Quine in Dialogue 9780674278134

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Quine in Dialogue

Quine in Dialogue w. v. quine

Edited by

Dagfinn Føllesdal Douglas B. Quine

harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2008

Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Quine, W. V. (Willard Van Orman) Quine in dialogue / W. V. Quine ; edited by Dagfinn Føllesdal, Douglas B. Quine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03083-1 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. 2. Quine, W. V. (Willard Van Orman)—Interviews. I. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. II. Quine, Douglas B., 1950– III. Title. B945.Q51F65

2008

191—dc22

2008011703

To my wife, Vera, and our children, Andreas, John, Benedicte, Magne, Olav, and Hallvard —Dagfinn Føllesdal

To my wife, Maryclaire, and our children, Alexander and Victoria —Douglas B. Quine

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

I Interviews 1

The Ideas of Quine (1978)

5

by Bryan Magee

2

The Interview: Willard Van Orman Quine (1985)

18

by D. C. Denison

3

Quine Speaks His Mind: Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine (1988)

21

by Edo Pivcevic

4

Philosophy (1993)

30

by Steven Vita

5

W. V. Quine: Perspectives on Logic, Science, and Philosophy (1994)

43

by Bradley Edmister and Michael O’Shea

6

Twentieth-Century Logic (1994)

57

by Giovanna Borradori

7

Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine (1994)

69

by Lars Bergström and Dagfinn Føllesdal

8

There Is Always a Further Step (1998) by Olaf Brill

82

Contents

viii

II Quine on Other Philosophers Correspondence 9

Logical Correspondence with Russell (1937–1967)

103

Articles 10

Thoughts on Reading Father Owens (1967)

115

11

Carnap’s Positivistic Travail (1984)

119

12

Events and Reification (1985)

129

13

Carnap (1987)

142

14

Charles Sanders Peirce (1989)

146

15

Let Me Accentuate the Positive (1990)

149

16

Exchange between Donald Davidson and W. V. Quine Following Davidson’s Lecture (1994)

152

Foreword to Kurt Gödel, Unpublished Philosophical Essays (1994)

157

Where Do We Disagree? (1999)

159

17 18

Reviews 19

Review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache (1935)

169

20

Probability. Review of Harold Jeffreys’s Scientific Inference (1937)

173

21

Review of Nelson Goodman’s Structure of Appearance (1951)

176

22

Review of Peter Thomas Geach’s Reference and Generality (1964)

184

23

Review of Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations (1977)

189

24

Review of Derek Bickerton’s Roots of Language (1983)

192

Contents

25 26

ix

Review of Charles Parsons’s Mathematics in Philosophy (1984)

194

Four Hot Questions in Philosophy. Review of P. F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism (1985)

206

Responses 27

Replies to Professor Riska’s Eight Questions (1992)

213

28

Comments on Neil Tennant’s “Carnap and Quine” (1994)

216

Responses to Articles by Abel, Bergström, Davidson, Dreben, Gibson, Hookway, and Prawitz (1994)

223

30

Reactions (1995)

235

31

Responses to Essays by Smart, Orenstein, Lewis and Holdcroft, and Haack (1997)

251

32

Response to Leemon McHenry (1997)

257

33

Responses to Szubka, Lehrer, Bergström, Gibson, Miscevic, and Orenstein (1999)

259

29

III Popular Pieces 34

Introducing Piaget (1960)

271

35

Mind/Body Problem (1963)

273

36

Magna Carta (1963)

275

37

On the Map (1964)

278

38

Charting the World (1965)

280

39

Words Enough (1969)

285

40

Skinner Retirement Party (1974)

291

41

A Letter to Mr. Ostermann (1975)

293

42

Farewell Thanks at Villa Serbelloni, Italy (1975)

297

43

Introducing Church (1975)

298

Contents

x

44

Introducing Dummett (1976)

300

45

Introducing Campbell (1977)

301

46

Knights and Knaves. Review of Smullyan’s What Is the Name of This Book? (1978)

303

Introduction to Gail Caldwell Stine Memorial Lecture (1980)

306

48

What I Believe (1984)

307

49

Sticks and Stones; or, The Ins and Outs of Existence (1984)

312

50

Introducing Kripke (1984)

325

51

Jean van Heijenoort Memorial (1986)

327

52

Books That Mattered to Me (1986)

328

53

To a Graduate Student in Philosophy (1988)

330

54

Life Is Agid (1988)

333

47

55 Words Are All We Have to Go On (On Philosophers’ Concern with Language) (1992)

334

56

Hobbling the Hawkers (1992)

340

57

Introducing Shepard (1994)

342

58

In Memory of John Finley (1995)

344

59

Quine /zkwain/, Willard Van Orman (b. 1908) (1996)

346

60

Acceptance Speech for Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences (1996)

349

61

Tidy Parsimony (1996)

351

62

Advice to the Next Generation (2002)

358

63

Farewell to Me (1978)

359

Credits

361

Index

369

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the help of the following people in locating hardto-find pieces: Dagmar Borchers, Olaf Brill, Alex Burri, and Uwe Czaniera. We thank Lindsay Waters and Phoebe Kosman of the Harvard University Press for their support of the publication of this book, and we thank the copy editor, Cindy Buck, for her meticulous review of the manuscript and Liz Duvall for seeing it through production. Finally, we wish to thank Alexander Quine, the third-generation Quine engaged in this effort, for his painstaking work in decoding manuscripts and helping to bring them to the light of day.

Quine in Dialogue

Introduction

Quine had all the qualities that make a good dialogue partner: he was never dominant, but listened and asked questions, especially questions of clarification and argument. He had exceptionally broad interests and knowledge, and he was always eager to learn more. He was also a stimulating traveling companion, never asking for the next Hilton, but eager to find out about the sights, the landscape, how people lived, what engaged them, and how they solved their practical problems. His openness and engaged questioning inspired his discussion partners and often gave them the impression that he agreed with them, although it was frequently the case that his questions manifested his curiosity about views and perspectives very different from his own. As an adviser, Quine combined openness with high standards. He never attempted to enroll students in a philosophical program, and he encouraged criticism and independence. He was very quick to spot unclear thoughts and sloppy arguments, and he insisted that criticism, whether of his own views or those of others, should be based upon careful reading and sympathetic interpretation. Hundreds of articles were written on his views each year. He responded to many of them, but refrained from answering critics who severely misread the texts they were criticizing. “Why write for a person who cannot read?” was his excuse. This volume begins with a sample of interviews with Quine and his most important articles, reviews, and comments on other philosophers. It ends with a selection of small pieces that were written for a broader public and that give a glimpse of his wide interests, his sense of humor, and his warm relations with friends. The volume also contains several unpublished manuscripts that have been brought to light by Quine’s son, Douglas Quine, who has collected

2

introduction

Quine’s manuscripts and notes and organized a website, www.wvquine.org, which gives access to this information. In choosing among Quine’s many responses to critics, we have been guided by the following considerations: First, we have not included any of Quine’s responses that appear in the two volumes Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine (Davidson and Hintikka, eds., 1969) and The Philosophy of W. V. Quine from the Library of Living Philosophers (Hahn and Schilpp, eds., 1986, 1998), since these volumes are widely available. And second, we have chosen responses that make new points or amplify or supplement Quine’s other writings and that can be read without recourse to the article to which they respond.

I Interviews

1 The Ideas of Quine Bryan Magee 1978

Introduction Magee: If we took a poll among professional teachers of philosophy on the question ‘Who is the most important living philosopher?’ it is not at all obvious to me who would get the most votes. But we could predict with confidence that certain names would be in the top half dozen: Quine, Popper, Jean-Paul Sartre, Chomsky probably (though strictly speaking he is not exactly a philosopher). The first of those names is that of Willard van Orman Quine, a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard—who has been described by Stuart Hampshire, for example, as ‘the most distinguished living systematic philosopher’. He was born in 1908, and is still highly productive; so he has had a long career, and it is by no means over yet. He has published innumerable articles, and more than a dozen books, the best known of which are From a Logical Point of View (1953) and Word and Object (1960). First and foremost he is a logician. The original contributions to logic which made him famous are for the most part highly technical, and not really accessible to the layman, though they always had their ultimate roots in problems fundamental to philosophy. However, in the latter part of his career he has become more overtly interested in philosophy in a more general sense. I thought it would be uniquely valuable in this series of dialogues to have a philosopher at the very summit of world reputation talking about the very basics of philosophy, and of his own activity.

Discussion Magee: What do you regard as the central task, or tasks, of philosophy? Quine: I think of philosophy as concerned with our knowledge of the world

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and the nature of the world. I think of philosophy as attempting to round out ‘the system of the world’, as Newton put it. There have been philosophers who thought of philosophy as somehow separate from science, and as providing a firm basis on which to build science, but this I consider an empty dream. Much of science is firmer than philosophy is, or can ever perhaps aspire to be. I think of philosophy as continuous with science, even as a part of science. Magee: Well, if it’s continuous with science, and even part of science, does it differ from the rest of science? Quine: Philosophy lies at the abstract and theoretical end of science. Science, in the broadest sense, is a continuum that stretches from history and engineering at one extreme to philosophy and pure mathematics at the other. Philosophy is abstract through being very general. A physicist will tell us about causal connections between events of certain sorts; a biologist will tell us about causal connections between events of other sorts; but the philosopher asks about causal connection in general— what is it for one event to cause another? Or again a physicist or zoologist will tell us that there are electrons, that there are wombats; a mathematician will tell us that there are no end of prime numbers; but the philosopher wants to know, in more general terms, what sorts of things there are altogether. Philosophy seeks the broad outlines of the whole system of the world. Magee: Do you include in its field of concern, or do you exclude from it, the age-old questions about how the world got here in the first place, and how life began? Quine: I exclude these from philosophy. How the world began is a problem for the physicist and astronomer, and of course there have been conjectures from that quarter. How life began is a problem for the biologist, on which he’s made notable progress in recent years. Why the world began, or why life began—on the other hand—I think are pseudo questions, because I can’t imagine what an answer would look like. Magee: You think that, because there is no conceivable answer to these questions, they are meaningless questions? Quine: Yes. Magee: Do you think that the most important questions philosophers have to deal with can be grouped under any particular headings? Quine: There are two headings which I think provide an important classification to begin with. There are the ontological questions, as they

The Ideas of Quine

7

might be called: general questions as to what sorts of things there are, as well as what it means to exist, for there to be something. And there are the predicative questions: questions as to what sorts of things can meaningfully be asked about what there is. Epistemology would be included in the latter. Magee: Since you’ve made this distinction, let’s cling to it for clarity’s sake, and discuss the two groups of questions one at a time. First, the whole group of questions about what there is. Although there are innumerable theories about this, it’s fair to say that throughout the history of philosophy there have been two broadly opposing views in the matter of ontology. The argument is between what you might very roughly call materialists and what you might equally roughly call idealists; and although there are innumerable different versions of both doctrines, you have on the one hand the view that reality consists of material objects in spatial and temporal relationships which exist independently of anyone’s experience of them, and on the other hand the view that reality consists ultimately of spirits, or minds, or exists in the mind of God, or is put together by our minds. Can I put a crude question to you? Which side are you on? Quine: I’m on the materialists’ side. I hold that physical objects are real, and exist externally and independently of us. I don’t hold that there are only these physical objects. There are also abstract objects: objects of mathematics that seem to be needed to fill out the system of the world. But I don’t recognize the existence of minds, of mental entities, in any sense other than as attributes or activities on the part of physical objects, mainly persons. Magee: Obviously that means not only that you reject idealism but also that you reject dualism. And dualism is, of course, the common-sense view—throughout history most human beings have believed that reality consisted ultimately of two categorically different kinds of entity: bodies and minds, or bodies and spirits. Quine: It’s true, I do reject this view. The dualistic view presents problems, creates problems, which are neither soluble nor, it seems to me, necessary. It is clear that an individual’s decisions will affect his movements, will determine his movements; in many cases his movements, in turn, will have consequences in the movements of other physical objects. At the same time the natural scientist, the physicist, insists on a closed system, on there being physical causes, physical explanations in principle,

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for the physical events. He allows no place for the incursion of influences from outside the physical world. Given all this, it would seem that a person’s decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object. It is a basic principle of physical science that there is no change without a change in the distribution of microphysical properties over space. Rejection of this principle I would find uncongenial, because the successes in natural science have been such that we must take its presuppositions very seriously. Magee: What you are saying is that wishes, emotions, feelings, decisions, thoughts, and so on, are all processes which take place in, or are propensities of, certain physical objects, namely people, and that not only are they always accompanied by microphysical changes—changes in our brains and our central nervous systems, and so on—but that they are those microphysical changes. Quine: Exactly. Magee: Before I go on to raise some of the difficulties inherent in this view I wonder if you have any explanation of how it is that almost all of mankind disagrees, and always has disagreed, with you about this—why people in general take a dualist view of reality? If I were to put that question to almost anyone else he could say: ‘But it’s obvious why people think like that: it’s because dualism corresponds to directly experienced reality—that is simply how we experience things.’ But you can’t say that. You don’t think it is how we experience things. So what would your answer be? Quine: I recognize a profound difference between so-called mental events and externally observable physical ones, in spite of construing these mental events as themselves events, states, activity, on the part of a physical object. As for the traditional dualistic attitude, certainly this goes back to primitive times. I think one cause of it—one partial explanation—may be the experience of dreams and the seeming separation of the mind from the body in that state. Certainly animism antedated science. Thales, the first of the Greek philosophers, is said to have said that all things are full of gods. Primitive peoples today are said to be animists very largely, and to believe that what we call inanimate objects are animated by spirits. One can even imagine traces of animism in the basic concepts of science itself. The notion of cause, I suspect, began with the feeling of effort, of pushing; also the notion of force surely had

The Ideas of Quine

9

that sort of origin; but as time has gone on, and as science has progressed in recent centuries, the dissociation of these concepts from their original mental context seems to have been conducive to great scientific progress. I think of physicalism as a departure, a product of latter-day science, which, of course, is a phenomenon that’s very uncharacteristic of the history of mankind. Magee: But, if I may say so, I don’t think the chief reason why most people take a dualist view of reality has to do with dreams, or with the other things you mentioned. I think it’s chiefly due to the fact that we all have direct experience of an internal flow of thoughts, emotions, responses, desires, fantasies, memories, and so on, which is going on all the time we’re awake, and which is extremely complex, not only in the sense that it may be about complicated things, but also in the sense that there may be several different activities going on at once. As I say, we’re all directly aware of this going on inside ourselves, and since none of it need manifest itself in observable behaviour, i.e. in bodily movement, it leads us naturally to think that this is an aspect of our existence which is nonbodily. Hence dualism. Quine: We are aware of these things, and I’m not denying their existence; but I’m construing them, or reconstruing them, as activities on the part of physical objects, namely on our part. The fact that they are not observable, on the whole, from the outside does not distinguish them from much that the physicist assumes in the way of internal microscopic or sub-microscopic structure of inanimate objects. A great deal goes on that we do not observe from the outside. We have to account for it conjecturally. The important reason for construing all this activity as activity on the part of bodies is to preserve the closed character of the system of the physical world. Magee: Does this mean that you deny the existence of the age-old problem about whether or not we have free will? Quine: Clearly we have free will. The supposed problem comes of a confusion, indeed a confusing turn of phrase. Freedom of the will means that we are free to do as we will; not that our will is free to will as it will, which would be nonsense. We are free to do as we will, unless someone holds us back, or unless we will something beyond our strength or talent. Our actions count as free insofar as our will is a cause of them. Certainly the will has its causes in turn; no one could wish otherwise. If

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we thought wills could not be caused, we would not try to train our children; you would not try to win votes; we would not try to sell things, or to deter criminals. Magee: Given that you hold these views, how do you see the traditional body-mind problem? Do you simply by-pass it altogether? Quine: The body-mind problem that confronted the dualist was the problem of how mind and body could interact, and how such interaction could be reconciled with physical determinism. This problem is cleared up by dropping dualism and accepting materialism. But this move leaves us with another body-mind problem: the problem, now, of how we can ever hope to get along without talking of minds and mental processes, how we can make do just with bodies. Even if all sensation and all emotion and all thought are just a matter of nerves, as we materialists suppose, we don’t know the details of all that mechanism; we cannot translate our mentalistic talk into the language of neurology. We are evidently left talking of minds and mental processes in the same old way. There is an easy preliminary solution. We simply keep the old mentalistic terms, but understand them hereafter as applying to people as bodies. A man senses and feels and thinks, and he believes this and that, but the man who is doing all this is a body, a living body, and not something else called a mind or soul. Thus we keep our easy old mentalistic way of talking, while yet subscribing to materialism. Now this is alarmingly easy; too easy. For the fact is that the mentalistic way of talking suffers from a serious weakness that we haven’t yet talked about. It is subjective; it is introspective; it reports events that outsiders have no way of verifying. It lacks the objectivity, or intersubjectivity, that is the strength of materialism and has made physical science so successful. If we take the lazy course of keeping the whole mentalistic idiom and merely declaring that it applies to bodies, we are gaining none of the advantages of objective checks and intersubjective verification. Here, finally, is the proper place for behaviourism. For behaviourism, at its best, is the insistence on external, intersubjective criteria for the control of mentalistic terms. Behaviourism, mine anyway, does not say that the mental states and events consist of observable behaviour, nor that they are explained by behaviour. They are manifested by behaviour. Neurology is the place for the explanations, ultimately. But it is in terms of outward behaviour that we specify what we want explained.

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Magee: And that would include verbal behaviour. Quine: Including verbal behaviour, yes. And, insofar as such criteria are available, we do have the benefits of materialism, after all, and even without full neurological explanation. So the extent to which I am a behaviourist is in seeing behaviourism as a way of making objective sense of mentalistic concepts. Magee: What you’re really saying is that behaviourism is not a solution to the kind of problems with which the psychologist deals, but a way of formulating them. It’s a kind of model in terms of which the problems should be couched before we go on to seek solutions. Quine: Yes. Magee: Can I now chart our present position in this whole discussion? I started by asking you what you regarded as the central tasks of philosophy, and you said not only what you thought philosophers ought to be doing, you said also what you thought they ought not to be doing; you ruled out a number of questions. You then grouped the questions you thought philosophers ought to concern themselves with under two main heads, the first being questions about what exists, the second being questions about what we can know (or say, or ask) about what exists. From that point onward we have been considering the first of those two groups of questions. You have said that your view of what there is is physicalist: you think that all reality consists of physical entities; that there are not minds separate from physical entities; and that the notion that there are leads us into all sorts of conceptual confusions which you think a behaviourist analysis liberates us from. Quine: Good. One correction I would make, though. My position is not that there are only physical objects—there are also abstract objects. Magee: But these abstract objects are not mental—it’s important to make that distinction, is it not? Quine: That they’re not mental? That’s it. Magee: In other words, you don’t believe in the existence of minds as separate from physical things, but you do believe in the existence of certain abstract non-mental entities. Quine: Yes, numbers notably. Magee: I think you need to explain that a bit. If you are a physicalist, how can you justify belief in the existence of abstract entities at all? Quine: The justification lies in the indirect contribution that they make to natural science. They contribute already in a minor way when we speak

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of zoological species and genera; these are classes. They contribute also in more complex ways. We all know how important numbers are to natural science, and how important mathematical functions are, and other abstract mathematical objects; the scientific system of the world would collapse without them. But mathematicians have established in the past hundred years that classes, or sets, are enough for all these purposes: they can be made to do the work of numbers, functions, and the rest. This, then, is why I recognize sets: to meet the mathematical needs of our system of the natural world. Assuming sets, or classes, is on an equal footing with assuming molecules, atoms, electrons, neutrons, and the rest; all these are objects, concrete and abstract, that are assumed by the network of hypotheses by which we predict and explain our observations of nature. I see natural science as continuous with the mathematics that it uses, just as I see all this as continuous with philosophy. It all goes to make up our inclusive system of the world. Magee: You say ‘on an equal footing’, but it seems to me there is a very important difference between the sense in which sub-atomic particles are unobservable and the sense in which numbers are unobservable. Sub-atomic particles are bits of material, bits of stuff. It so happens— perhaps because of the accident of our optical apparatus—that they are too small for us to see, but if we had supermicroscopic eyes perhaps we could see them; and if we had different kinds of fingers perhaps we could pick them up. Numbers, on the other hand, are not material in any sense. They are abstract through and through—there is nothing but abstraction to them. Quine: It’s true. There is this discontinuity. However, even the continuity of ordinary observable objects with the elementary particles is rather more tenuous than had once been supposed, because an elementary particle is too small, for instance, even in principle, to be detected by light, because it’s smaller than any wavelength. Furthermore, the behaviour of the elementary particles is basically unlike that of bodies; so much so that it’s, I think, only by courtesy that they’re called material. The indeterminacy with respect to whether two segments of paths of electrons are segments of the path of one electron or of two different ones; indeterminacies of position; the antithesis between wave and corpuscle in the interpretation of light; these and other anomalies—notably something called the Bose-Einstein statistic—all suggest that the analogy of body is an analogy that was useful for extrapolation only up

