[3.5.1.4.] Worries About Modality.

 

Quine now turns his attention to a topic that has attracted a lot of attention from philosophers over the last few decades: modality.

 

When philosophers talk about modality, they typically mean the following concepts:

·         necessity

·         possibility

·         impossibility

·         contingency (a contingent occurrence is one that is possible but not necessary)

 

On Quine’s view, we may be safe using the adverb “possibly” (and presumably the adverb “necessarily” as well) to modify statements. For example, it may make sense to say “Possibly, there is a fat man in the doorway.”

 

But we definitely should not use the adjective “possible” (or “necessary”) to modify expressions that ordinarily refer to things. E.g., we should avoid saying that there is a possible fat man in the doorway.^[1]

 

 

[3.5.1.5.] Quine’s Answer: Back to Russellian Translations.

 

Having rejected two unsatisfactory answers to the question about Pegasus, Quine proceeds to give his own, positive answer...

 

Sentences containing non-referring terms should be translated according to Russell’s theory of descriptions.

 

For example: “The round square cupola is pink” should be translated:^[2]

 

“Something is round and is square and is a cupola and is pink, and nothing else is round and is square and is a cupola.” [This is false.]

 

The troublesome non-referring expression, “the round square cupola” has disappeared!

 

But what about the sentence “Pegasus is not”?

 

The expression “Pegasus” is a name, not a definite description like “the round square.” So Russell’s theory of descriptions does not apply to it directly.

 

Quine says we have two options when translating a sentence containing “Pegasus”:

 

i)                    Replace it with a definite description, e.g., “the winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon”; then we can apply Russellian translation to “The winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon does not exist.”

 

ii)                  Suppose that the idea of Pegasus is too difficult or too basic to unpack with a definite description. Even then, it remains true that any thing has a property that nothing else has—the property of being itself—so we can use that property to create a verb phrase such as “the thing that pegasizes.” We can then apply Russellian translation to “The thing that pegasizes does not exist,” to yield something like: “There is nothing that pegasizes.”

 

 

Quine summarizes as follows:

 

McX and Wyman supposed that we could not meaningfully affirm a statement of the form ‘So-and-so-is not’, with a simple or descriptive singular noun in place of ‘so-and-so,’ unless so-and-so is. This supposition is now seen to be quite generally groundless, since the singular noun in question can always be expanded into a singular description, trivially or otherwise, and then analyzed out à la Russell.

                … We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant. (136)

 

And he offers the following diagnosis of how McX (but not Wyman) went wrong:

·         McX confuses naming with meaning. He mistakenly assumes that if a word fails to name something, then it must be meaningless.

·         This is a mistake that Frege did not make: he held that two terms (e.g., “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star”) can name the same object (e.g., Venus) without meaning the same thing. [In pointing this out Quine is not agreeing with Frege about what the meaning of a given term is—he is simply agreeing that naming and meaning are different things.]

·         Because of this confusion, McX assumes that, in order for “Pegasus” to be meaningful, it must name something... and he settles on something that actually is (viz., the idea of Pegasus) as the thing that “Pegasus” names.

 

 

[3.5.2.] The Problem of Universals.^[3]

 

After his discussion of the Platonic riddle of non-being, Quine turns to another ontological problem: the problem of universals.

 

This is a problem about attribute agreement: how do we explain the fact that two or more separate, individual things can have something in common?

 

For example, consider two objects, e.g., two apples, that have some of their attributes in common. They are both green, round, sweet... and they are both apples.

 

According to the pre-philosophical, common-sense view…

·         we don’t create all these similarities by classifying things together; we don't arbitrarily classify various objects as green, round, etc.;

·         rather, we classify them that way because they are green, round, etc.; at least some of the similarities among objects are objective, real, independent of our classifying activity.

 

Assuming that this is true, how do we explain how it is that two or more different things can have something in common? Beginning with Plato, some philosophers have found it philosophically puzzling how two distinct objects, existing separately from one another, could have attributes in common.

 

Two competing philosophical views of the matter are realism and nominalism.

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday March 4. For next time, finish reading Quine’s “On What There Is” (Hales 139-41).