df.): criteria that must be met in order for x and y to be numerically identical; e.g., the identity conditions for physical objects are as follows: physical object x and physical object y are identical exactly when they occupy the same position in space-time.

 

Quine's standards are quite strong. It is notoriously difficult to provide criteria of identity for properties, propositions, concepts… and even persons. If it turns out that we cannot provide identity conditions for persons (i.e., if it turns out that we cannot say what conditions must be met in order for person x to be numerically identical to person y), then, on Quine’s standards, there are no such things as persons.

 

The point that Quine is making in “On What There Is” is this: if we cannot specify identity conditions for unactualized possibles (i.e., if we cannot say what conditions must be met in order for unactualized possible x to be one and the same as unactualized possible y), then we should not admit unactualized possibles into our ontology.

 

In other words, there are no identity conditions for merely possible (possible but not actual) entities, i.e., there is no way to tell the difference between one merely possible entity and another. So we should exclude such entities from our ontology.

 

 

 

Stopping point for Monday March 2. For next time, read in your textbook Quine pp.136 (beginning with the last two lines) - 139. Come to class prepared to answer these questions:

1. Explain the problem that Quine discusses in this reading.

2. Explain McX’s approach to the problem.

3. Explain Quine’s approach to the problem.

(All three questions are answered in the text before Quine begins discussing the philosophy of mathematics, midway down the right column on p.138).