The Ideas of Quine

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to a point. The evolution of hypotheses in the light of further experimentation and further refutations has finally carried us to the point where the continuity is no longer so evident. Magee: I would like, if I may, to go back in our discussion to the point where you were saying that the adoption of a physicalist approach to reality and a behaviourist way of formulating problems liberates us from the spell of certain entrenched ways of looking at things which, though they may appear to be commonsensical, are nevertheless mistaken. Can you say what some of these entrenched ideas are? Quine: Good—liberation is one way of looking at it. A sterner discipline is another way of looking at behaviourism. But at any rate a major example is the notion of meaning. There’s the common-sense notion that words somehow convey meanings. How do we know that the same words convey the same meaning to two speakers? We can see that the speakers react in the same way. All this is describable in behavioural terms, but might the meanings themselves be different? What behavioural sense can be made of the question? No behavioural sense, no adequate behavioural sense has been made of it. There are other notions that come similarly into question: translation. Once the notion of meaning is questioned, the notion of translation becomes more complex. We can no longer say it’s simply a matter of producing another sentence that has the same meaning as the sentence that’s being translated. The notion of necessity, again, comes into question. Magee: Well, there are two kinds of necessity, aren’t there, the logical and the causal. Quine: Yes. Some truths that are called necessary are said to hold true because of the meanings of their words. This sort of necessity goes dim along with the notion of meaning itself. Other truths that might be called necessary are the laws of nature. Necessity of this sort is a dubious notion too—not because of behaviourist strictures exactly, but because of similar scruples. Appreciation of this point goes back two centuries and more, to David Hume. People think necessity must make good sense because the adverb ‘necessarily’ is so frequent and useful. But if you examine the ordinary use of this adverb, you find that it has nothing to do with any enduring division of statements into necessary ones and contingent ones. When someone attaches the adverb ‘necessarily’ to some statement that he makes, he is apt merely to be predicting, in the light of the other speaker’s statements, that the other speaker

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will agree that the statement is true. But necessity and possibility are interdefinable: ‘necessary’ means ‘not possible not’, and vice versa. So to drop the notion of necessity is to drop that of possibility as well. There is a fashionable philosophy of possible worlds, but it is something undreamed of in my philosophy. Magee: How, on the basis of what you have been saying, are you able to provide an explanation of laws of nature, and of how we get to know them? Quine: I recognize no distinction in principle between laws of nature and other true statements about the world. What are called laws are usually general, but I would not distinguish them from other general truths. As for our method of knowing them, it can be and is summed up in a word, albeit a double-barrelled word: hypothetico-deductive. First we think up a theory, a set of hypotheses. Actually it will have been handed down to us, mostly, by our predecessors; we may have just changed a hypothesis, or added one. From this theory we then deduce what observations to expect under various observable conditions. If such an expectation is disappointed, we look to the theory for possible revisions. If not, we go on believing it. Magee: You’ve called into question such fundamental elements in our thinking as causal necessity, logical necessity, the idea of a law, the notion of meaning. . . . The ground is beginning to disappear from under our feet. What kind of view of the world are you coming out with? Quine: My tentative ontology includes physical objects, in a generous sense. The content of any portion of space-time, however scattered, is for me a physical object. In addition my ontology includes, as I said, the abstract hierarchy of classes based on those objects. But the doubts about meaning that behaviourism imposes make me unreceptive to others of the commonly accepted abstract objects: to properties and to propositions. The trouble comes in identification. Thus, consider two expressions written out, two predicates, and suppose they are true of just the same objects. Perhaps one of them says ‘equilateral triangle’ and the other says ‘equiangular triangle’; or suppose one of them says ‘has a heart’, and the other says ‘has kidneys’. The two predicates are true of just the same individuals, but shall we say they ascribe the same property? How do we decide? We are told that they ascribe the same property only if they are not only true of the same things but also are alike in meaning. The doubts about meaning thus induce doubts about

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the very notion of a property. Propositions are in the same trouble, for two sentences supposedly express the same proposition only if they are alike in meaning. So I reject propositions as well as properties, while keeping classes. So much for the ontological side. On the predicative side my view is rather negative. I reject predicates that have too little in the way of intersubjectively observable criteria, unless they compensate for that defect by contributing substantially to a well-knit system of the world which expedites prediction. I would insist, not that predicates have necessary and sufficient conditions in observation, but that they have a good share of observable criteria, symptoms of application, or that they play quite a promising role in theoretical hypotheses. Magee: One thing that pleases me about the discussion we’ve had is that almost none of it has been about language or the use of words. I say this because a lot of intelligent laymen who take an interest in philosophy are put off by what they take to be the discovery that modern philosophers are doing nothing but talking about words, analysing sentences, and so on—and you haven’t talked in that way at all. It’s clear that the problems you are concerned with are not problems about language. Nevertheless anyone opening your books or coming to study with you at Harvard would find that a great deal of your technique of approaching these problems is via the analysis of concepts, and therefore careful attention to words, elucidation of sentences, statements, and so on. Why is it that you and other contemporary philosophers adopt this linguistic approach—to what are, after all, essentially nonlinguistic problems? Quine: One reason is a strategy that I call semantic ascent. Philosophical issues often challenge the basic structure of our system of the world. When this happens, we cannot easily dissociate ourselves from our system so as to think about our opponent’s alternative. The basic structure of our system inheres in our very way of thinking. Thus the discussion can degenerate into question-begging, each party stubbornly reiterating his own basic principles, the very principles that are at issue. But we can rise above this predicament by talking about our theories as systems of sentences; talking about the sentences instead of just stubbornly asserting them. We can compare the rival systems of sentences in respect of structural simplicity. We can examine them for hidden equivalence, by seeing whether one can be converted into the other by re-

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definition of terms. We can find a common ground on which to join issues instead of begging the question. This is one reason philosophers talk of language. There are also others. For a deep understanding of our conceptual scheme, our system of the world, we do well to consider how it is acquired: how the individual learns it, and how the race may have developed it. The individual acquires the system mainly in the process of learning the language itself, and likewise the development of our basic conceptual scheme down the ages is bound up with the evolution of the language. The philosopher thus has good reason to be deeply concerned with the workings of language. Magee: We’re approaching the end of our discussion. Before we do finish, can I ask you to say something—perhaps in the light of what we’ve said so far—about the original work you’re doing at this moment? Quine: In the few years since my book The Roots of Reference came out, all I have done is produce numerous short pieces intended to clarify or defend or improve my philosophy at a variety of points. But let me just indicate three sectors where I should like to see breakthroughs, by me or by others. One is semantics, or the theory of meaning. Since we can no longer put up with the uncritical old notion of meaning, we need to devise some systematic theories of translation and of lexicography that respond to behavioural criteria. This sounds like business for linguists, and in large measure it is. But it is closely bound up with philosophical interests and scruples. Anyway, I set little store by boundaries between philosophy and the rest of science. A second sector is the theory of the so-called propositional attitudes, which are expressed by sentences containing subordinate sentences: thus x believes that p, x hopes that p, x fears that p, x rejoices that p. These constructions involve certain subtle difficulties of a logical kind. Also they present grave problems in respect of behavioural criteria. I should like to see a new conceptual apparatus of a logically and behaviourally straightforward kind by which to formulate, for scientific purposes, the sort of psychological information that is conveyed nowadays by idioms of propositional attitude. So the first of the three sectors that I have in mind is on the border of linguistics, and the second is on the border of psychology. The third is on the border of mathematics. What justifies pure mathematics, with its ontology of abstract objects, is the indispensable part it plays as an adjunct of natural science. I should like to see this apparatus pared down to the weakest and most natural set of assumptions that might

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still provide an adequate foundation for the scientific applications. One effect to be hoped for, in such a minimization, is a more natural and conclusive solution than we now have for the antinomies of set theory. Some of the people following our discussion are no doubt familiar with one of those antinomies under the name of Russell’s paradox. But others are probably not familiar with them at all. So perhaps I’d better stop here.

2 The Interview: Willard Van Orman Quine D. C. Denison 1985

“I think we should brace ourselves for some big breakthroughs.”

Willard Van Orman Quine, 77, professor of philosophy emeritus at Harvard University, is widely considered to be the most influential living American philosopher. His autobiography, The Time of My Life, was recently published by MIT Press. We spoke in his office overlooking Harvard Yard. Philosophers used to be read by the general public. Why do contemporary philosophers have so little popular appeal? I think one very considerable factor is the rise of mathematical logic, under the influence of Bertrand Russell, which is rather ironical, because Russell has also had a tremendous popular appeal through his books and articles. But there are also his great contributions, with Alfred North Whitehead, to mathematical logic, which have important applications to more traditional philosophical questions. And, insofar as those devices come into philosophy, it’s likely to be more technical and less accessible. So it’s been a matter of progress. Why has logic become so important? Well, perhaps through a couple examples, I can give some suggestion of it. One perplexity has to do with names that aren’t names of anything— “Pegasus,” for instance. If there is no such thing as Pegasus, then isn’t the name meaningless? Or phrases like “the present king of France.” We seem to understand it, but how do we understand it if it’s meaningless? How can it be meaningful if there’s no such thing? But, by a rather sim-

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ple logical construction, Bertrand Russell cleared this up pretty well. The solution wouldn’t have been so evident, however, without the tools of logical analysis. Do you think that philosophers should offer their opinions on the social questions of the day? I don’t see that philosophers, by virtue of their profession, have any special claim to competence on such points. Their training probably gives them some experience in reasoning, but there are certainly other pursuits that are likewise conductive to clear thinking. Legal training, for example; I think that would be equally helpful in social matters. I feel I’d rather leave things in the hands that they are in at present. Would you say that physicists are now in a better position than philosophers to explain the way the world works? Not that I have seen, although I think philosophy has gained tremendously by paying attention to physics. I think that partnership between philosophy and physics can be immensely important. So the philosophers of the future would be well-advised to be familiar with physics? Yes. We’ve had several philosophy students here at Harvard who have taken courses in physics, and have worked on these things in combination. So I think it’s coming. I think we should brace ourselves for some big breakthroughs. What’s your correspondence like? It’s tremendous. I try to keep up with it, but I have to be increasingly selective. I learned early that if I could see the man was something of a crank, that I just shouldn’t answer. That’s just a waste. Other times, even if he doesn’t know much about the subject, but I can see that he’s been working at it, and if I can see something helpful to write him, I do. Sometimes that’s developed into an exchange of dozens of letters. In one case a man ended up here at Harvard as a graduate student. I’ve also corresponded with a number of bright young fellows who have gone on to make a name for themselves in philosophy. So it can be worthwhile. What do you do to get away from thinking about philosophical problems? Down through the years I’ve been able to get away from philosophy and logic without abandoning both, because I can go back and forth. A lot of my work in logic is mathematically oriented, and that can be a relief from the inconclusiveness of philosophy. And then, philosophy can be

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a relief from the dryness of logic. But apart from those, an interest of mine is linguistics and the history of language. I’ve studied languages a good deal. In fact, I’ve lectured in six languages, and I’ve studied a number of others, including Japanese and Chinese. What would you say are the most stubborn philosophical problems, the ones that never seem to go away? One stubborn one that I don’t think ought to keep coming back, but it seems to do so, is the problem of determinism and free will. It seems to me that the problem was addressed satisfactorily many times—namely, that determinism does not compete with free will. Freedom of the will is just the extent to which your actions are what you’re doing without being pushed. Freedom from constraint. That is perfectly compatible with determinism, even to the extent that what you want to do is completely determined by your past training, and by your genes. In fact, if we didn’t think those things were capable of being determined or at least being influenced, we wouldn’t bother trying to train the young. Or try to scare the criminals, for that matter.

3 Quine Speaks His Mind Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine Edo Pivcevic 1988

There can be few philosophy undergraduates who have not experienced the impact of Quine’s views, particularly his criticisms of a priori knowledge, logical truth, meaning, analyticity, his theses of the indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity and his insistence upon the close relationship between philosophy and science. His books, much thumbed, will be on their bookshelves: in particular, Elementary Logic (1941), Methods of Logic (1950), From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and Its Logic (1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969) have been quoted in thousands of students’ essays and have been subject to scrutiny in the leading philosophical journals. He has, further, the rare honour of being the subject of a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers (1976). Professor Quine was interviewed in his rooms at Harvard by Dr. Edo Pivcevic, President of the Cogito Society. E. Pivcevic: Professor Quine, as an undergraduate you studied mathematics at Oberlin College, Ohio. Could you tell us how you developed an interest in philosophy? Professor Quine: Philosophical curiosity had touched me somewhat by about the age of ten, when I began to sense the implausibility of heaven and immortality. A few years later, having taken to reading the collected writings of Edgar Allan Poe, my philosophical interest in the nature of things was fired by his eloquent and extravagant essay “Eureka”.

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But I had conceived equally strong interests outside philosophy, notably in the origins of words. In school I did well also in mathematics. The result was indecision, in college, over choice of a major field. A knowledgeable older student had heard of Russell’s “mathematical philosophy”, and this seemed to offer a way of combining two of my competing interests. So I arranged to major in mathematics and do my honours reading in “mathematical philosophy”, which turned out to be mathematical logic. It was not taught at Oberlin, but the mathematics professor consulted a colleague elsewhere and prepared me a reading list, which I pursued with mounting enthusiasm. It culminated in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, for which my admiration was unbounded. After graduating I moved on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy, for Whitehead was by then—1930—a professor of philosophy there. My change of field, from mathematics to philosophy, did not reflect a change in interest. The focus of my interest had come to be the intersection of the two. E. Pivcevic: What was the subject of your post-graduate research at Harvard? Professor Quine: On becoming a candidate for a doctorate in philosophy I had to take on traditional philosophical studies, but in my own research I took the same line that I would have wanted to take if I had been going for a doctorate in mathematics. I was bent on improving the logic and set theory of Principia Mathematica, by enhancement of rigour, economy, and philosophical clarity. It is no disparagement of Principia that it cried out for such improvements; such is the way with pioneer works. E. Pivcevic: Which particular sections of the Principia did you think were most in need of repair or improvement? Professor Quine: My improvements were limited to the Introduction and Part I, “Mathematical Logic”—hence the first half of Volume I. These were the sections where the semantics of the system were set forth and the technical apparatus was developed for the derivation in Parts II–VI of classical mathematics. A fault on the semantic side was a persistent neglect of the distinction between use and mention, sign and object. As a result the conceptual background was nebulous and needlessly complex. A fault on the logical side was redundancy of symbols. Many notations were introduced by definition that could be paraphrased in prior notations with little or no loss of brevity. Such redun-

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dancy mounts exponentially, because each new notation generates a new sheaf of theorems relating it to previous expressions. I showed how some economy of notation could do away with scores of turgid pages and relieve the memory of a needless lot of ideograms. E. Pivcevic: At one time you were strongly influenced by the German logician Rudolf Carnap, whom you first met, I believe, in Prague in 1933. Why did you go to Prague, and how long were you there? Professor Quine: A travelling fellowship from Harvard had taken me to Vienna in October 1932, on the heels of my Ph.D. I met young Gödel, who had lately clinched immortality with his great theorem, but there were no lectures on mathematical logic or kindred themes in philosophy. It was Carnap, major spokesman of the Vienna Circle, who pressed modern logic most vigorously into the service of philosophy, and he had moved from Vienna to Prague the year before. I wrote to him, and when he visited Vienna late in 1932 I talked with him. It was arranged that my wife and I would move to Prague on March 1, 1933. We stayed 37 intensive days. My months in Vienna, meanwhile, had strengthened my German to the point where those 37 days could be fully exploited, for with Carnap I spoke only German. The theme was philosophical, but the technique, a wonderfully effective one, was largely mathematical logic. Afterwards I went on to Warsaw and immersed myself in mathematical logic pure and simple. There again, for lack of Polish, German was my language. E. Pivcevic: 1933 was of course the year of Hitler’s accession to power. He became Chancellor on 30 January 1933, and Goebbels was appointed minister for propaganda in March of the same year. What was the atmosphere like in Prague at the time? How did the philosophical community react to these events? Professor Quine: In Prague our only intellectual contacts were Carnap, the philosopher-physicist Philipp Frank, their wives, and perhaps Karel Reach. Certainly all of us, unreservedly, found the Nazis scandalous, outrageous, and alarming—much as we do now in retrospect, even though not foreseeing then the horrors of the holocaust. We had already observed the anti-Jewish propaganda and the expulsion of Einstein. In Vienna, where Nazi graffiti and swastika confetti had already been widespread in 1932, my friends likewise saw matters as I did and do. Similarly in Warsaw, with two rather vacillating exceptions. E. Pivcevic: Who were the vacillating exceptions?

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Professor Quine: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. E. Pivcevic: A number of German philosophers, especially those associated with the so-called ‘Vienna Circle’, emigrated to the States in the thirties. Tell us about those who came to Harvard. Professor Quine: Philipp Frank, Viennese in origin, and Carnap, Viennese by adoption, both were of the Vienna Circle. Frank came to Harvard and stayed. Carnap visited at Harvard but settled at Chicago. Gerald Holton, a younger philosopher-physicist and a Viennese with a changed name, came to Harvard and stayed, and a great teacher he has been; but he had been a little too young for the Vienna Circle. Herbert Feigl, a young member of the Vienna Circle, had come to Harvard on a fellowship before Nazi times, and had been instrumental to my choosing Vienna in 1932. E. Pivcevic: Russell was there too at one time. In 1940 he gave a series of lectures at Harvard which were later published under the title An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Did you attend his lectures? Professor Quine: Yes, 1940 was a great year: Russell, Carnap and Tarski were all at Harvard. I did indeed attend Russell’s lectures, and later I reviewed the resulting book, Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, for the Journal of Symbolic Logic. E. Pivcevic: Russell was very scathing about the tendency to see philosophy purely as language analysis. What was the reaction to his lectures at the time? What was the discussion like in the seminar? Professor Quine: I shared Russell’s reservations regarding Oxford’s philosophy of ordinary language—“the metaphysics of savages”. My review of his Inquiry was nevertheless very critical. Of his seminar, as distinct from his lectures, I recall nothing. I may even have neglected it. For all my admiration of Russell’s earlier work, by 1940 I was finding my stimulation in Carnap, Tarski, Hempel, and a few of my local contemporaries. E. Pivcevic: Russell of course was highly critical of the ‘Wittgensteinean’ view that the only proper topic for philosophy is language, and that the way to find out about the structure of the world is to analyse the language in which we talk about the world. What is your own view on this? Professor Quine: Epistemology, for me, is science self-applied. It is the scientific study of the scientific process. It explores the logical connections between stimulation of the scientist’s sensory receptors and the scien-

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tist’s output of scientific theory. Ontology, for me, is the inquiry into what it means to assume objects of one or another sort, and what such an assumption contributes to the logical connection between the scientist’s sensory stimulation and his scientific output. Epistemology and ontology so conceived will indeed focus on language, as logical analysis must; but not necessarily on our pristine vernacular, any more than mathematical analysis does. “In the scientific enterprise,” David Justice writes, “man transcends his language just as he transcends his untutored sense impressions.” Frege likened the use of technical notation to the discovery of how, by means of the wind, to sail against the wind. E. Pivcevic: Let us turn again to your relations with Carnap. Eventually you parted ways with him philosophically. Why? Professor Quine: In Prague I was reading Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache fresh from Ina Carnap’s typewriter. With the help of mathematical logic he brought new clarity to the philosophy of science. I became an ardent disciple. Central to the book was his Thesis of Syntax: Philosophy is the syntax of the language of science. After a couple of years we both saw, in our separate ways, that that theory was untenable. It was a vital matter of syntax versus semantics. Carnap’s proposed remedy, moreover, was one that I could not accept either. It committed him to modal logic, a logic of necessity and possibility, which both of us had formerly deplored for its lack of intelligible foundation. Meanwhile, I had become critical of others of Carnap’s tenets. One was his fundamental distinction between analytic sentences, that is sentences true purely by virtue of the meanings of their words, and synthetic sentences, which convey information about the world. Another was his sharp distinction between the meaningful and the meaningless, with relegation of metaphysics to the latter category. In the case both of the distinction between analytic and synthetic and the distinction between meaningful and meaningless, I became aware of a lack of criteria. Thus our divergence on philosophical points. But we remained firm friends, he ever the generous adversary and I ever the grateful pupil. E. Pivcevic: You explained your views on the synthetic/analytic distinction in your paper on “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that this has been one of the most widely read and most influential papers in recent philosophy. Could you briefly summarise its contents for us? Professor Quine: Not an exaggeration, in view of some forty anthologizings

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and translations of “Two Dogmas” and hundreds of responses in the form of articles and books. The first of the two dogmas was the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences. My attack on this was what raised most of the turmoil. The second dogma was to the effect that every synthetic sentence has its own empirical content, its own separable criteria in sense experience. Put negatively, the second dogma is a failure to appreciate the truth of holism, which says that synthetic sentences for the most part have empirical content only jointly as interlocking systems of sentences. In “Two Dogmas” I cited the second dogma only as helping to explain the widespread acceptance of the first dogma. Today I see the second dogma as the true villain of the piece. E. Pivcevic: What are the advantages of the ‘holistic’ approach to knowledge, and in what way does your own ‘holistic’ approach differ from that of Hegel? Professor Quine: Holism is inevitable once we reflect on the experimental method. A scientific hypothesis rarely implies, single-handed, what observable results to expect from the observable conditions set up in an experiment. In order to clinch such an implication the scientist has to draw on his background of scientific theory, common sense, and mathematics. What implies the observables is thus a big bundle of stated and unstated assumptions and beliefs. It is not, however, the whole of science as Hegel would have had it, it is a question only of critical mass: a big enough fragment of science to imply what to expect from some observation or experiment. The size will vary from case to case. This moderate holism is scarcely debatable, irrespective of its advantages; but there are advantages too, in that it solves two riddles regarding mathematical truth. How, Carnap asked, can mathematics be meaningful despite lacking empirical context? His answer was that mathematics is analytic. Holism’s answer is that mathematics, insofar as applied in science, imbibes the shared empirical content of the critical masses to which it contributes. Second riddle: Why is mathematical truth necessary rather than contingent? Carnap’s answer, again, was analyticity. Holism’s answer is that when a critical mass of sentences jointly implies a false prediction, we are free to choose what component sentence to revoke so as to defuse the implication. In so choosing we choose to safeguard any purely mathematical truths among those sentences, since disturbing them would disturb science excessively in all its branches. We are guided by a maxim of minimum mutilation, and it is this sparing of mathematics that accounts for its apparent necessity. So we

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see how holism solves two riddles that had been primary motives for Carnap’s insistence on the notion of analyticity, the first of the two dogmas. I said earlier that I now see the second dogma as the true villain of the piece, and this is why. Once we appreciate holism, even moderate holism, the notion of analyticity ceases to be vital to epistemology. E. Pivcevic: All your books have been widely read and appreciated, especially in the English-speaking world. Which of your own books do you yourself regard as most successful from your own point of view? Which do you regard as most important? Professor Quine: The duality of my training—mathematics and philosophy—has carried over into my publications. My second book, Mathematical Logic, came out in 1940 and exerted some influence in that domain, to judge from the gratifying number of professional logicians who have told me that it drew them into the profession. But my eighth book, Set Theory and Its Logic, and at a more elementary level the fourth edition of my Methods of Logic, are my contributions to that rapidly developing subject that most please me now. On the more purely philosophical side, perhaps my most influential book has been Word and Object. But my later writings improve on it in sporadic ways. E. Pivcevic: How do you see the role of philosophy in the general system of education? Professor Quine: Students who choose philosophy as a major field should also pursue a strong minor in a hard science, so as to get a true feeling of what it is to understand something or to prove something. Conversely, students majoring in other subjects need the perspective and critical detachment that can be fostered by philosophy at its best. How to contrive this in a curriculum is a baffling problem, calling for a rare combination of philosophical wisdom and pedagogical finesse. E. Pivcevic: Is there anything that philosophy, as you view it, can usefully say about God? Are you yourself a religious man? Professor Quine: What my own philosophy can say about God is that there is no such thing, at any rate in any ordinary sense of the word; and there is no answering for extraordinary senses. I am not a religious man. E. Pivcevic: Looking back on your life as a logician and a philosopher, would you say that you have achieved most of what you set out to achieve, or do you have any as yet unfulfilled intellectual ambitions? Professor Quine: It may be characteristic of a scientific or philosophical ca-

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reer that one can define a clearly intelligible goal for oneself only after being well on the way. I was pressing the vague quest for the basic elements of mathematics and the ultimate nature of reality without knowing what to look for or how to recognize it when I found it. At one stage, ontology seemed to me to be central to philosophy: what there is, and what being means. In later years I came to see that ontology, the positing of objects of one sort or another, is secondary to the relating of scientific theory to the stimulation of our sensory receptors. Yet even this was no reversal, no traumatic disillusionment. I kept pressing for further understanding, letting interim goals rise and tumble as they might. Currently I have gone on trying to clarify and integrate my views on communication, empirical content and truth, and I have lately been rewarded by the dissolution of several nagging perplexities. But I still have no unfulfilled intellectual ambition clearly in mind, and I do have my full share of philosophical curiosity about matters that I am in no position to cope with. There are the baffling challenges that quantum physics levels at the concept of cause. I think here of the findings in connection with Bell’s Inequality, and I think also of how some microphysical facts about the past are represented as depending, paradoxically, on present observation. The cosmology of the expanding universe is another matter in crying need of more light. Closer to home, there are the mysteries of the mechanism of memory; also of consciousness—I am even at a loss for a satisfactory statement of what consciousness is, though nothing is more familiar. E. Pivcevic: You said that lately your efforts have been rewarded by the dissolution of several nagging perplexities. What did you have in mind? Professor Quine: For light on the nature of meaning, I have speculated over the years on how a linguist might break into a hitherto unknown language and achieve translations. I had represented his entering wedge as translation of certain native sentences into English sentences that respond to the same sensory stimulations. But this seemed to require equating the native’s stimulations with those of the linguist; and how to equate them was one of my nagging perplexities. Lately I concluded that we need not. The linguist merely finds that he can get on with his translations by associating the ‘Jungle sentence’ and his own sentence with his own stimulations. Here was one perplexity resolved. Another was a question touched on a few minutes ago: What does the assuming of objects contribute to the linking of sensory stimula-

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tion with scientific theory? I concluded that it serves to tighten those logical links by reinforcing truth functions with quantifiers. I explained this in the volume Action and Events edited by Ernest Lepore and B. P. McLaughlin. A third quandary concerned empirically equivalent but conflicting systems of the world. Davidson showed how to resolve their logical conflicts. Should we then reckon both as true? At last I have seen my way to doing so, by relating truth to an inclusive language rather than to either system exclusively. A fourth insight has to do with empirically equivalent but conflicting manuals of translation. Both can be reckoned true by reckoning them as specifying two senses of ‘translation’. E. Pivcevic: Finally, tell us something about your origins. Your ancestors, I believe, came from the Isle of Man? Professor Quine: My father’s father was born in the Isle of Man. The name ‘Quine’ is Manx. He went to sea as a sailor in 1866 at the age of sixteen, and plied the seas under sail for a year or more, from the Faeroes in the north to the Falklands in the south. My father’s mother emigrated with her parents from Germany to Ohio. My grandfather met and married her there, and there both of my parents grew up, as did my brother and I. My mother’s father, named Van Orman, came of Dutch stock some generations removed, and her mother came of British stock aged in New England.

4 Philosophy Interview by Steven Vita for Veery 1993

Veery: What is the most rewarding aspect of philosophy? Quine: Well, for me, it’s clarification of the nature of the world, the nature of reality. I seek the same satisfaction that one looks for in science in general, in theoretical science. Veery: What do you look for in a piece of philosophy? What does it have to have for you to be impressed by it? Quine: Depth and precision and clarity. Veery: Is there a difference between the philosopher and the philosophy? Veery: Do you think that when you read a philosophical work, you can tell a lot about the philosopher as a person in his everyday life? Quine: I think that varies a great deal with a man’s style and no doubt along with it his personality. I think that a good deal of philosophical writing is completely without a perceptible personality behind it, so that there’s just no judging. Then there are other writers who I think create a pretty vivid impression of themselves through their writing. Well, the scientific sort of philosophy at least that I’m concerned with isn’t apt to reveal a personality through its subject matter. Veery: Do you find you have personalized your creative philosophical process around your habits, schedule? Or do you veto your schedule, habits and just go full tilt, damn the calendar? Quine: Well I never have kept a rigid time schedule except as imposed by my classes in the university. I’ve tended to think and work most of my available time because I generally have a project on that I’m pursuing either out of curiosity and enthusiasm or because of meeting a com-

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mitment. And I do knock off occasionally for recreation of one sort or another but not very much. Veery: As your years in philosophy accumulate and your experience in the field grows, what becomes more clear to you? Either about yourself or philosophy itself and what you do with it. Quine: There has certainly been a broadening. The first twenty years (1930– 1950) of my professional efforts, my emphasis has been pretty much on the mathematical side, mathematical logic; although philosophy has been the motivation, the content and style has been fairly mathematical. And then there’s been a broadening in that respect and more discursive philosophy from well, well, about from 1950 on, predominantly logic. In fact the turning point, in so far as there was one, was brought about by my years in the Navy which were 1943–1946, as a matter of fact. And when I began teaching after coming out of the Navy, the subjects were more centrally philosophical: theory of knowledge primarily and philosophy of science; and I think along with it, in later years, more recent years, there’s been some increase in openness and tolerance of philosophical views that previously had turned me off because of their vagueness or as it seemed irresponsibility. But I think that change, as far as it exists, is pretty slight. I’m still capable of being pretty impatient with slipshod philosophy. Veery: You sit down at a desk with some paper. You’re envisioning another work. Here you are in your eighties. Are you more able to now, in your eighties, through this experience of having done it so much, to say to yourself, “I know how to get to the point that I want to get to here faster than I did when I was in my fifties”? Quine: Well, I wonder. Yes. Yes, I am, certainly somewhat, and I’m more familiar with the sort of fumbling that goes into it. It’s a mixture of jotting down the beginnings of an outline in so far as I think of likely topics for the beginning and maybe writing a fragment that’s going to be occurring farther along but not yet having decided how that’s going to fit in. A good deal of effort goes on, writing, inserting and cutting and pasting. I still do it the old-fashioned way; I haven’t gotten converted to a word processor yet. This way the finished manuscript is apt to be rather a patchwork although consecutive. Sometimes it’s bad enough so that I then type it myself. Veery: When you’re doing things more, you’re learning the path perhaps

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more to where you want to get to, is it that when you do more of it, and you have more experience, you learn more of what to leave out, what to avoid? Is that one of the things that becomes obvious to you? Quine: Yes, that very definitely. And I think perhaps that is a result of my teaching experience. I do make more of an effort to put myself in the reader’s place: what he’s up to, what he’s apt to know already, or what I need to explain a bit, and what also seems to be heading directly to the main objective rather than incidental information. So I think there must be quite a striking difference between my earlier writings and my later ones in that respect. Veery: In poetry, there seems to be a pattern of poets who when they get older, have more experience and have been doing it more, have a tendency to cull rather as opposed to expand. Would you feel the same way about yourself and the pattern of your life’s work? Quine: Yes, I do that; perhaps I do it more than I used to; I’ve always tended to cull. I generally find that I’m more satisfied with a piece after it’s shorter, and I find that also in reading other people’s work. Veery: At what point does a work of philosophy most near reality? Quine: Well, I like to think of a successful piece of philosophy, all successful pieces of philosophy, as being equally close to reality. But they can differ in respect of certainty versus conjecture. A worthwhile piece of philosophical writing, or scientific writing more generally, can be highly conjectural and uncertain, although it’s important that the author recognize it as such; but in so far as it is successful, it’s as close to reality as the more certain jobs. I would see the difference as coming in degree of certainty, degree of conclusiveness, the capture of reality, or the portion of reality that it’s concerned with—to be aimed for every time. Veery: Who are your favorite artists and why? Quine: The ones I respond to most are the Impressionists, the French Impressionists. I get a sort of refreshment when I go into a gallery of those paintings. It’s the form, the color, the scene, the immediate unanalyzed response; there’s certainly a lot for me in the composition, the distribution of masses. I’ve been drawn a little bit into sketching myself. Some of my pencil sketches are reproduced in my autobiography. And I’ve tried my hand also at watercolors and done a number of them, and they’re very amateurish. I think the drawings are more successful. Also,

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one thing that strikes me very much is a good job of drawing, a good effective cartoon, a good caricature; in fact, I picked up for a song many years ago in Mexico a quick drawing by Rivera which hangs in our vestibule: just a very telling, single continuous curve practically of an Indian woman’s head. I think the relevance of this to my thinking is that in philosophy itself, I feel my goal anyway, and a typically philosophical goal, is getting at the essence of things; and what the caricaturist achieves, when he is successful, is this getting the essence, the essence of a face. And sometimes in the comic strips I’ll notice and clip out a drawing that captures a face or a scene with a minimum of strokes. I marvel at our ability to recognize an acquaintance at a glance though unable adequately to describe him, and I admire the artist who captures the essence in a few strokes. Veery: You’re interested in symbolic logic and mathematics, very concrete forms of philosophy, nothing vague. Here you are interested in Impressionism as opposed to realism, where Impressionism presents a feeling of a scene in terms of how a hat will have colors that you would normally never encounter with a real hat. Do you find that this is perhaps a way to explore a different aspect of your thinking, as if a kind of vacation from your realism and concreteness of the philosophy of mathematics? Quine: I think there is something in that, but I don’t succeed in going very far in that direction. When we get beyond the Impressionists into the post-Impressionists, I do still respond some to them, Matisse, Modigliani, and Rouault. But then when we move on to the really abstract ones, I don’t respond at all. In fact, I’m even suspicious of most of it. Veery: What philosophers do you respect? Veery: You probably want to only say dead ones so no one will be hurt who is alive. Quine: Of the old timers, I feel most congenial to Hume. But one old timer, although there’s a good deal I don’t like about his views and his way of presenting them, is Kant. There are deep insights there that I’ve come closer to sharing as time has gone on. As far as recent figures, the man that interests me most is Carnap, Rudolf Carnap. There was a time, a short time, when I agreed pretty fully with his views; then we diverged in later years, but I still was very much influenced by him even when I

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i n te rv i e ws was debating some of the points with him. He was the greatest influence on me and I guess Bertrand Russell next and earlier.

Veery: Is your after hour life tightly linked to philosophy? Veery: Do you have time when you never even think about philosophy: you’re playing either a sport or cards, or just watching television, and you avoid philosophy? Quine: Oh I see, yes, not very much. When something comes on television that promises to be interesting, oh archeology or popular science or travel (or it’s apt to be geography), and occasionally also something say, a light skit, or the “Masterpiece Theatre” generally, yes, and certainly my mind’s off philosophy when I’m watching that: but that only happens, maybe, oh, a few hours a week, but very few. And otherwise I just haven’t given enough time really to sports or games—sometimes when there’s some social situation, or perhaps I’m with relatives or old friends (of course there’ll be lively conversation); and that certainly is remote from philosophy for me, and may even settle into a game that’s likely to be Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, but those occasions are really rare. I should add that very frequently, every few nights, some seasons it’s almost every evening, my wife and I will have a couple of games of chess—neither of us is good, neither of us could compete with a champ of a village high school chess team, but we enjoy chess. Veery: Philosophy and social/political concerns. Does one have business with the other? Quine: I don’t think my philosophy does but certainly some philosophy does and philosophy which I think is genuinely philosophical and worthwhile. I think of my colleague, John Rawls, whose field is ethics and political philosophy; I don’t agree with his politics: he’s too liberal for me. But I admire him as a philosopher and there are ingenious and deep perceptions in his writing. And another one I think of, again on the more or less political edge, is Amartya Sen who is a philosopher and economist. That end of philosophy I think is relevant to society and politics. Veery: When you started in philosophy, what did you think of it? What do you think of it now? Quine: Well, my first philosophical impulse I guess was, still in my fairly early years, fed in part by Edgar Allan Poe’s piece, “Eureka.” It fed my curiosity about nature, about everything, about the cosmos. A few

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years later [that interest] led into reading popular science, Arthur S. Eddington, Bertrand Russell, Sir James Jeans. So that’s been the impulse. I wonder: have I forgotten your question, or am I getting away from it? Veery: When you started in philosophy, what did you think of it? What do you think of it now? How did you view philosophy, and how do you view it now? Is it still functioning, fulfilling the same needs to you as it did before? Are you still viewing it and identifying it the same as you did before? Quine: Certainly the impulse for me is the same. In the earliest days, I did have notions of brilliant illuminations from the readings of the things that started out so mysteriously: Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of mathematics and well again Poe on the cosmos and then the popular science writers. Well, I think I see philosophy very much the same, I see philosophy as a handmaiden of the sciences, and I have visions of its being increasingly useful in a practical way for the scientists as the old rather artificial barriers between philosophy and science are weakening. There’s much more collaboration. Veery: Of your philosophy, what is your favorite? Quine: Well, of the short ones, one of my short essays that has been anthologized a lot, perhaps it’s “On What There Is” in 1948. But certainly of my books, the most decisive, most influential one, and perhaps one I like the best is Word and Object in 1960. But then my work has been rather schizophrenic, you might say, between mathematics and philosophy; most of the readers of those works, Word and Object for instance, haven’t read my logic at all, the mathematicians vice versa. On the mathematical side, what I like best is my Set Theory and Its Logic. However, now as I think more of it, I should mention above all, Quiddities. It has been getting round, and in fact it’s even in Penguin now. I wish I could do more of that because now and then I just happen to pick the book up and read a few pages, and I’m tickled all over again; and that’s what I’m particularly proud of. In fact, I’m particularly pleased when one of my readers comes up with something he admires not in the way of my philosophical views but some line, maybe in one of my logic books or one of my philosophy books, some line that appealed to him, that had some sort of surprise or witty turn to it. Veery: Did you have any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige?

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Quine: Well, yes. There was a period there, the late thirties, when I had published quite a number of articles and a book or two and didn’t feel that I was getting the advancement up the academic ladder as quickly as I should. At that time, I was even considering outside offers; I was at Harvard as it turned out early and late. But then, times changed. In fact, it was when I came back from my three years and a half in the Navy: I was very promptly advanced and thankful that I had stayed at Harvard. I have since then had no such discomfort or dissatisfaction at all. I’ve had all the recognition I deserved and perhaps more. Veery: Do you picture yourself as part of any tradition? Quine: Yes; I can’t classify myself exactly. I’ve been classified as a logical positivist, I’ve been classified as a pragmatist, I certainly would consider myself an empiricist (that’s so broad as not to say much), but the main influence behind me, as I see it now, was the Vienna Circle of which Carnap was for me the main spokesman. Although I’ve departed from that, and I’ve been regarded even as one of the opponents of classical positivism who contributed to its decline, I see that as just a matter rather of the events of scientific advance, things moving ahead, philosophy moving ahead, as other scientific fields do. But that would be the tradition. An earlier influence was Bertrand Russell, however he would be classified. He regarded himself as a realist; I do too and myself as well. Veery: What disappoints you today about the present philosophy world? Quine: Well, there is a tendency which I think of as disappointing: it’s in general the defeatist tendency, as I see it, the deconstructionism and its predecessor the existentialist movement; those I deplore. Those are stronger, and certainly deconstruction and related attitudes are more influential in literary circles, English departments and the like, than in professional philosophical departments; but there’s a certain amount there too. On the other hand, at my end of things, I’m cheered. I’m cheered by the way young graduate students, some of them, are going into science very seriously and even along with their philosophy are taking seminars, advanced seminars even in quantum mechanics; and then in another direction, the increasing communication and collaboration between philosophers and psychologists, pyscho-linguists, neurologists (that is brain neurology), and artificial intelligence in the computer field, and mathematical logic along with it which has become

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so central to computer theory—that bundle of fields is practically a single superfield in itself. Veery: What’s the best thing someone could say about your work? Quine: Things that have been said that have pleased me—some people have admired my style: its succinctness is one of the things I hear, and occasional flash of wit which pleases some of them, so that stylistic thing is part of it. As for content, well, yes, one thing that has been remarked on is the scope and integration of it: the making for something like an overall system, somewhat more systematic anyway than the usual modern philosophical corpus of an individual. And the logical precision, explicitness. Veery: Do you interest yourself in another field to bring your philosophy an added dimension? Quine: I’ve had to look some into psychology, certainly mathematics, nothing else I believe in depth—and linguistics, decidedly. More specifically, history of language, word origins and all that had been an enthusiasm of mine before I’d even decided on a philosophical career, and that, as things have worked out in later years, the so called linguistic turn in philosophy (I think Richard Rorty’s phrase), has even made linguistics relevant to my philosophical pursuits: linguistics not in the specific sense (specific word origins and specific languages which I have been interested in primarily since the old days) but rather the broad, mostly theoretical aspects of linguistics; that in fact, now that I think of it, linguistics would be the field, apart from philosophy and mathematical logic, that has concerned me most. Veery: Is philosophical talent something you are simply born with? Quine: Well, I think yes to some degree. From my angle, I think of a talent which would combine with some degree of mathematical talent as well: a talent for precision, explicitness, and depth. Well I don’t know what basis there is by way of evidence, hard evidence, but my impression is that a good deal of that is in the genes. Veery: Before you got into philosophy, what was on your mind as philosophy is on your mind today? Veery: Did you want to be an architect or something else at one time? Did you have a different love? Quine: I’ve had as a child, and it’s lasted through later years as well although

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i n te rv i e ws it’s petered out now, a tremendous drive for seeing the world, and I have traveled a lot, and along with that also learning other languages. I didn’t, growing up, have any serious views of another career, a career that would call for traveling specifically. Yes, in my late teens I guess, one alternative I was considering seriously was the career of a writer, a fiction writer perhaps. I’m certainly glad I didn’t stick with that; I couldn’t have, in fact.

Veery: What makes a philosopher’s career rise? Quine: Well, you mean progress in his philosophical theory or progress in his career advancement? Veery: Career advancement, prestige. Quine: Of course, pretty much a minimum requirement is publication. And I don’t think there’s any way of getting around that although it has its very unfortunate aspects because it encourages publication of stuff that isn’t worth publishing, that encourages the founding of new journals with lower and lower standards. Since tangible evidence is needed for the part of the senior faculty or deans who are making the decisions, publication does have to be a major criterion; but the important way of tempering that evil is that it should be qualitative and not quantitative, and efforts should be made to assess the philosophic value of the publications. That’s compatible with the publications having been quite few and brief. Veery: To what extent does the press play? Veery: Either the specialty press in the field or the press at large. Quine: From the vantage point of Harvard, I would say the professional press. Veery: There is no succession up the ladder without the professional press giving you the blessing to make that ascension up the ladder. Quine: There is not much, but teaching can’t be disregarded. At Harvard, I guess there’s more premium on scientific contributions that is through publication rather than the teaching, but I think in other institutions, especially small colleges, and quite rightly, the stress should be on the teaching; but everywhere the teaching is a factor: if a man’s teaching is really pretty bad, basically there’s no place for him. Veery: Where does philosophy start? Quine: Well in practice it’s usually apropos of some issue, some controversy that’s already in the current literature. That’s far and away the most fre-

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quent way, as in various sciences; there are current ongoing problems and the professionals flock to them. Veery: What is philosophy? Quine: Philosophy covers such different directions. Philosophy as I see it, as I’m involved in it, is the search for basic principles, basic concepts. What there is—what does what there is do—fundamentally. Veery: What can a philosopher learn from a poet? Quine: I haven’t read enough poetry to have really been influenced philosophically by it, or the right ones, unless one counts again “Eureka,” what Edgar Allan Poe called a prose poem; that certainly did. One thing you can certainly learn is an improvement of your style. Veery: Is philosophy closer to mathematics or creative writing? Quine: Scientific philosophy, the sort I think of, philosophy of science and all that, is closer to mathematics. Veery: What can a philosopher learn from an artist? Quine: Selectiveness certainly. Veery: Is one aspect of a philosophical treatise the most significant, for example, new territory covered over analysis, or just as well, analysis over new territory covered? Quine: Yes, that’s an interesting question: which is more significant—working out a theory for a new domain that hasn’t properly been systematized at all versus getting a better theory for one that already has? I’d say the former, a significant theory if it’s a substantial job; having subdued new wild territory is I think better than having improved one’s treatment of familiar territory. Veery: Who are your favorite writers, poets, novelists, and why? Quine: There are some. Now and then I’ve read poetry and been quite moved by it. And I felt I should read more of it, but I just don’t. Some Yeats, Coleridge, I think of “Kubla Khan” and “The Ancient Mariner,” and Poe, whose complete works I read in my youth. There are a fair number of poems that I’ve certainly been delighted with. I respond quite strongly, quite deeply to an occasional passage in one or another poem. Veery: What do you think about when you look at a blank sheet of paper? Quine: Well, for a while I do look at the paper, get up and walk around, or

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lie down, and then I’Il think of something which may be the beginning, may be just a little outline of three or four topics; and then I’ll hurry back to the paper and get them down. So the thought that has occurred to me at the start is just wondering how to get into the topic when I’ve already got the topic in mind. And often, when I’m in that situation, I stop writing, and weather permitting, go walking and kick the idea around while I take a walk somewhere; or, when I’m out at our country place in the summer, I may go out in my canoe. At least as often as not, I come back with a better perspective and can go ahead. Veery: If a poet, Milton, Donne, T. S. Eliot, whoever, had just written a philosophical work, whose would you want to read and why? Quine: I haven’t read much Milton. I haven’t read much Eliot; I wouldn’t be tempted by either I guess. Veery: If a philosopher, Hume, Plato, or whoever, had just written a poem, whose would you want to read and why? Quine: The philosophers I’m most responsive to are the ones least likely to have written a poem. I suppose, well, I was going to say Russell, but Russell did go over into fiction: there were a couple of little books, Satan in the Suburbs and Nightmares, that fell flat. Veery: Do you prefer to watch sunrise or sunset? Quine: Oh sunset, even though I do often see the sunrise. Veery: What to you is the point of criticism? Veery: Between philosophers to philosophers. Quine: The value of it of course is in pointing out a mistake. This can be a real contribution, a real contribution even from the point of view of one who has been corrected. The criticism can often suggest the next step, even to the philosopher who is criticized. Yes it’s tremendously valuable. I always want there to be a referee on any professional journal to which I submit a paper. I have gained from referees over and over and have been saved from publishing a blunder on several occasions. But on the other hand in philosophy there’s a regrettable hostility in criticism; one finds it even especially in young budding philosophers, partly I think because of the publish-or-perish situation. Reading something with a critical eye and hoping to find something to come out against is the easiest, most direct way of finding something to write about if you don’t have an inner urge to begin with in that direction. So

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there’s altogether too much of that. I’ve been pleased on a couple of occasions recently to read that philosophers are at a point of trying to read sympathetically and saying as much: I think of Daniel Dennett as one and I think of Wilhelm Essler as another. Veery: Thousands of years ago they saw an animal die in their cave. Someone in the cave communicated to another human that such killing is a part of life no matter how sad. Was that philosophy or did it start sometime else? Quine: Yes, good, yes. Yes. I’ll accept that as philosophy. Veery: What is philosophy’s role to nature? Quine: I don’t understand. Veery: Does it have to evoke what one would consider some of the same characteristics of nature into the thought process of philosophy as in terms of things being in a state of harmony, having their own procession? Is there somehow a way we can apply that, in thinking of that, to philosophy? Veery: For instance, we can say with art, that art has a definite role to nature: for instance, the landscape painting, in an abstract work even if it’s a landscape painting with a stroke instead of a house, and then in poetry we say, yes, things must have their balance, things must have their composition, for all things have their place. Quine: Well perhaps so. In science generally, and in philosophy in particular, there’s certainly a premium, other things being equal, on symmetry of design, just as there is on simplicity, economy of means. Veery: At what point does perception become logic? Quine: I’m not sure how to take that. At what point does it become logically organized? Veery: You have a thought, and you have made a perception, and this thought is at this point a perception. At what point would this thought then turn into logic? Quine: Yes, well, I think that happens when it gets connected to a significant set of ideas that you have already accepted so that its relation to several other ideas is clarified to the point where you can fit it systematically in. Veery: Is there one artist by art or poet by poetry who you feel reminds you of yourself by your philosophy?

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Quine: No, I can’t seem to think of any one out there. Veery: Would you like to clarify any positions or misconceptions through external sources, people, applied to your work, in a brief way? Quine: You mean where people have been wrong? Veery: Yes. Quine: That certainly happens frequently. Often it will be a misconception of some incidental point, not the whole theory, and then I’ll go back and look at the reference; I’ll see how yes, they simply misread that, and I’ll see how it could be misread. And chances are if there’s another opportunity, another edition to be published, I’ll patch that up. And I am a good many times startled and surprised at the misconception. Sometimes it’s been due to a false lead in my exposition; but more often I think it’s been something that didn’t occur to me to cover because I’d taken it for granted and would have assumed, if anybody had asked me, that the reader would take it for granted. It hadn’t crossed my mind to wonder whether the reader might or might not. It’s a rather unpleasant experience. Veery: Do you think that a philosopher could write a philosophical treatise that had an aspect of interest to the philosopher to it, however it wasn’t really everything that the philosopher was most interested in—is there a point of detachment—is it possible for a philosopher to express a view on philosophy that the philosopher could be somewhat detached from no matter how successful he was in that subject, that treatise? Quine: I think it happens that a philosopher does a laborious study, or an article at least, on a subject that he’s not really interested in because it either develops in the line of his teaching duties, or he is thinking in terms of possible advancement of his own situation; but I certainly wouldn’t expect the best work to come out of such a venture: it’s apt to be dull and plodding.

5 W. V. Quine: Perspectives on Logic, Science, and Philosophy Bradley Edmister and Michael O’Shea 1994

Introduction Perhaps no philosopher has been so influential yet so unrecognized as Willard van Orman Quine. Though widely known, read, and deeply respected within the philosophical community, the name Quine is virtually unknown outside of the academy. Nevertheless, Quine’s work provides the intellectual grounding for the “postmodern” revolution in English-speaking countries; he is the father of a fundamental change in the way people conceive the world. Quine’s early work focused heavily on logic, a subject about which he published two books in the early 1940s. His work, however, quickly began to incorporate the study of language. Quine was involved in a series of exchanges with Rudolf Carnap. Their debate centered around Carnap’s sharp distinction between a language that one spoke and the statements that one made in this language. This view relied on a hallowed distinction in philosophy (at that time): the distinction between analytic truths (statements true in virtue of the meanings of their words) and synthetic truths (matters of empirical fact). With the publication of his article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (in From a Logical Point of View) in the early 1950s, Quine launched a ferocious attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. In the process he shook a fundamental belief widely held by philosophers and began a debate that is, to this day, unsettled. His work in this period has had a lasting and profound impact on the history of philosophy, especially on the logical

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positivists (the most notable of whom was Carnap), contending that their philosophical project was misconceived. Had Quine’s philosophical career ended here, he would deserve to be considered among the giants of the twentieth century. But he was far from done. In 1960 Quine published Word and Object. In this book he developed his famous doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation. Quine argued that there were many ways, each consistent with all potentially available evidence, of translating between any two languages. In attacking the analytic-synthetic distinction and arguing for the indeterminacy of translation, Quine was attacking a “dogma” deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition— that words have meanings. The connection between these arguments and word meaning is this: if words were to have determinate meanings, then one could speak of two words being synonymous if they had the same meaning. It would follow, then, that an analytic truth would be one that could be turned into a logical truth by replacing some of the words in the sentence by their synonyms. Similarly, if words have meanings, then only one translation between two languages would be acceptable—that which mapped each word in one language to a word in the other language that had the same meaning. Quine’s work in the 1950s aimed at destabilizing meaning. This notion of meaning being unstable, which has its roots in Quine, is central to the contemporary postmodern project. Further, Quine argued that our knowledge forms a “web of belief.” For Quine, no piece of knowledge was sacred or beyond potential revision. His work in the 1950s partially anticipates and lays the groundwork for Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a work at the very basis of the postmodern canon. The idea expressed therein—that scientific theories are simply descriptions of observed phenomena rather than deep descriptions of “reality”—is a clear extension of Quine’s web of beliefs. Quine’s style of writing was elegant and rigorous. His argumentation was famously clear and well-phrased. His work helped set the standard for philosophical rigor and clarity that is still dominant today in departments of analytic philosophy. In his later years, Quine continued to struggle with ideas in language and logic and produced much philosophical writing, including the Philosophy of Logic (1970), in which he revisits issues of logic, truth, and meaning. W. V. Quine passed away December 25, 2000, having left an indelible imprint on the world he inhabited. The influence he exerted both on the philosophical community and the contributions he made to ways of thinking in general are of lasting importance.

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Interview HRP: What is the role of philosophy vis-à-vis science? Quine: I think of philosophy as continuous with science, but philosophy differs by degree in various respects. Philosophy undertakes to analyze the general, basic concepts of science—the sort of concepts the practicing scientist will typically take for granted. These are such basic notions as truth, existence, and necessity. Also, philosophy investigates questions of evidence for science—that’s epistemology. It seeks a better understanding of the tremendous transformation that takes place between the input that we receive through the irritation of our sensory surfaces, and our torrential output in the form of scientific theory. It tries to analyze theory, and see[s] how much of it is really dictated by the input (“by nature,” we say, but that’s only going to be in the input), and how much is only a matter of our accommodation and organization of it. These are considerations that aren’t ordinarily taken up by any particular science. In these studies, philosophy will sometimes elicit paradoxes, which the scientist, even if he is told about them, isn’t likely to worry about. In normal scientific practice, he can simply dodge that end of his theory. But the philosopher is going to be concerned. HRP: So the existence of paradoxes in philosophy of science doesn’t affect the workings of scientific theory? Quine: Right. This is brought up most dramatically in the familiar paradoxes of set theory—Russell’s Paradox and the like. Even mathematicians, as a whole, didn’t worry about them, because they weren’t going to be dealing with self-membership in classes, or classes of all non-self-membered classes. They worked in mathematical domains where, when intuitively surveying the assumptions and axioms involved, they felt they were on solid ground. It’s the sort of thing that falls quite naturally into the philosopher’s domain. HRP: That view seems to reduce the work of philosophy to simply tying up the loose ends of science. Is that accurate? Quine: Yes, I think “tying up loose ends” is a good way of condensing philosophy’s purpose. HRP: How much science should a philosopher know in order to do his job competently? Quine: It’s important that he have a respectable grasp, at least at the undergraduate level, of a hard science. It’s extremely important to have had

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the experience of really knowing something without a shadow of doubt, even if it takes [on a] complicated argument, and having what one feels is a firm basis of evidence. Ideal for this purpose is mathematics, especially mathematical logic. I have always felt that a good course in modern logic ought to be required, not only of every candidate for a philosophy degree, but for every undergraduate in every field. It could even be valuable for students specializing in the literary domain, where one doesn’t aspire to logic’s sort of certainty and conviction. It’s important for those students to see the difference. HRP: What is the role of first-order logic in the scientific project, in physics, for example? Quine: In relation to physics, I don’t see much of a role. I think that as far as elementary logic is concerned, the common sense of the physicist today (and of centuries ago, perhaps, before modern logic began) is enough. But modern logic is important for a systematic understanding of theoretical relationships; and when it comes to more analytical studies, both in foundations of mathematics and in philosophical analysis of concepts generally, logic is vital. The illumination that modern logic has brought to philosophy of mathematics is the most illuminating instance. Gödel’s incompleteness proof contradicted what everybody, even mathematicians, had taken for granted, namely, that mathematical truth consists in demonstrability. [It was thought that] you may not find the proof, but the proof can be found, if the thing is true—and a proof purely mathematical in content and formulation. This is what Gödel showed to be an impossible situation. HRP: How has the role of logic in philosophy changed from the 1920s and 1930s, when there was a lot of excitement about the foundational role of logic? Quine: I don’t think the foundational role of logic has changed. But there’s been a lot of progress in specialized directions, with perhaps the greatest being in axiomatic set theory and higher categories of infinity, and then also a tremendous amount of progress in proof theory, of which Gödel’s proof is a shining example. HRP: You crowned your recent Pursuit of Truth (1987) with the motto, “Save the surface and you save all.” How have your empiricism and behaviorism affected your view of what it means to give a philosophical explanation?

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Quine: That epigraph was accompanied with another one from Plato— “save the phenomena.” I find it particularly interesting that Plato appreciated this attitude, but it’s essentially just the statement of empiricism, the statement that what we’re trying to do is explain what we can observe. If we don’t respect our observations, and stick to them rather than revising them to fit our theory, then we’re not succeeding in our effort to achieve truth. Behaviorism, as far as I’m concerned, is only an intersubjective empiricism. It’s empirical in attitude, but one doesn’t settle, in the manner of Husserl and the old epistemologists, for private, introspective data. When you take as your data your own perceptions, and pool these with those of your colleagues, and get the common denominator, then you have data which are pertinent to science from the standpoint of intersubjective behaviorism. I don’t see that as going beyond what every modern scientist would subscribe to as a matter of course. HRP: In the reduction of common-sense terms for introspective human states to publicly accessible, empiricist terms, is there a danger of losing something? Can empiricism do justice to our inner lives? Quine: Here one must distinguish two factors: the dreaming-up of hypotheses and the amassing of evidence for them. All sorts of undisciplined thinking can be valuable as a first step in thinking up bright ideas, wayout, highly imaginative, which turn out to be just what’s needed once you get down to finding logical connections through experiments. I don’t think that this process neglects the natural mentalistic input—it just means not settling for it. Daniel Dennett was very good on this topic in an essay defending introspection, which took pretty much this line, as I read it. HRP: You wrote in Pursuit of Truth that “there is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances.” Does the indeterminacy of translation hinder the intersubjective communication of scientific concepts, a communication which seems to be important for the project of “naturalizing epistemology”? Quine: No, I think not. The indeterminacy of translation doesn’t get in the way of translation—it allows that there are good translations and bad. It’s rather a question of the data that are available to see whether a translation is good or bad. It proposes external, behavioral criteria for the test. Here’s the situation: you have two translation manuals that are both

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as good as can be. This is according to the empirical test of using them in normal communication with a native, and finding that they lead to smooth dialogue and successful negotiation, which could mean getting directions somewhere, or the native’s giving up some priceless relic for some glass beads, or whatever you’re trying to bring about. Those are the tests. If you have two manuals, arrived at independently, which both pass those tests to perfection, then you try meshing them. Suppose it turns out that if you use one of these manuals for a given text, it gives perfect, smooth translation, and if you use the other one it works just as well, but when you try alternating them on the same text it turns out to give incoherence. This illustrates what I mean by the indeterminacy of translation. My conjecture is that [this situation] is to be expected when we get into theoretical dialogue. However, it’s not something that would show up in entering into scientific communication; both of these manuals are completely successful on the empirical score. In that case, the moral is: stick to the same manual. But translation isn’t always possible in science. Today’s physicist talks about Neutrinos, for instance, and says “Neutrinos are particles which lack rest mass.” That sentence certainly isn’t translatable into the English of 1930, because there’s no translation of “Neutrino,” not even a long paraphrase; because “Neutrino” has never been defined. None of the particles, not even “electron,” has ever been defined in the strict logical sense of definition. There aren’t even contextual definitions comparable to Russell’s definition of singular descriptions. No word or phrase, either by itself or in context, can take the place of the word “Neutrino” or the word “electron.” This is no obstacle; people use the word with no problem, and the native above can even use the word, given a certain substructure of explanation. Explanation, but not translation. HRP: Your view explains intersubjective communication on the basis of readily observable events. But what happens when we’re testing “manuals” about theoretical concepts or philosophical ideas? Presumably, such manuals could conflict with each other, yet they don’t necessarily allow for observable evidence of the success of translation. This is more acute given the potential existence of radically different conceptual schemes among those communicating. What do we do in this case? Quine: The way I see it, two different translators could in theory come up

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with quite different conceptual schemes for the same people. I see this as a matter of richness rather than poverty. It helps bring out the point that conceptual schemes are almost completely a matter of human creativity—creativity to the purpose, however, of matching up with the neural input. Theory is so overwhelmingly much stronger and broader than the neural input that, of course, you expect slack, and that’s what makes me believe in the thesis of indeterminacy. In the case we’re imagining, we have two accounts of the natives’ metaphysics, which are not much alike. It is then a chastening experience to find that they’re equally faithful accounts. Now what there is to be communicated of an objective, scientific kind is being communicated all the better, through our appreciating the theoretical latitude. HRP: Would it be fruitful for philosophers to become irritated about this state of affairs and seek metaphysical explanations for this metaphysical looseness? Quine: I don’t think so. The distinctive thing about science is that there are checkpoints of observation. Everything that is compatible with those checkpoints [is acceptable]. One is always trying, as Sir Karl Popper pointed out, to “break” one’s theory, devising the least hopeful experiment possible to subject it to. That’s what marks the difference between responsible science and fancy, and it remains undisturbed through all this. HRP: Your philosophy played a pivotal role in the demolition of the logical positivism of the 1930s. Do you feel any nostalgia for the philosophical optimism of those days? Quine: I can see the attractiveness of that idea, but I also see something hopeful that seems to be taking its place: the tendency in certain philosophical circles (Dennett is again a shining example of this) to rub out, or at least blur, the boundaries between philosophies and various sciences. Here, Simon Saunders and others are trying to rub out the boundaries between physics and philosophy, along with others like Aber Shimony. It’s not only getting physics into the philosophical circle, but philosophy into the physical circle—collaboration. These people take serious, advanced seminars in physics. Roger Penrose, in The Emperor’s New Mind, is hoping that someone will come up with a new force, a new particle, that will give us a more intuitive understanding of new finds in quantum mechanics, of scientific concepts anyway. That’s of as much interest to philosophers as physicists, and the addition of

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philosophers trained in physics might improve the situation in physics itself. HRP: So the paradigm is not philosophy grounding physics, but rather a mutual strengthening and smoothing between philosophy and physics. Quine: Exactly. Furthermore, it’s not just in physics. This effect is present in the work of Dennett, with his seminars over at Tufts with people from neurology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology participating. The boundaries between philosophy and all these fields are wavering and disappearing, and this bears promise of a great new era. HRP: Are we, then, on the verge of a new optimism about the role of philosophy and science? Is there a feeling of possibility, of finally “getting things right”? Quine: I don’t know about getting things finally right—it’s an interesting question whether there’s an end point, but I have no firm opinion there. There is certainly progress, that seems very clear. What excites me in this collaboration is the prospect of progress, not necessarily getting to the end of the line. HRP: What have you found to be the most exciting intellectual development of the last twenty years? Quine: Near philosophy, and of close philosophical relevance, I think of the work of Hubel and Wiesel in neurology, and the utterly new picture that they’ve given of the neurology of vision. It seems that it’s not a matter of the visual field being reflected isomorphically somewhere in the nervous system, but a matter of various dominant features coming in separately from one another, and not even being clearly synthesized until the moment of reflection. All of this goes on in hundredths of seconds. It gives us a new angle of approach. Reaching back before 1974, I think of advances in psychology of vision made by Edwin H. Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, and his theory of color vision. There’s no guessing what they’re going to come up with next. HRP: You seem to have considerable respect for the work being done in cognitive science. How do you feel about the attitudes characteristic of cognitive science, for instance, the conjecture that machines can duplicate the intelligence of humans? Quine: First, I find the Turing test for artificial intelligence unhopeful as a test, because human behavior depends so much on everything that’s gone on through many years, reaching back to infancy, and even to the

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distant history of our corner of the world. Intelligence, it seems, is a matter of degree, and I’m hindered by the fact that I have no satisfactory criterion for what constitutes “thinking.” When we just go by output, of course, computers are already doing a quite remarkable job of thinking. But I doubt that a machine could ever pass the Turing test. That was itself an arbitrary criterion to separate thinking from computing, and I have no hope for the development of a sharp criterion. HRP: Famously, several of your papers written in the 1950s denied that the analytic/synthetic distinction had any foundational value, at least in the sense that Carnap and others wished. Does the distinction have any methodological significance? Quine: In The Roots of Reference I suggested a definition of analyticity which seemed to me to approximate the layman’s intuitive conception—not that the layman uses the term “analytic.” The analytic is what the layman calls “just a matter of words.” He dismisses someone’s assertion as just a matter of words, as a question of how to use the words. But we still want a criterion for analyticity, and one that has occurred to me is that a sentence is analytic (for a given native speaker) if he learns the truth of the sentence in the course of learning one of its words. The obvious example is “No bachelor is married.” A native speaker clearly learns the truth of this sentence by learning how to use the word “bachelor.” A foreign speaker might have learned the word rather by translation. This criterion covers not only all sentences like that, but surely also all truths of elementary logic. Somebody who affirms “p and q” but denies “p” is, we say, misusing “and.” He hasn’t learned to use “and.” That’s true for all the basic principles of elementary logic, and from the basic principles you get all of elementary logic. Elementary logic, in the sense I intend it here, is complete. It covers truth—functions, quantification, and identity—not set theory. This fits nicely with what Frege, Carnap, and Kant all held. I don’t think of the rest of mathematics as being analytic. Furthermore, this isn’t a concept that I can see applying across the board. This is what makes it unfruitful as a tool of philosophical analysis. Nobody remembers how they learned the truth of each sentence, and on the face of it, it shouldn’t matter. So a new word, “momentum,” comes in. By definition, it’s mass times velocity. No questions there, an arbitrary definition. We simply

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dig up an obsolete Latin word for this technical purpose. But even so, relativity theory denies that momentum is simply mass times velocity. You have to get something in there about the square of the speed of light. So there’s nothing about analyticity that compels particular uses of words. That’s why I felt that Carnap’s blanket application of the term in theoretical contexts generally was obscuring the issues and getting on the wrong track. This matter of truth by virtue of language does come in as a component, but not, I would argue, sentence by sentence. Clearly, verbal convention is a factor in the truth of any sentence. If the syllables of the words in any sentence, however empirical it may be, were used for another purpose, the sentence might be false instead of true. So the degree to which language contributes to this or that sentence, this or that part of science, can be methodologically and scientifically significant. HRP: Is the gradation of analyticity and syntheticity in ordinary language a philosophically interesting topic? What are some ways it might be talked about? Quine: I wouldn’t think of it as coming into issue with particular words. But sentence by sentence . . . it seems reasonable that there would be gradations, maybe consisting in the magnitude of the network of definitions that are necessary to connect what we learn ostensibly with a sentence in question. That’s a highly theoretical question, and perhaps that would capture the gradation. HRP: You gave us a sense in which elementary logic is analytic, but were just now careful to exclude set theory from that sense, presumably because of the implications of Russell’s Paradox. What is the status of set theory, and given its use in grounding the axioms of mathematics, where does that leave arithmetic? Quine: Russell’s Paradox made all the difference. Frege thought the whole of set theory was analytic, although even in the days before Russell’s Paradox he noted somewhere that the axiom that people would be most dubious about in terms of its analyticity was the universal comprehension principle [all predicates determine classes]. The question applies to higher mathematics generally, from set theory on up. I see mathematics as sharing empirical content in a way connected with holism. In general, if you’re testing a scientific hypothesis, typically you’re going to need a whole cluster of other hypotheses before

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you get down to the level of observables with implied consequences. Among the auxiliary hypotheses you’ll have to bring in, there will be some purely mathematical principles, differential and integral calculus, and so on. So you might say that in general a cluster of scientific truths and hypotheses has an empirical “critical mass” if it is enough to imply observable consequences. And often, to get critical mass you’re going to need some purely mathematical sentences. If you regard essential participation in a set of hypotheses with critical masses as what it means to have empirical content, it means that [all] applicable mathematics has empirical content. But it’s not empirical in the sense of John Stuart Mill; that is, arithmetic is not the product of generalization from counting and counting again. Sometimes it is, I expect, historically, but that’s not the point. Then I would apply this in particular to set theory. But this matter of having empirical content must be separated from the old positivistic exclusion principle of the meaninglessness of metaphysics. I think it’s a mistake to require that a sentence must have empirical content in order to be meaningful. In fact, I think that there’s no end to the important [non-empirical] beliefs and truths of history and sociology, and perhaps theoretical physics. You can add a whole bunch of them together and they won’t be enough to imply any observations, and yet they’re important. They seem plausible by virtue of symmetry, simplicity, fitting-in to the things that we have well established by tests. These are indispensable, moreover, in suggesting further hypotheses which one can test. Science would be paralyzed if we excluded the untestables. HRP: Within a “critical mass” of hypotheses in mathematics, exactly how do the purely mathematical sentences relate to the empirical ones? Quine: Here’s something characteristic of mathematics, but perhaps not only of mathematics: that these sentences are needed as components of sets with critical mass, but that no set purely of mathematical components has critical mass. This is a sense in which mathematics can be viewed as auxiliary to science. But then history—something as unlike mathematics as can be—would also be auxiliary in this sense. Again, just a set of historical sentences about, say, ancient Rome, and nothing more, can’t be tested without the help of a lot more earthy generalizations. The tolerance that I’m urging regarding sentences that don’t, of

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themselves, have empirical consequences, becomes, curiously enough, not merely a defense of highly speculative metaphysics or of history, but of hard mathematics itself. HRP: Your work is marked by a clear concern for style of expression. What are your stylistic aims in writing philosophy? Quine: Well, I certainly haven’t thought about style enough to have principles of consequence, but one thing that I tend to try to avoid is mutually conflicting etymological metaphors. One of the persistent errors that strikes me funny, which I first saw in a newspaper, and now it keeps popping up in print, is “stirring up tensions.” Another is “it was at the height of the Depression.” Another specific thing I dislike is the heterogeneity of languages in new coinages. I like homogeneity of the components of a new word. For example, a mathematician’s “hypernatural numbers.” No! “Supernatural numbers.” Hyper is Greek and natural is Latin. There’s so much of that. I would hope that a scientist who needs a new technical word for something would consult a literate colleague, someone who knows Latin and Greek and could help him get it right. In more general terms, I strive for clarity and brevity. It happens so often that by going over something and making it shorter I improve it. HRP: Where did you pick up your rhetorical principles and skills? Quine: When I look back to my first book, A System of Logic (1934), and articles from those years, I find that it’s a more stilted style—I wasn’t as sure of myself. My style’s improved a lot since then. It’s been mostly a matter of practice. I don’t know of any source for my distaste for heterogeneities and so on. HRP: At its best, it seems that American analytic philosophy tends toward a radically clear, taut style that one sees particularly in both your work and Nelson Goodman’s. It reflects a very different spirit from the German philosophical prose of someone like Heidegger. Do you think that the tradition and the values of those who work in it dictate a particular style? Quine: That’s a very interesting point, and I believe perhaps it does. There are certainly affinities between [my writing] and Goodman’s. But when I think of how clear and succinct Carnap’s German was. . . . HRP: Perhaps it’s not national, but rather a divide between the analytic and Continental traditions. Quine: Yes, I think that’s it. It’s the same sort of taste that makes for mathe-

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matical and logical elegance. It’s linked to the desire for clarity and brevity. But my interest in overtones in etymological metaphors would be an independent factor. It comes from an interest in natural language as such that I’ve had from way back; it just happened. I got into etymologies when I was still in high school—I remember taking books out of the library about the origins of words. I still have the same urge; I’ll want to know what the origin of a word is and have to look it up. HRP: What modern philosophers do you follow with the most interest? Who do you think is on the right track? Quine: I suppose that would have to include the work of my former student, Donald Davidson. I don’t agree with him on everything, but we’re after nearly the same thing, and along the same lines. We have very profitable discussions. HRP: That’s interesting—in a controversial reading of Davidson’s philosophy, Richard Rorty has taken Davidson as an exemplar of his own type of ironist, relativist anti-representationalism. What do you think of Rorty’s stance? Quine: I was surprised by reading Rorty’s big book [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature], the one that made such a stir. He said very favorable things about my philosophical views, which surprised me because I didn’t like his position. It strikes me as defeatist, and it shows a bit of the anti-scientific bias that is more extreme in people like Derrida and Heidegger. HRP: Those “Continental” thinkers are often distinguished from analytic philosophers by saying that they do not take scientific inquiry as an intellectual model. Your own project of “naturalizing epistemology,” on the other hand, reflects the conviction that scientific theory provides the paradigm for what philosophical accounts should be like. Do you think it’s possible to do viable philosophical work that is organized around other paradigms, like poetry or belles lettres? Quine: It seems to me that the place where that sort of thinking has a function, and is still within the domain of philosophy, is in philosophy of poetry and the graphic arts. Whether we choose to call it philosophy or not, there is a place for the strictly artistic use of language in conjuring up thoughts and visions, which help you get the point of an art work that you had missed before. I don’t think that this function could ever be managed by strict scientific prose. But on the other hand, I don’t see a place for it in scientific philosophy.

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HRP: If a young philosophy student came to you for advice, and asked where the most pressing work in philosophy currently lay, where would you advise the student to turn? Quine: One big project that has struck me as promising would be to take some limited part of hard science, like Newtonian mechanics, and try to trace out explicitly the logical connections of implication from its basic principles to the observational checkpoints. In other words, an explicit amassing of evidence. It would have the advantage not only of illuminating the epistemology of the science but also might even be a contribution to the science, by suggesting shortcuts and simplifications, or by showing how some bit of theory just didn’t get used or serve its purpose. That method, if it succeeded with a sample chunk of science, might spread to other cases, and, if it succeeded, might help make philosophy a handmaiden to science, along with mathematics.

6 Twentieth-Century Logic Giovanna Borradori 1994

Introduction In 1965, only five years after its publication, Willard Van Orman Quine’s Word and Object was described by critics as “the most discussed book of American philosophy since the Second World War.” Born in 1908 in Akron, Ohio, Quine had long since entered full maturity, and had for some decades played a key role in international philosophy. Having guided the emigration of the ideas and the authors of the Vienna Circle onto American soil at the dawn of the Second World War, he imposed on them a decisive theoretical turn, based on indigenous pragmatism and behaviorism. The itinerary that led Quine to Vienna and to logical positivism in 1933 was a progressive march towards the East: from the Great Plains through Harvard University, where in only two years he completed a doctorate in mathematical logic under the guidance of Alfred N. Whitehead, co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica. His sojourns in Vienna, and then in Prague, brought him into contact with all the great masters of the Vienna Circle, from Rudolf Carnap to Hans Reichenbach, and from Moritz Schlick to the Polish mathematician Alfred Tarski. This contact rapidly became a profound intellectual syntony that, from then onward, would tie Quine to the fate of logical positivism and which, through him, would change the destiny of contemporary American thought. From the citadel of Harvard, where he still remains after forty years of teaching, Quine has never ceased to project an aura of very powerful thought, representing one of the fundamental reference points for the currents of analytic and postanalytic philosophy. Upon his return from Europe in 1934, and for the following ten years,

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Quine’s contributions were worked out in the articulation of one of the central themes of the internal discussion of the Vienna Circle: the role of logic in the foundation of mathematics, which, from the point of view of some developments in set theory, lies at the center of the article “New Foundations for Mathematical Logic” (1937), not to mention the subsequent volume Mathematical Logic (1940). Thanks to Quine, the site of this first theoretical elaboration remained the Harvard campus which, starting in 1939, attracted the masters of European logic, including Carnap, Russell, and Tarski. Some of them, for political and racial reasons, would settle permanently in the United States. After the war, during which Quine decided to enroll for three years as a volunteer in the Navy and resolved not to read “a single line of philosophy,” the publication of the article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” acted as a genuine detonator for post-analytic philosophy. In this article Quine tried to undermine two main points of Viennese positivism, among them the fundamental distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, on which the scientific pretensions of the entire positivist discourse were based. According to the authors of the Circle, analytic propositions are the only ones on which the production of objective knowledge can be founded. In fact, since they lack empirical content (for example, “if it is raining, then it is raining”), they are the only necessarily true assertions. Analytic truth, without saying anything about reality, is founded on a series of syntacticsemantic properties of language. In contrast, synthetic propositions are a posteriori and contingent assertions. In fact, the truth of propositions of the type “in such a place at such a time it rains” depends, aside from linguistic factors, on the reality on which they are based. On the basis of pragmatism, hinging on the “holistic character of experimental control,” Quine’s critique suggests that a net distinction between these two logical orders is incapable of definition. It is a given that synthetic judgements are true only in relation to the fact that the world is a certain way, that each of them is a case in itself, and that the generalizations must be collectively examined on the basis of individually verifiable consequences. But it is not a given that analytic judgments, even if they can be organized into systems such as logic and mathematics and do not depend on empirical reality, are based on a form of pure logic. The truth of the purely logical proposition “every x is an x” derives from the fact that x neither is nor implies anything, while the truth of the proposition “every bachelor is an unmarried man” depends more on the significance of its constitutive terminology than on purely logical form. Hence the need to redefine the notion of

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analyticity through the concept of synonymy which, nevertheless, is unable, according to Quine, to restore such a clear and irrefutable distinction. The criteria for distinguishing between the analytic and the synthetic therefore remain pragmatical. From the article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) to the publication in 1960 of Word and Object, Quine continued to elaborate his theory of language. Of essential importance in these years was his proximity to the Harvard master of behaviorism, the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Through him, Quine developed a behavioral theory of language acquisition, from which is derived one of his most discussed and original theses, on the “indeterminacy of translation.” In this thesis Quine holds that, paradoxically, it would be possible to formulate “manuals of translation,” diverse and incompatible among themselves, each of which corresponds to the communicative dispositions of its interlocutor’s mother-tongue. These conclusions induced Quine to recover an aspect of logical discourse banished by the Vienna Circle: that of ontology. According to Carnap, because of the analytic/synthetic, internal/external distinction, the scientist investigated the world and the philosopher deepened the logical structure of the language describing the world. Quine, on the contrary, has declared rationally incongruous the practice of accepting that a system is explicative and irreducible, while at the same time rejecting its constitutive entities. Above all, starting with the essay “Ontological Relativity” (1969), Quine has developed a true ontological theory, based on the idea that ontological inquiry is to be kept to a minimum: that is, to the indispensable minimum necessary for a system to be proved explicative and irreducible.

Interview Due to the historical impact of your theories, you are referred to as the “father” of post–World War II American philosophy, but in what way do you feel like the “son” of United States culture? Mathematical logic, my true passion, wasn’t popular on this side of the Atlantic; its centers at the end of last century were on both sides of the Alps, Germany and Italy. In 1910 and 1911 Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was not very influential in the United States. Until World War II, the centers for this new discipline were Germany, Poland, and, partly, Austria, thanks to the emblematic figure of Kurt Gödel. Alonzo Church played an important role in the diffusion of mathematical logic in the United States, and it was also thanks to him

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that, after his return to the U.S. in 1932 having completed a Ph.D. at Göttingen, the discipline became widespread in American philosophy departments. I came back from Europe a year after him, and we were the first ones to promote mathematical logic—Church from Princeton, and I from Harvard. In the years that followed, before and after the war, a great number of émigrés, exiles, and political refugees made the United States the center of mathematical logic. If your interest in mathematical logic is not common in the American context, what was the origin of your interest in such an abstract subject, one that seems almost mystical, like a form of transcendental meditation on the conditions of thought? It’s a story of a funny coincidence, as it always is in life. When I was in college I was undecided among three majors: philosophy, mathematics, and linguistics. By chance, an older student mentioned Mathematical Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, and it was love at first sight. It was possible to join all my interests in one. I decided to major in mathematics, and I did my honors reading in philosophy of mathematics, which eventually became mathematical logic. Hence, Russell was your point of departure. Yes, and along with him were Boole, and even Giuseppe Peano, whose Formulario Matematico I had read in French. And the logicians of the American tradition, such as Charles Sanders Peirce? I missed Peirce at first. I’m not sure I had even heard of him when I was in college. He didn’t happen to get onto the reading list that my professor had made up for me. When I came down here to Harvard to pursue my graduate studies, I began to find out about Peirce. George Sarton, the editor of a history of science quarterly called Isis, asked me to review the volumes on logic in Peirce’s Collected Papers, which were just beginning to be published by Harvard University Press. I reviewed volumes two, three, and four of Peirce’s work, and thus learned about him, but I didn’t really gain that much in the way of logical content. What I learned about was historical perspective. How do you relate to the pragmatist tradition of which Peirce, along with William James and John Dewey, can be considered the forerunners? It’s hard to say what constitutes pragmatism. If one considers it a branch of the empiricist tradition then yes, it is very important for me. Here at Harvard my teacher Clarence Irving Lewis called himself a “conceptual pragmatist.” Before I went to college, I read William James’s Pragmatism by chance, since my brother had sent it to me. Then, during my

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graduate studies at Cambridge, I read a lot by Hume, Locke, and Berkeley. But I don’t think that the influence on me was distinctively American; it was rather one of international empiricism. It was in fact Whitehead, Rudolf Carnap, C. I. Lewis, and, among the Poles, Tarski, who influenced me a great deal. I suppose that I think of philosophy more horizontally than vertically. About Whitehead: in Italy he was a very important author within the “Husserl Renaissance” inaugurated by Enzo Paci in the fifties. And I would say that Whitehead was better known as a “philosopher of relationism” than as a logician. I met Whitehead at Harvard toward the end of the twenties when he was better known as co-author of Russell’s Principia Mathematica than for his own work. I did my Ph.D. thesis under Whitehead’s sponsorship. When I met him, he wasn’t working in logic anymore, but he was lecturing in process and reality, and had already written Process and Reality and Science in the Modern World. I attended his lectures and was very impressed by his wisdom, but I learned more, philosophically, from C. I. Lewis. However, my big gains were after I got my Ph.D. and went to Europe on a fellowship in 1932. That’s where I caught up with Rudolf Carnap, at the Vienna Circle meetings first, and then in Prague. What do you remember of your first meeting with Carnap? We were very congenial from the beginning. Carnap was very hospitable and generous and went out of his way to find a place for my wife and me to stay in Prague. I went to his lectures and, when he wasn’t lecturing, I would go out to where he lived at the edge of the city and talk with him for hours. I was reading his new book, which was still being typed by his wife, and I would take the new pages with me and study them, in order to discuss them with him when I returned. We argued and discussed these things and it was a tremendously fruitful period for me. I became quite a devotee of Carnap’s philosophy until, over the next few years, I began to see difficulties with his work, and my own ideas diverged from his. He also saw difficulties in it and changed his views, but we changed our views on his initial position in different ways. There was a fair amount of debate between us in our correspondence, soon to be published by the University of California Press.1 We continued to be good friends right to the end, and, although we disagreed on cer1. W. V. Quine and R. Carnap, “Dear Carnap, Dear Van,” R. Creath, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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tain points, I gained more from Carnap than from any other philosopher. Who else did you meet in the Vienna Circle? In Prague I met Philipp Frank, who later came to Harvard. In Vienna I met Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Kurt Gödel, whose great discovery had just been published. What I learned in Vienna was due to my fluency in German, which was also of great value to me in Prague with Carnap. In Warsaw at the time there was primarily mathematical logic, even though, eventually, it transformed itself into a proper philosophy of logic. In Prague, a purely philosophical enthusiasm reigned, thanks to Carnap. All of this, of course, was happening before the Nazis. What was the impact of Nazism on this school of thought? Everyone I knew was horrified from the very start, before the Holocaust, before any of the unthinkable things happened. The antisemitism in Vienna was evident before the Nazis took power. There were Nazi demonstrations, graffiti on the walls against Jews, and when the Nazis took over there were scandalous moves, like when they dismissed Einstein from the Prussian Academy. The Nazis also founded an outrageously racist mathematical quarterly, Deutsche Mathematik. They were allowed to re-occupy the Rhineland: it was so clear that we should take a firm stand about the gravity of the situation. In 1938 I was in Portugal for half a year, and my friends there talked about their discouragement with the British attitude of appeasement, and with Chamberlain. I didn’t know anybody, even back then, who wasn’t worried and outraged by the Nazis. When I hear that people didn’t realize the extent of depravation under the Nazis, I don’t believe it. Of course we couldn’t foresee how bad it was going to be, and we didn’t have details about extermination camps. But you could feel an extreme nationalism, and there were many who were very sympathetic to the idea of a reinvigorated Germany. There were a lot of stupid people, and there were a lot of rather evil people. I was eager for the United States to get into the war. What was your position on the political situation? Did you support any sort of “social engagement”? More than a position, mine was a reaction. I volunteered in the Navy, where I became an officer. I wasn’t liable for the draft because of my age and my position here at Harvard; there were special concessions for teach-

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ers. I felt that Western culture was on the verge of collapse, and all I was doing was philosophy of logic. That was certainly the sort of thing that could be put aside. I didn’t read a line of philosophy or logic for three years. This happened after 1939, which you have described as a great year for Harvard’s philosophy department, where Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Carnap, and the Vienna Circle were guests. I returned in the fall of 1933 and was appointed junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 1938 I became an instructor, and I’ve been here ever since. Carnap came over on the occasion of Harvard’s tricentenary, in 1934. I had given several public lectures on Carnap, and I hoped that Harvard would hire him, but we didn’t swing it; he was hired by the University of Chicago. But we had good times when Carnap was in this part of the world. Tarski arrived in 1939 and we found him a job at City College in New York. Thirty-eight to ’41 were splendid years. What was Russell’s role in this context? I had met Russell earlier and had corresponded with him for years. He came to Harvard in 1931 to give lectures. Whitehead introduced him to the audience and he also introduced him to me. When my first book, A System of Logistic, was published in 1934, I sent Russell a copy. He was a very open man. I jealously save many of his letters with compliments and objections concerning that first book of mine. I owe a great deal to Russell, to his logic, and also to his philosophy, especially his books: Our Knowledge of the External World, his introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and, of course, to Principia Mathematica. Russell was not only a logician but also one of the philosophers who, in the tradition of our century, demonstrated more interest in the great political and social events. His pacifist faith even brought him to jail during the First World War, and then the Russell Tribunal attracted worldwide attention to the American intervention in Vietnam. I was never drawn to socialism and communism as he was, much less to the views he held in his declining years when he was demonstrating against the United States in favor of Soviet Russia. Until the Nazi alarm I hadn’t been politically active or conscious. I would neglect newspapers for days, but I began to read them again in ’32. During your stay in Vienna, phenomenology was a flourishing field of study. Three years before your arrival in Austria, Edmund Husserl published

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his Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), and in Freiburg his favorite student and successor, Martin Heidegger, was working on What Is Metaphysics? expediting the detachment of existentialism from phenomenology. The phenomenological tradition never attracted me very much. I read Husserl’s Logical Investigations with difficulty, but I couldn’t get into the rules of the game; much of it was a matter of introspection, and his terms seemed vague to me. Somebody has tried to establish some link between my philosophy and his phenomenology. I was never too convinced, though I recognize that Husserl and I, in very different ways, addressed some of the same things. I am interested in the combination of behaviorism and neurology, and he was interested in introspection. Behaviorism has been interpreted as a variant of pragmatism in social sciences like pedagogy, sociology, and psychology. What has it meant to a logician with a mathematical background like you? Behaviorism has always been important for me. Stetson, my psychology professor in college, assigned John B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of the Behaviorist. Then, when I was a junior fellow here at Harvard in 1933–36, I came to know Burrhus F. Skinner, who was a junior fellow also. We became great friends, we talked a great deal, we both felt that we were behaviorists when we met. However, I believe that behaviorism isn’t ultimately explanatory, though it is indispensable methodologically. What is important is to consider the neurological mechanism for some introspectively identified mental state, or mental process. You need to specify that process in objectively verifiable and recognizable terms, so you need behavioral criteria to set the problem for which you are going to look to neurology for the solution. It is the same in medicine. In the case of an infectious disease you look for the micro-organism but you don’t identify the disease by that organism, you identify the disease by the symptoms. Verbal behavior is the symptom: it comprises the symptoms of mental states, just as symptoms of a medical sort provide the criteria for finding the micro-organism that is the cause. How does your position differ from classical behaviorism, and from Skinner in particular? Skinner and I share the fundamental position that an explanation—not the deepest one, but one of a shallower kind—is possible at the purest behavioral level. One can hope to find, and I think one does find, behav-

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ioral regularities. In economics, for instance, you can formulate the concept of unemployment without reducing the phenomenon of economics to the behavior of individual people, which would be unproductive and chaotic. The instructive regularities occur at another level. In psychology that level is behaviorism. Your idea that there exists a set of integrable recurrences, from the smallest to the biggest, seems to belong to the organicist matrix. In fact, to define your horizon of thought, you bring to the field a concept very close to that of organicism: a philosophical “holism,” by which any organism, biological or physical, must be understood as an organized totality rather then as the sum of its discrete parts. Holism is a convergence of various hypotheses, theories, beliefs, truths; even when one focuses on any one of these, the others have to help. Carnap shows his appreciation of this by speaking well of Pierre Duhem, who with Poincaré and Milhaud, founded conventionalism. Carnap, like others in the Vienna Circle, didn’t follow the consequences of holism sufficiently: they appreciated that further hypotheses might be drawn supporting their thesis, but they overlooked the fact that, when you take hypotheses seriously, not only is the effort great, but it is also embedded with practical consequences. Even in mathematics, arithmetic, and differential calculus, the laws can be made to be operative: those laws are part of the holistic bundle that implies from the start the experimental result—your predictions. Hence one can avoid Carnap’s dilemma of trying to explain how mathematics could be meaningful, since it was devoid of content. Furthermore, it even helps explain the necessity of mathematical truth, which Carnap tried to explain with the concept of “analyticity,” so closely bound up with the notion of “syntheticity,” its contrary. The renewal of the holistic perspective, then, marked the most decisive moment of your separation from Carnap and from the logical positivists. Certainly it marked my separation from Carnap. I have actually tempered the extreme holism of my first writings. If one accepts the holistic hypothesis, the conclusion is that, except for logic and mathematics, there is only one science. On the contrary, beyond logic and mathematics there isn’t only extravagance. The way I look at things today is that there isn’t only one science, but a big enough bundle of laws not to be comprehended in a single hypothesis. The big enough bundle implies logically some observational conditions, namely some categories defin-

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ing observable situations. The connection between science and observation is made through these categoricals, and holism is needed to the extent that you have a big enough combination to apply some of these testable categories. Your interest in ontology suggests a detachment from the analytic philosophy derived from Carnap and the neo-positivism which remains your major point of reference. Why is it that after the Second World War this current of thought, so different from pragmatism and any preceding American tradition, has had so much success in the United States? The United States was strongly influenced by both the English tradition and the very different tradition of analytic philosophy that came from Vienna. I belonged to the Vienna side, through Wittgenstein and his followers, but John Austin and Peter Strawson also had a strong influence on me. Bertrand Russell was naturally very important: he was like a bridge between the two schools, and he had a strong influence on Wittgenstein. In the United States, Russell was absorbed partly through Vienna and partly through British analytic philosophy. Between the wars, the scientific temper in America was intensified by the influx of European scientists from Germany and Austria. Don’t you think that for Americans still fascinated by the New Deal, the Viennese émigrés also represented a liberal and liberating form of thought, antagonistic to that historicist imposition often seen in the background of totalitarian ideologies? That’s partially true. I think that an anti-historicist mood was prevalent in the United States before their arrival. For me the scientific motivation was dominant. Ever since the beginning there had always been a great exchange between the scientists and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. Philipp Frank, who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1936, took over Einstein’s position at Princeton, and this brought Carnap there a few times. We were reading the same texts and teaching the same authors. Following the detachment from logical positivism and analytic philosophy, your thought has sometimes been defined in a “post-analytic” perspective. If you had to think about any other post-analytic philosopher, whom would you name? Donald Davidson comes close. Also, Roger Gibson, and, to some extent, Hilary Putnam. I can’t exclude Nelson Goodman, with whom I have also worked. Goodman was a graduate student when I was still an instruc-

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tor at Harvard. We would get together periodically for an evening and discuss philosophical problems. That was a very good thing, but then he went to Penn, where he remained for many years. In any case, I feel the same intellectual empathy with Europe as I do with the U.S., although, in the European context, England is a different story. Although I spent two years at Oxford and I have many friends there, I don’t feel England has had a great impact on my work. Going back to the thirties, to Vienna and to your first European trip, do you remember if there were any exchanges between the Vienna Circle and the literary and art world? No, actually I was only in contact with philosophers. I attended Schlick’s lectures on the theory of knowledge, a subject I was very interested in at the time. However, the main value for me was the practice in language because, as I said before, German was so useful later with Carnap and the Poles. And in other moments in your life, has art ever been a support or an inspiration? As a young man, I was fascinated by a literary piece that certainly was a factor in my becoming interested in philosophy: Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka. I read all of Poe. When I read him again years later, I found it outrageous. There was cosmology modeled on nineteenth-century astronomy—a very old view of reality and the universe. I was fascinated by the cosmological conjectures about the origins of planets. The combination of the grandeur of the whole picture painted by Poe, and the grandiose language in which he presented it, fascinated me. I was interested in writing, and tried to write in the style of Poe. I even considered a career in writing. But, by the time I was in college, I had stronger interests in mathematics and philosophy, and my idea of becoming a writer brought me to another kind of writing. How did the jump from Poe to mathematical logic take place? My interest in science was as strong as my interest in philosophy. They both involved reality and the universe. Theoretical physicists study the philosophical reasons of the universe. If I hadn’t hated the experimental side of physics, I could have become a physicist. I am mechanophobic; I am terribly afraid of machines. Your words make me think about the origins of philosophy and about the great pre-Socratic physicists, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander. Cosmologists

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and navigators at the same time. Children of a great navigational culture, the Greek one, which is, after all, like the American one: it suffices to think of Melville. I’m very keen on travel, from way back. Traveling means crossing cultural and mental boundaries. I’ve lectured on six continents, I’ve visited a hundred and thirteen countries. This may have something to do with alternating generations in my family. My father had a true passion for machines but he didn’t travel at all, except on business. His father, on the other hand, was a sailor. Perhaps I, too, am a bit of sailor: a sailor of logic.

7 Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine Lars Bergström and Dagfinn Føllesdal 1994

Lars Bergström: I would like to start by welcoming you to Sweden. It is because of the Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy that we have the privilege of having you here. This interview is supposed to make it possible for you to enlighten us and the general public on some points of your philosophy. You are obviously part of the great empiricist tradition from people like John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Bertrand Russell, the logical positivists like Carnap and Neurath and Hempel. But you have also criticised this tradition in important ways, e.g. in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” long ago. I wonder if you could say something about the ways in which you are still an empiricist, about the things that unite you with the great tradition, and also about some of the points on which you differ from your predecessors in this tradition? W. V. Quine: I consider myself certainly an empiricist. The points on which I’ve departed from predecessors, particularly Carnap, have been a consequence of my insisting on a more completely empirical approach than Carnap himself. My criticism of the use he made of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements rested on my not seeing an adequate empirical criterion in terms of the behaviour of speakers of the language to distinguish the two kinds of statements. So it seemed to me an unempirical dogma. In general orientation certainly I see myself in agreement with Hume, with Bentham, with Locke. Bergström: I understand how you differ from Carnap for example but what is it more specifically that you have in common with the earlier em-

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piricists? Is it that all evidence is empirical, that it comes through the senses or what is it? Quine: Quite so, yes, that the evidence comes through the senses. I should also mention Dewey. On essential points I seem to find myself especially in agreement with Dewey, although I was not influenced by Dewey. I didn’t know his work that well in the old days. Certainly I’m much more sympathetic with Dewey than other pragmatists so called, notably William James. There are two points where I depart radically from James: one, his pragmatic theory of truth, second his “Will to believe”, which seems to me to be a way of giving aid and comfort to wishful thinkers. And as for Charles Sanders Peirce, I’ve never succeeded in gaining a unified picture of Peirce. I admire his pioneering contributions to modern logic, but as for his metaphysics, what little of his philosophy I’ve read hasn’t appealed to me, because of the rather vague and excessive metaphysics that comes into it. Dagfinn Føllesdal: So although you wrote on Peirce rather early, it’s really the other two pragmatists, mainly Dewey who have appealed the most to you in later years, is that right? Quine: Dewey seems to be the one that I’m most sympathetic with, yes, in retrospect. Although I read James way back when I was first looking into philosophy and didn’t get into Dewey until many years later, after my own views were pretty well formed. Bergström: But this idea that all evidence comes through the senses, this seems rather trivial. I mean it’s hard to think of people who would disagree on this point. If you think of the people who have been contrasted with empiricists, the rationalists, of Descartes for example, I suppose he would also say that all evidence comes through the senses. But he might say that some things are in the mind already or genetically inherited. Would you disagree? Quine: Well doesn’t it just come to that. From Descartes’ point of view all knowledge, all evidence, does not come through the senses, and similarly for Kant. There are basic inborn intuitions that we depend on. However, I agree that it’s hard really to draw sharp objective lines there because we must all recognise a very important innate component, there’s a great deal in the genes, in the way of our aptitudes, our predilections. We have to have a great deal of innate equipment in order to master language in the first place. Føllesdal: So one difference, if you should try to pinpoint the difference be-

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tween your view of the innate and the views of some of the more extreme rationalists, seems to be that the rationalists thought that you actually have some knowledge that is innate. But you seem to hold that we have some abilities that might be needed in order to acquire knowledge through our senses. I wonder if you could say a little more about what you would accept as innate. For example when it comes to language learning, people have argued that our ability to structure in certain ways is innate. Quine: Yes, there are endowments that have yet to be discovered, I think, by the brain psychologists and neurologists. The acquisition of language depends primarily, I’m sure, on the same mechanisms as habit formation generally among all the higher animals: the conditioning of responses, and the drives and aversions which are innate. But also there is the conspicuous fact that man alone has language, has anything really worthy of being called language, namely the apparatus that is capable of generating longer and longer sentences without end, and in such a way that the hearer can understand them even though never having heard that particular sentence before. Very unlike the songs of birds or the cries of apes. So I think we might expect discovery sometime in the future of particular neural equipment or quirks of the neural system that are distinctively human, that have facilitated this difference. It has been found that the brain, the size of the brain, increased markedly and rapidly in the generations while language was developing. So there is something there that is peculiarly human. And I think it’s just a matter of the future finding out what this mechanism is and what it consists in. I think perhaps another point on which what I think of as empiricism, at least in my own case, contrasts with the rationalists is that these inborn predilections and abilities admit in turn of scientific, physical, empirical explanation in terms of natural selection. So they are not simply something that’s irreducible there, something that can’t be accounted for. Although it is innate it is empirically explicable in terms of cause and effect. Føllesdal: So this is probably part of what is called naturalism? Quine: Yes, yes I think that perhaps is the right term to draw this distinction. Føllesdal: So what more is involved in what you call naturalism? Quine: Well I think of the basic tenet as a negative one, namely that we can’t hope for any evidence, any avenue to truth higher than or more funda-

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mental than ordinary scientific method itself. The method of prediction, and then experimental testing of the predictions. So that the traditional epistemological quest for something firmer than science that would serve as a justification of scientific method is dismissed as a mistake. Bergström: When you talk now about ordinary scientific method I wonder what would you say to those people, those many people, who think that there is a very important distinction between the method that is used in natural science and the methods used in social sciences and the humanities. Many philosophers think that there is a very important difference here. Would you agree to that? Quine: I don’t see a difference in principle between the methods used in the natural sciences and the social sciences. It seems to me that there is just a difference in degree of certainty, degree of conclusiveness of evidence, and in the amount of vagueness. But elsewhere in the humanities of course there is also aesthetic value, artistic value which is not a matter of cognitive knowledge. Not as I see it a matter of truth and falsity. So this would lie outside the distinguishing criterion of naturalism. Bergström: You say that aesthetic value has nothing to do with truth and falsity, but even in the natural sciences and in philosophy I believe you would say that simplicity is an important value to be sought after. Isn’t that a kind of aesthetic value after all? Quine: Yes it is, it certainly is and, yes we certainly put a premium on elegance and regard elegance even as a presumption of truth other things being equal. And the way I would sort that out is to distinguish between the testing of a hypothesis and the framing of a hypothesis. Considerations of simplicity, elegance, also conservatism—that is, not changing your theory more than you feel you need to in order to accommodate new data—these maxims I see as heuristic guides to the framing of hypotheses which we think may prove worth testing, may have a good chance of being vindicated by the tests. We don’t want to just think of hypotheses at random and waste our time devising experiments to test them. So I think that’s the role that these aesthetic values play in strict science. Bergström: So the difference would be that in strict science aesthetics has only heuristic value but that in the humanities it also has value of its own? Quine: That’s right, it’s the objective there, it’s the goal.

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Bergström: But you can conceive of two theories in natural science, which are empirically exactly the same, which are empirically equivalent, but where one is much simpler. Would you say that this simpler theory is also the true theory and it is true because it’s simpler? Quine: Well, that’s hard to say because in the practical situation we don’t know conclusively that it’s true, that both theories are true. And we are apt to think that the simpler one has a better chance of being true. I think that’s the way it would work and so on that score simplicity is still playing its heuristic role. And certainly quite apart from all that, we prefer the simpler theory partly on aesthetic grounds, partly because it’s easier to grasp, easier to handle, because there is less to work with. Bergström: But couldn’t it be the case that truth is even harder to come by in the humanities, and that this is why it seems to us that aesthetic value plays a more fundamental role in the humanities? Quine: I would separate the humanities themselves on that score. Economics, sociology, history, these are cognitive sciences and the theories are true or false, and then there are other activities in the humanities that are not cognitive at all. And that’s where I place music, painting, poetry, fiction. Føllesdal: What about mathematics, that is something where empiricists often have had problems, and I wonder whether you could say a little bit about how you look upon mathematics: its entities and its truths if there are any? Quine: I tend to minimise the contrast between pure mathematics and natural science. In all the sciences and especially in the harder ones mathematics plays an indispensable role, and I think we have to view mathematics, insofar as it is applied, as an integral part of the branch of science in which it is applied. And in general on this score it’s important to appreciate the holistic character of theory: that ordinarily you can’t set up an experiment which is going to test just one hypothesis independently of the rest of one’s theory. That is because the hypothesis of itself is not going to imply that when a particular observable situation is created such and such another observable situation will ensue. That’s quite an elaborate deduction to make and you have to appeal usually to quite an array of preconceptions or previously accepted conclusions to support the implication, along with the particular hypothesis that you are interested in testing. And in that bundle of accepted beliefs or hypotheses there will be purely mathematical statements, in-

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sofar as mathematics has been applied in that particular part of the science. So I think of mathematics, applied mathematics, as playing the same role as the other laws or hypotheses. But the question why mathematics has been so seemingly infallible and certain, and independent of empirical evidence, I think can be accommodated by reflecting on what we do when a bundle of scientific acceptations has been shown false by finding that it implied an experimental effect which does not come through. We have to modify that bundle by throwing away part of it, throwing away enough of it, so that the false implication is no longer there, and we make a point of not disturbing the mathematical components if there are any, but changing the other assumptions or hypotheses or laws instead. And the practical motivation of that kind of discrimination in favour of mathematics is that changing mathematical theories would excessively disturb the whole scientific structure because of the way mathematics gets applied in virtually all branches of science. Our heuristics include this maxim of conservatism: just not to rock the boat more than we need to. So mathematics is preserved in this way. One can still wonder about the status of mathematics on another account: that whereas typically a bundle of scientific hypotheses of an empirical kind may or may not turn out to be false when tested by experiment, take a bundle of purely mathematic sentences alone so that there are no empirical ones there to modify in case of contradiction; why don’t we ever get a contradiction from just the mathematical laws themselves? This point might be raised as an argument that mathematics is unempirical and so quite different from natural science. But my answer to that is that if you take highly theoretical, strictly theoretical, laws from physics itself and don’t add to that bundle any further assumptions of a less highly theoretical kind, again you’re not going to have any implications of the kind that can be experimentally tested. So I would say that this consideration is merely calculated to show that mathematics is highly theoretical. Føllesdal: What about logic? In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” you seem to indicate that even logic could be changed, and then in later writings on translation you don’t really permit changes in logic. I wonder whether you could say something about that? Quine: Yes, yes well logic is in a peculiar situation in this respect that I think that there is no objective distinction between changing logic and merely changing the notation. If someone decides to change some basic

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principle of logic such as “If a sentence P is true, then the alternation P or Q is true”; if someone wants to modify that or deny it, we would say: “well he’s just misusing the word ‘or’.” And I think this is a perfectly reasonable reaction because the child in learning those basic logical connectives—‘or’, ‘and’, and ‘if . . . then’ and the rest, ‘every’, ‘some’, the various particles that go into purely logical formulas—learns them by observing the relation between various sentences that people will affirm, and observing that people don’t affirm a sentence and then deny an alternation of which that sentence is one part. And if he does it himself he is corrected. He misused the word. So the acquisition of elementary, basic logic is just part of the acquisition of language. In this respect I do regard elementary logic as analytic in the sense of being something that is true, as they say, by virtue of the meanings of the words. Yes, so, on this score I think of the truths of logic as analytic in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say true by virtue of the meanings of the words. Or as I would prefer to put it: they are learned or can be learned in the process of learning to use the words themselves, and involve nothing more. They’re analytic in the same sense in which the standard example such as: “No bachelor is married”, is analytic: something that’s learned in the process of learning to use the word ‘bachelor’ itself. My objection to Carnap’s use of analyticity in his philosophy is not an objection to use of the notion of analyticity in this familiar, common sense way, but rather that Carnap has made use of the distinction across the board, through the heart of science itself, separating the analytic from the others so called synthetic, without a satisfactory criterion. That has been my criticism. And that the philosophical ends that he is trying to achieve by that are to be achieved and can be achieved by other means. So I’d say logic does come true by virtue of the meanings of the words. And this is not true, in my judgement, of mathematics generally. Føllesdal: Does that mean that there are some words like ‘and’, and ‘or’, and ‘not’, that are learned in a way different from other words? Or can we draw a line saying that just the logical words in some sense are different in kind from other words? Quine: Well I don’t think this is a peculiarity exclusively of logical particles. I think that such a sentence as “No bachelor is married” is on an equal footing in this respect. A special thing about logic is evidently that a

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great, unlimited array, infinite array, of sentences are swept together by this sort of criterion because there’s no end to the sentences that share the same logical form. Whereas other examples such as “No bachelor is married”, are isolated examples that stand apart. So it is perhaps an interesting question how, how big a domain, how much more than elementary logic itself might be embraced under this head of there being a truth criterion that depends merely on outward structure. It would certainly go beyond what we think of as the strictly logical particles, a good deal in the way of further connectives such as ‘above’, ‘below’, and again the active and passive voice and analytic truths, general laws quite comparable to those that we think of as logic that would apply there too. “If x sees y, then y is seen by x”. There is something that is as good as a logical truth, but we don’t think of it as logic. Føllesdal: There are a couple of words that some people would regard as logical, words like ‘necessarily’, ’possibly’, but you do not want to include sentences whose truth turns on those words as logical or analytical? Quine: Yes, well I don’t find a sufficiently clear meaning to the notion of necessity, I don’t accept the notion of necessity. As for a general criterion of analyticity, a general definition that I’ve used is that you might say a sentence is analytic for a native speaker if he has learned the truth of that sentence, learned to affirm that sentence, in the course of learning one of the words in it. That would account for ‘and’, and ‘or’, and these other examples and also the bachelor case. I say a native speaker because if it’s someone’s second language he may have learned the words by translation from his own language rather than in the way that would qualify them as analytic. And the reason this criterion doesn’t serve satisfactorily for the general epistemological sort of application that I’ve criticised is that in general we don’t know how we learned our words and we don’t care. It seems clear that it shouldn’t matter because we end up with a going system of language where all the truths are on a par in this respect, and it’s just a few cases like “No bachelor is married”, that stand out where we can say confidently that any native speaker has learned the truth of that sentence by learning one of its words. Føllesdal: How does this fit in with what you said in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” about maybe quantum mechanics forcing us to change our logic?

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Quine: Good. Yes, there is a question there, as I suggested earlier about distinguishing, if there is a distinction, between changing language and changing the laws of logic. But there’s a little more to be said, namely, two sorts of cases that we can distinguish. One case is where, gratuitously, we start using the word ‘and’, where we previously used the word ‘or’, or that sort of thing; we just play with the words and it’s uninteresting. But then there is the more serious case where the alternative logic is weaker than our standard one. So it isn’t a matter of just changing the use of the words, we’ve actually lost something. First of all here I think of intuitionism, where you get a weaker logic. And in mathematics generally we know ways of proving that one set of terms, one fragment of language, is not reducible to another, that is, it is stronger. So in such a case, one gives up in principle something that we have accepted in logic, notably the law of excluded middle—that every sentence is either true or false, there is no middle ground. This is the sort of thing that one might conceivably, as in the case of quantum mechanics, be persuaded to switch to; that it turned out that we can make clearer sense, maybe get a simpler view of nature in its submicroscopic aspects by switching to another logic, just as already through Einstein we got a view of nature that depends on giving up basic notions way back to simultaneity, or again recognising the curvature of space. Now, of course the traditional Newtonian mechanics is still useful if we’re dealing with situations where the velocity isn’t very high, where the distances aren’t very great, and similarly if we were persuaded by quantum physicists to change our logic to fit quantum mechanics I expect the same sort of thing would happen: that for convenience of application in ordinary situations where we are not dealing with that submicroscopic level of quantum mechanics we can bring in a hypothesis from which our ordinary classical, clear and simple, familiar logic would still follow. So that I think one can welcome these changes if it turns out that they are needed. Bergström: I wonder if I could go back to the point you made a while ago about the distinction between cognitive science and non-cognitive arts. This reminds one somehow of what the logical positivists used to say about, for example, moral philosophy: “there’s no truth there, moral judgements are neither true nor false”. Would you agree to that or would you keep to your idea that to say that a sentence is true is just to reaffirm it? And then if you think in that way, maybe you would say

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that the sentence “slander is evil” for example, is true, just in case slander is evil? Quine: Yes, this is certainly a puzzle what stand to take there. Whether to say exactly that if and only if slander is evil but then that still leaves the whole situation up in the air. Is it evil or isn’t it? I’m inclined to withhold the truth-predicate in these cases. Adhering to Tarski’s paradigm, Tarski’s disquotation principle—that the sentence is true if and only if, and then you utter the sentence itself after the “if and only if ”—that still holds but I would apply it only to sentences that have these cognitive claims, and my feeling about sentences both of aesthetics and of ethics is to withhold those claims. Of course we can develop cognitive theories about the origin and social utility of our moral laws, and how they’ve been perhaps supported by natural selection and are perhaps to some extent innate. Furthermore, I think that taking this stand regarding moral judgements doesn’t deprive them of their importance. We can still do a good deal of cognitive persuasion in ethics by depending on deep-lying agreements, ethical agreements, between people, depending on there being such agreements reaching out to most people and just stopping short of the utterly depraved. And if there is a disagreement as to the ethics of some particular act or situation, sometimes we can clear it up by appealing to cognitive connections on the scientific side between such an act’s causal connections; and other events which we can agree on as to their moral status, good or bad. And this certainly is the way we do persuade people of the morality or immorality of a deed. When it comes to the point where that simply can’t be done because of utter depravity, then of course we just have to resort to force. It’s not that there is an overall permissiveness on the grounds that it’s a question of social custom. There simply are values, and unfortunately they are not entirely shared although the basic ones are almost universally shared, one thinks, hopes. Bergström: But if you withhold truth from moral statements and aesthetic statements on the ground that you don’t have the same kind of evidence here, that you can have for scientific statements, isn’t that to confuse epistemology with ontology? I mean, should this question of evidence have anything to do with truth? It seems that in some of your writings you yourself make a very clear distinction between ontology and epistemology? Quine: I hold that a lot of sentences[,] even of the cognitive kind, [that]

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turn up even in the hard sciences and are affirmed as true to the best of our lights, may be incapable of test however indirect. They fill out a theory; perhaps they’re suggested by considerations of simplicity and symmetry and they can be useful indirectly in suggesting further hypotheses which do admit of testing. I think this might prove to be the main source of fruitful new hypothesis in the advancement of science. So I don’t insist on everything being testable, but I would expect sentences with cognitive content to be relevant in that indirect way at least, fitting into the overall system of science, so as to make a coherent system. And I hold there is no way of doing for either aesthetical or ethical principles, so they will be danglers. Bergström: Yes, I can see that moral and aesthetics statements may not be very useful in theoretical science, to fill out the gaps as it were in the theory, but couldn’t it still be the case that they are tied to evidence in a certain sense, namely that some ethical statements and some aesthetic statements are really observation sentences in your sense, that people are conditioned to tie those to certain stimulation. For example, wouldn’t a sentence like “this is good music” be an observation sentence in a certain community? Quine: Yes, it could, and insofar it would certainly be cognitive. Here would be a subtle sense quality, that the members of that community would all recognise and agree to the presence of. And I should think that at a primitive level there would be no difference in principle between this and the other sentences. Bergström: So if there is a difference maybe it has to do with the size of the community? I mean the difference between aesthetic cases and scientific statements, scientific observation sentences? Quine: Yes, it’s a difference perhaps that develops and defines itself only with the systematic further development of science. As our scientific theory is constructed, and we’re finding that we can successfully predict all sorts of observables, we find that these particular observation sentences aren’t figuring in that network. It’s after the construction of the theory that we are drawing the invidious line that puts them beyond the pale. Føllesdal: Then maybe I could follow up a little bit that last point because given that these are observation sentences it seems as if the development of science should not be able to cut them out and say that we don’t need them, because after all, aren’t they part of what science

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should explain, account for, with all observations being something that should be accounted for by science? Quine: Yes, and I think that would happen and that they could be accounted for in terms of the psychology of the people in that special community, the innate and acquired factors. And in general of course we want scientific explanations both of aesthetic satisfaction and of moral principles. That is how they are acquired; the history of morals. The familiar example: the ethologists account in terms of natural selection of altruism among animals and explanation of why, generally in nature, altruism applies to only close kin. So that’s all part of the overall system. So that we would, we certainly want scientific explanations of aesthetic evaluations. Bergström: There is something I would like to ask you about. You have been a philosopher now for a very long time, and it’s natural then to ask you whether you can see any important changes in the way that philosophy is being done throughout this period? Quine: Yes, the conspicuous early change, I’d say, is the application of modern logic. Well there is the familiar example that Frank P. Ramsey called a paradigm of philosophical analysis, namely Russell’s theory of singular descriptions, which cleared up a puzzle about existence and nonexistence and depended on modern logic which brought out very clearly the central distinctions involved here. Or for that matter I think of the criterion of ontological commitment itself, namely, identifying it with the values of variables. This is something that refers directly to modern logic and yet is utterly metaphysical in its content. A big step a hundred years earlier or so is certainly what Rorty has called the linguistic turn—where it came to be appreciated that one can proceed much more clearly and effectively by talking about expressions explicitly instead of talking vaguely about ideas. The idea idea moves into the background in philosophy; in the old days it was so very central. And then in later years I’ve been pleased by the increased interplay between philosophy, between the scientific philosophy, anyway, and the various sciences: linguistics, physics, psychology, neurology, and nowadays computer theory with its simulation of the brain—artificial intelligence. It seems to me that these developments furthermore are accelerating. We find people like Daniel Dennett, very well versed in neurology and in artificial intelligence too and yet motivated strictly by philosophical curiosity and philosophical considerations.

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Bergström: This last part may have something to do with what one might call the value of philosophy, the use of philosophy. Many people who have a very unclear idea about what philosophy is might think that it’s not useful at all. But perhaps it can have a use in connection with other sciences. It seems to me that that’s one kind of use it can have. Quine: Yes. I think, although it hasn’t happened yet, that philosophy as these developments continue could conceivably play an active role in the advancements of natural science itself. There is already, of course, in Einstein’s critique of the notion of simultaneity, an essentially philosophical consideration that has made all the difference between classical and relativistic physics. Perhaps, if things continue as they seem to promise, there will even be a place for a consulting philosopher of physics in the scientific laboratory. But that certainly is not yet. As for the relevance of philosophy to the layman, I think an educated person should have been exposed in school, in college, to some philosophy for the sake of the critical attitude that it encourages and helps to develop. I think that this could be important for society and it should be combined with some training in hard sciences in order that one appreciate what it really means to know something. This by way of guarding against jumping to conclusions and making irresponsible decisions of the kind that are calculated to upset society, upset a government, and do so all too often. Then furthermore, of course, there is the attraction of philosophy for any thinking person in the way simply of satisfying or perhaps stimulating intellectual curiosity about the nature of things.

8 There Is Always a Further Step Olaf Brill 1998

Question: Professor Quine, it’s an honor and a pleasure having the opportunity to talk to you during the festivities celebrating the award of your doctorate honoris causa at Oldenburg University. You’re an outstanding philosopher and logician, combining in your work sharp thinking and clear presentation, and you are witness and main protagonist of this century’s philosophy. At the beginning of a book subtitled Ein kleiner Streifzug durch die analytische Philosophie (“A Little Expedition Through Analytic Philosophy”), it seems appropriate to begin with a little walk through the life of one of this century’s greatest philosophers. So, my first question is: Why—and when—did you become interested in philosophy and logic and decide to lead the life of a philosopher? Quine: I think I could quite definitely date the point where I became singlemindedly keen on mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic as a career, and that would have been in the third of my four years in college. But that had its origins, its causes, in previous interests. When I entered college I had three interests, three fields which were in competition as to which one I should choose as my major field. One was mathematics, because I’d been doing well in mathematics in school and I liked it. Another was linguistics. There was no such—I’m not sure even that the word was current in those days of 1926, but my word at the time was “philology” and that was a title for a specialty after college, so my field of concentration would have been classics. I don’t know when that interest began; sometime when I still was in middle school I

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became curious about word origins and began reading the subject. So that was a life possibility. And then the third, somehow, philosophy. I was still very vague on what it was all about. I read a couple of books that my brother had passed me. He wasn’t going into philosophy at all, but he was aware of my having somehow conceived what I thought was an interest in philosophy, and sent me books from a course he was taking, which I read uncritically. One was William James’s Pragmatism1. The other was M. C. Otto’s Things and Ideals.2 Looking back, I could see that these books would have been very much at variance with each other but I uncritically thought they were both very true and interesting. So, in short, it’s quite clear that my interest in philosophy was rather groundless, but I had this simple curiosity, vaguely about what things come down to, how they fall together, I suppose this is typical philosophical curiosity. So, there were these three fields and I didn’t know how to choose among them, and then I heard from an older student who was in the English department, but he was well read, I heard, of Bertrand Russell’s so-called “mathematical philosophy.” That seemed to combine two of my three competing interests, so I majored in mathematics, but arranged to have my honors reading in my senior year in mathematical philosophy, which of course turned out to be mathematical logic. And when that fourth year came, I was immediately taken with it and as enthusiastic as could be, and the enthusiasm has never subsided. So, there was mathematics major in college, but I conceived this admiration for Whitehead and Russell because of their Principia Mathematica3 which I had studied among various other books which had been brought together. Regarding mathematical logic, there was nothing relating to that in Oberlin College, but the chairman of the Mathematics department, a very good man, had friends in other institutions, he got advice, and got me up a reading list, and it included Principia Mathematica and some more primitive things, and, well, then I learned that Whitehead had just a few years before retired, had been retired because of reaching the 1. James, W., Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, 1907). 2. Otto, M. C., Things and Ideals (New York, 1924). 3. Russell, B., and Whitehead, A. N., Principia Mathematica (Cambridge, 1910–13).

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age of sixty-five, from the University of London, where he had been teaching, I gather, Mathematics and Mechanics, but I understand that he had conceived an interest in metaphysics in later years, after Principia Mathematica apparently. He had been invited by admirers to Harvard for the rest of his career. So, since he was at Harvard and since he was in philosophy—he had switched to philosophy when he made this move—I switched to philosophy as my major, as my subject for graduate school. But my dissertation was still the dissertation that I would have done in the math department if I had been there and if they had permitted it, because it was on the boundary. It was strictly mathematical logic, but still that’s mathematics with a philosophical motivation. So, it is alright, I think, to have a little boundary. So then, when my teaching career began, I was for a while in both departments, teaching both mathematics and philosophy. Question: Later, you met Bertrand Russell too. Can you tell us about that experience? Quine: That was at the beginning of my second year as a graduate student. I rushed through in just two years for financial reasons; I needed to get through fast and try to get a job. I was married, there was a deep depression on in 1931–32, and therefore I was already working on a Ph.D. thesis when Russell came through. I don’t know why he had been in America, but he passed through Harvard University, gave a lecture on the way, and Whitehead introduced him to the audience, and that was my first great experience of confrontation with great men. Out at Oberlin College we had good teachers, but none that we were aware of as great men. But these were two that I was aware of. After the lecture, Whitehead even introduced me to Russell. I talked to him for a while, talked about the things I was working on in my dissertation, which I was writing. In 1940 he was brought to Harvard as a William James lecturer, which meant also giving a seminar, so he and I were colleagues for a semester. And then I saw him once after that, he came through again and gave a lecture where I introduced him. I suppose I got ten or a dozen letters from Russell over those how many years, well, twenty years. Question: You met other great men too. You have been travelling a lot and are probably the philosopher with the most, how should I say, miles per year and probably the philosopher who met the largest number of people and some of philosophy’s outstanding personalities like Russell.

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Can you share with us your impressions and recollections about a few others, beginning perhaps with Rudolf Carnap? Quine: Ah yes, indeed. It was just a year after getting my doctorate that I was given this travelling fellowship, and the good advice of a scholar who was visiting for a year on a Rockefeller fellowship, and that was Herbert Feigl of the Vienna Circle. He came to America and stayed on in America from then on for the rest of his career. He advised me to go to Vienna. Also someone, I think it may have been my friend John Cooley, had put me meanwhile on to Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt,4 which, certainly, that impressed me. So, I did head for Vienna and spent the first of the two semesters there, and participated in at least two of the meetings of the Vienna Circle, and it was of course through the Vienna Circle that I met Carnap. But Carnap had already left Vienna the year before. He had moved, he had been a Privatdozent, I think, at Vienna, and had moved to Prague as an Ausserordentlicher Professor in the Deutsche Universität, Karls-Universität in Prague. I met Carnap when he came on a visit to Vienna, and the second semester I moved on to Prague. I had six or eight weeks in Prague, with one conference with Carnap after another. When he wasn’t coming in to lecture, I was out at his flat at the edge of Prague, discussing, discussing. His new book Logische Syntax der Sprache5 was just coming out of his wife’s typewriter, and when I went back to my hotel after discussing it they would say, “Oh, just stay on, Abendessen, but no more science.” If Carnap “does any science,” as she called it, after dinner, he won’t sleep. But those were stimulating, wonderful sessions. I would read this, I would take back to the hotel the sheaf of the newly typewritten pages, and then I had things to discuss with Carnap next time round. That was my first experience, really, of serious man-to-man working with a great man. With Whitehead it was different, he had put logic behind him, and I think that when I was a graduate student he found some nostalgic pleasure in discussing again these matters of Principia Mathematica, which was what I was working on. I was going through Prin-

4. Carnap, R., Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin-Schlachtensee: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928), xi, 290 pp., and Carnap, R., Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie: Das Fremdpsychische und der Realismusstreit (Berlin-Schlachtensee: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928), xi, 46 pp. 5. Carnap, R., Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna, 1934).

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cipia, improving, if one can, their pioneer work, finding new shortcuts and simplifications, and he would take pleasure in these “Oh that’s capital, old fellow, right jolly!”, in his strong British accent, but there was no give-and-take. But with Carnap, yes! Question: Did you ever meet Kurt Gödel when you were in Vienna? Quine: I did, I met Gödel. Yes, and of course Gödel’s great breakthrough, it had been published less than two years before. Yes, indeed, and we did talk. Gödel was a young man, but not at all forthcoming. He was friendly, but somehow he just didn’t engage, so, in spite of my admiration of Gödel’s achievement, it was Carnap that meant most to me. That was the greatest influence ever on my work. Russell had a big influence through the printed page but that was all past, background rather than current. Question: I would be very interested to hear: What was your initial reaction when you first came to know about Gödel’s proof. You were just beginning your philosophical work, then. Quine: I was startled, and I can’t believe that any mathematician who really appreciated what was being said wasn’t startled. There were many mathematicians I know who dismissed it: “Oh yes, what else is new.” Because surely from the point of view of perhaps anyone who was philosophically enough inclined to be interested in such a question at all regarding mathematical truth was that any and every mathematical truth could be proved, that mathematical truth consists in demonstrability in those particular terms, and it may be that we never do find the proof, but there is a proof to be found. And now, what Gödel’s theorem shows us of course is that that is not the case at all, and in this respect mathematics is much more like natural science, although it still is in a class by itself, because it still remains that something consisting of pure mathematics without any empirical introduction doesn’t behave as empirical theories should; it’s not something that you could undertake to test by experimentation. If it is, I think the experimentation isn’t going to be sufficient. Question: Gödel’s essay dealt with “formal” undecidable statements.6 So, it looks as if he had disproven formalism to some extent. And yet you have argued, and rightly so, I think, that of course his proof itself was 6. Gödel, K., “Ueber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38.

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highly formalistic. And you, I think, have also thought that formalism is something to be kept. Now, doesn’t Gödel’s proof, if it is against formalism, also undercut some of your own beliefs? Quine: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we can dispense with formalism. All I can see that distinguishes it from ordinary intuitive proofs is that we’re saying very expressively what we are doing, what steps we take and what’s going on; we’ve settled on what’s going to constitute a proof. Now there are ways short of formalistic proof certainly, in which one can go on in the same spirit and which one does in natural science, towards making a hypothesis more and more plausible. And this is a sort of thing that one naturally undertakes in the case of the axiom of choice or the continuum hypothesis: “Oh, there is every reason to believe!” Again it’s certainly very much the way of Fermat’s last theorem. Well, now we know at last after about 330 years or whatever it may be, that the theorem is true, and we have a formal proof, so the experts tell us—a formal proof of 200 pages maybe, but it might’ve been otherwise. But anyway, short of the formal proof it’s been found that there’s no counter-instance to Fermat’s last theorem in the first, oh, maybe several thousand numbers in the way of exponents to the formula. It’s with the entering of the computer that it has been pushed way up there, so that of course compared with any scientific hypothesis in physics or anywhere we could be absolutely certain of Fermat’s last theorem. And this is the sort of thing that isn’t excluded by Gödel’s argument. In fact, you know, Gödel’s proof shows us as a byproduct—maybe I should go back a step: Gödel’s proof applies to any formalism, formalism being sharply defined, but what the definition comes to is that rules of proof are formal if they could be programmed on a computer. And a proof procedure is formal if it can be tested on a computer to see whether it was carried through correctly or not. So, this is very liberal, and anything that could be thought of really as a proof beyond pure adventure surely should be formal. The point is that Gödel’s proof is always carried out relative to some given formalism; he doesn’t give the formalism, but given any formalism that fulfills these requirements of a formalism, relative to that you can construct this sentence, which cannot be proved by that formalism, unless the formalism is such that you could prove a falsity. In fact, if you could prove it, it would be false. What I wanted to bring out here is

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that it also comes out of Gödel’s proof that this formula, this undecidable formula, is in fact true. And that you can, then, adopt it as a further axiom, strengthen your system, now there is a system, in which that previously undecidable theorem is a theorem. But then reconstruct Gödel’s whole argument relative to this extended system, you get another. And that’s so, but—surely Gödel wouldn’t have conceded either that this shows that formalism is a dead end, and that something else should be found; but on the contrary, this is where formalism really in an informal way has vindicated itself, in showing the thing to be true. (Pause) It says that you can extend your horizon, but there’s always a further step with which your horizon could be extended, and that’s Gödel’s theorem. Question: I would like now to make a little shift to a specific topic, if you agree, which I think is intellectually stimulating, for example, for beginners in philosophy, and that’s paradoxes. In one of your lectures held in the early 60s, “The Ways of Paradox,” later published,7 you wrote about different kinds of paradoxes—leading from more joke-like paradoxes like the Frederic paradox or the barber’s paradox to those hardcore antinomies which challenged science and thinking. Can you tell us something about the role of paradoxes in scientific progress? Quine: Certainly in set theory, in mathematical logic, in foundations of mathematics—a very crucial role. There is this thesis of logicism, socalled, I think, paradoxes are very decisive there: the notion that all mathematics can be reduced to logic. The Principia Mathematica carried out this program: the details were carried out by reduction to logic. And indeed, mathematics was reduced, all its traditional branches reduced through rigorous definition to what was being called logic. But, it wasn’t until a paradox came through that it became perfectly clear, should have become perfectly clear, I think, to everyone concerned, and certainly it was clear to me, that this is not reduction to logic in the intuitive sense that would surprise people and make them think: “Oh, good heavens, here is all this abstruse and powerful mathematics, that can all be reduced to these trivial obvious principles of logic, as syllogisms!” Of course it’s nothing like that! 7. Quine, W. V., “The Ways of Paradox,” The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1966), revised and enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 3–20.

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What brings up that it’s nothing like that, is that paradoxes show that when ordinary logic is extended so that you are actually rigorously quantifying over classes it’s—it takes off. Of course later, through Gödel’s own work, we know that this gives you an incompletable system. And the paradoxes show that, as it was when this work began with Frege, it’s not merely incompletable, it’s inconsistent. Inconsistent! The principle which seems such a transparent and obvious principle, the principle of class existence, namely: “Every condition you can express determines a class” turns out to be false! And so, I think at that point it should have been clear to Russell; maybe it was. I’m not sure just what his attitude was there at that point, but it should have been clear to Carnap, and it wasn’t, that whatever analyticity means, set theory is not analytic. It’s a created theory, and so, although it is perfectly true, that all mathematics is reducible to set theory, logicism is not reduction to logic in any interesting sense. And I would draw the line between logic in the intuitive old sense after quantification theory, the truth functions and identity, and short of second-order logic so-called, with quantification over classes, as I called it, which is set theory. Question: Having talked about some other philosophers we should now introduce the reader/viewer to your own numerous contributions to philosophy. But before we do this, I would like to know: What is it like to be a member of the staff of the philosophy department at Harvard nowadays. Is there a lot of communication going on? Do you meet regularly? Quine: Strangely enough, no. In all the time I have been there, there isn’t a whole lot. There have been efforts occasionally; I know that Roderick Firth, that late Roderick Firth, who was a member of the department, promoted the idea, let’s every, well, couple of weeks perhaps get together and discuss, somebody maybe read a paper or something he’s been working on and let’s discuss it. Maybe we’d have two such meetings, and it would die out. I don’t know why, but certainly they’d been good men and good friends, good congenial people, but tending to work alone. There is some, here and there in more recent years I’ve seen that there had been some collaboration especially between the members of the department and a member of another department, someone in the law school or someone who is a professor of economics, who’d join into that, or even in one case, religion, but in that respect it

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seems that lots of values seem to be potentially there but—anyway, I spent a good life there even though it’s been rather a matter of each man working for himself. Question: We should now turn to some of your own contributions to philosophy. I would like to begin with your ontological thesis: “To be is to be the value of a [bound] variable,” which has already become one of philosophy’s “famous statements” like “cogito ergo sum” or “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” It’s also a great example of philosophical thought: seems slightly technical, hard to understand for laymen at first glance, but then, I hope, can be explained and understood easily. So, what does it mean? What was new in this concept? What’s the relation to former concepts? And why is this a step forward? Quine: Good. Alright, first, of course this is a formulation in terms of variables as something for just as a mathematical approach, but what it comes to in our ordinary language is “to be is to be the reference of a pronoun.” In fact, it should be more general, what really matters: “To be is to be the object of an essential pronoun.” Now, an essential pronoun is a pronoun that cannot be supplanted by its grammatical antecedent without destroying the meaning of your sentence. There are cases where one thinks of a pronoun as just what Peter Geach calls a “pronoun of laziness,” where you don’t want to repeat a clumsy antecedent, you just use an “it” or “he.” But there are uses of pronouns that cannot be so replaced, and these are the uses that matter; typical of these uses are where the antecedent is a quantified expression such as “Some” or “Every,” “Every man,” “Every man loves his mother.” What’s the antecedent of “his”? “Every man”? “Every man’s”? Well, supplant. And the result is: “Every man loves every man’s mother.” That’s not what we should say, you see. This is a sentence in which the pronoun is essential. Very well, it’s the essential pronoun, the role of which is assumed by the variable, when we go put things over into semi-mathematical notation. And now, why go for a criterion at all? The point is this: let’s think of the medieval nominalist who like all of us, I think, many of us, certainly I, liked to stick to the concrete, where we know what we’re talking about: sticks, stones, books, substances at worse, but not abstractions. We need abstract terms, we need predicates, we need general terms, and we can use them that make good sense in context, but we don’t need to say that they refer each to an object. There are various men, various houses, but “house” itself isn’t a

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further thing, contrary to Plato, that we could refer to, or “man.” With that thought we’re all congenial, but then the question arises: what does their thesis come to in the end if they’re going on using these terms, these general terms, just as we do, and yet saying that they’re not names of anything? They’re just crossing their fingers—what would it be like if they were names of anything? Where’s the difference? What does matter? And I wondered about that, I had wondered: when we try to reduce our ontology for reasons of intellectual economy and we are getting rid of some things in favor of others, just what are we doing? Are we still using the old terms but have found out how to paraphrase them into terms that don’t seem to be so obviously talking about objects. It struck me that this was just a question of whether it—the object, alleged object— is among the objects that one will be referring to when one says “some” or “every.” And this sounds as if—which is another way of looking at this same criterion—the crucial question, the primary question, what’s easiest to cope with first, isn’t whether there’s such a thing as Pegasus, as Socrates, as the present king of France, so on, but rather the plural: are there any unicorns, are there any people, and so on. That is the question of what if any things are these general terms true of? And an incidental point in favor of this shift of focus is that this leaves us now perfectly at home with the conception that there are a lot of things that we can’t name or pick out at all. In fact, in the foundations of mathematics one proves even that there are irrational numbers, there are real numbers that, given any prior notation, can’t be described at all, can’t be specified at all. It’s proved that the real numbers cannot be correlated one to one with the integers, and verbal expressions of language can. Well, if we’re looking at the denotation of general terms rather than the designator of singular terms, that even covers this territory. So, this way of drawing the line, it seems to me, brings things under control and puts them into intelligible words. Question: I would like to ask you a question, which many people probably would like to ask you. One of your most famous theses is the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. It’s a thesis which you advanced in 19608 and which made you even more famous, it seems, than your the8. Quine, W. V., Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

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sis about ontology and about analytic and synthetic sentences. But as the interest in this thesis mounted in the world, so that by now some people think, that Putnam is right, when he says that it has the stature of the transcendental deduction by Kant, it is interesting to see that your interest in this thesis waned. Your later work doesn’t even mention it anymore, while everybody else is going haywire over it. Could you explain that? Quine: Oh yes, that’s a good idea. What led me to this thesis in the first place: I was unhappy, as I still am, with the notion of meaning. Meaning is vague. But particularly, the notion of meanings in the plural. Because I have insisted, I think one must insist, that there’s no entity without identity. Because identity is definable in elementary logic in terms of simply membership in the same classes. So, if there are such things, however abstract, as meanings, they should be met with a sharp criterion of identity, at least something that’s very clearly intelligible relative to the rest of our understanding. And that hasn’t been done. And I don’t see how to do it, how to define, in general, synonymy. Synonymy between sentences would be the crucial starting point. The only point of this indeterminacy of translation was: I made, to make the thing vivid, a thought experiment of “radical translation” as I called it, translation without having any bilinguals or others who have previous knowledge of related languages. And what it means, when you succeed in this translation. How do you do it? To see just how to bring that about would be a way of telling us how to decide whether the meanings of two sentences really were the same. And then I thought, well how can we do it, how do we go about radical translation, and it seemed to me to stand to reason and it still does, that the result isn’t going to be unique when you get up into theoretical sentences away from what can be pretty much settled by observation. That there would be different translations which would be equally compatible with everything that you could observe. However, even this thesis is a negative thesis, and it was simply backing up my critique and my doubts, my dismissal, of the notion of meanings, and I certainly hadn’t intended it to cast doubt on the utility or dependability of translations, because of these indeterminacies, as their existence was conjectured anyway. The discrepancies would have no practical relevance or impact. If they did, we’d be able to decide them after all. And so, whereas I find naturally, as all of us must, translation is a very useful matter—I’ve been pleased every time I’ve learned that another of my writings has

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gone into translation, and I see no difficulty there! I’d say even that this thesis is a thesis that we have an unexpected wealth of alternative equally good translations rather than none at all. Well, it’s regrettable, this shock value of this, which depends really on misunderstanding of the thesis itself. So, I haven’t seen any point in reiterating in my later writings, unlike the indeterminacy of reference, and this is something which isn’t a conjecture, it could be very trivially proved—in terms of what I called proxy functions, and I think this is important as dramatizing the fact that what matters in science, in the verification of science, the empirical support of science, is only a matter of this logical structure of the scientific system and not of what objects it is talking about, and this I do reiterate in later writings. Question: May I ask you one more question about the thesis of indeterminacy of translation? You have just said that the argument involves a thought experiment, and I remember that I have also thought just that. Part of that thought experiment is that you built up a behaviorist scenario at the beginning, and one might deduce that this was really done only for the sake of the experiment. But isn’t there also a strong sense that you are a behaviorist? Are you? Quine: Yes, yes. Completely right, yes, that’s vital. That I can admit as evidence or as criterion only what can be intersubjectively agreed upon by observation. My behaviorism doesn’t go so far as to deny that we’re having thoughts and these thoughts we may even be incapable of expressing to our own satisfaction for the understanding of other people; they’re just to get their appropriate responses, and all that. Furthermore, there’s no dispensing with thoughts in the way of devising experiments or even devising definitions of our terms. But: that’s all going into the method. When it comes to making sense of our hypotheses and making sense even of our problems as objective problems as much as of our solutions, we can only go by, depend on, terms where in principle it can be intersubjectively agreed upon whether they apply or not. And so, in short, as applied to introspection my attitude is, this introspection is vital for the discovery in problem-solving, but insufficient in explanation, insufficient in the explanation of laws for general understanding and confirmation, and indispensable also for causal establishment of a thesis. Question: Does that mean that your behaviorism is parallel to your thesis that extensionality is what should count in science? Quine: Ah, yes, yes. That’s a good point. Yes, I’m not sure whether I thought

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of that directly. Yes, they certainly go together, yes, indeed. Because what isn’t extensional, well, when we think of examples of what’s not extensional, they are pretty much of the introspective kind. “Necessity” in this sense of conviction is what we have until “necessity” is spelled out in a way that we can extensionalize, namely in terms of say “logical necessity,” which we can formulate by semantical ascent in talking about the sentences and their structure. Yes. Yes, good, so this brings out an important link between extensionalism and behaviorism. But it’s going to be always there; I mean it’s a connection with a very moderate, and I would say a very reasonable behaviorism. Behaviorism, I mean, behavior, I never think behavior is explanatory. Behavior calls for explanation. And the explanation is going to be in the nervous system. It’s going to be physiological. But the behaviorism goes in, in stating the problem that we are trying to solve. It comes out vividly in a disease: the disease is known by signs and symptoms to the doctor, and he describes it that way, and it’s described and treated by trial and error and researched before it’s been discovered what’s causing it. But the symptoms are never the cause. And the symptoms in general, the behavioral evidence, is never the cause; it’s just the identification of the phenomena for which we might try to find a cause. Question: Another of your famous theses is there is no difference in principle between analytic and synthetic statements. Do you think that you have proven that there will never be a distinction forthcoming which makes sense? Could it be, like in Fermat’s last theorem, that the hypothesis is that there is this distinction between logic and empirical matters, but that we just haven’t been able to prove it as of yet? Quine: Well, I suppose, in principle I might, I ought to concede that, yes. That’s certainly all that’s happened. The problem has several aspects. The notion of analyticity, although without that technical word, is good common sense, and everyone shares it. When someone says: “Oh, I’ve just discovered, it looks to me as though bachelors are not married, no bachelor’s ever married!” we tell him: “That’s simply what the word means!” That’s a natural response of a non-philosopher, it’s all right, it makes good sense to everyone. And I think that a working notion of that can be defined in a rough way, which I suggested in one of my books, namely: “For a native speaker a sentence is analytic if he learned the truth of the sentence in learning the use of one of its words.” The bachelor-case is obvious there: The native speaker’s learned the truth of that only by learning the word “bachelor.” I said “native,” because a for-

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eigner might have learned this sentence, no reference made, by translation from his language, but the native no. I think that roughly this definition actually with some refinements which make for what the set theorists call closure—that is things logically implied by sentences fulfilling this condition should still count as analytic—but with that refinement, it works, so far as that criterion ever would be used anyway. However, when it comes to theoretical sentences in science, one doesn’t know when one has learned that a sentence was true, when one learned even one of the words going into the sentence, and it doesn’t matter, one doesn’t care. The word “momentum” came in by deliberate explicit definition, I believe—as a technical term, mass times velocity, momentum is proportional to velocity by definition, and then Einstein comes along and says: “No, momentum is not quite proportional to velocity, it’s proportional to velocity divided by something involving the square of the speed of light,” and the physicists don’t say: “You’re contradicting yourself, it’s a contradiction in terms.” They go along! In short, even making a sentence true by definition does not implant itself in the sentence itself as an enduring trait. It’s just so that the sentence will be on the level of all the other sentences. It’s simply a hypothetic trait. And to draw a line, I can’t imagine how the line in general can be drawn satisfactorily and intuitively among theoretical sentences between what are analytic and what are synthetic. And for Carnap it’s in the theoretical sentences—after all it is the philosophy of science he’s worrying about—that he’s making a central use of the notion of analyticity; and that’s where my criticism applies. Now you began this question with an analogy to Fermat’s last theorem. That’s an interesting one, and I think, in answer to that I’d have to say: yes, I can’t be sure. But, it’s certainly my conjecture that it can’t be done. Question: This takes us in a way naturally to natural science. And, I’ve got this question: Do you agree with naturalized philosophy as it’s done by today’s philosophers. Do you think it’s in keeping with what you had in mind when you wrote “Epistemology Naturalized” some time in the sixties? Quine: Yes, yes, I think I still go on with it. Question: Coming to an end, I would like to hear from you briefly what you think the important issues of philosophy today are? Which questions would you most like to have answered? Quine: Well, there’s one that may be on the brink of solution, Solomon

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Feferman thinks it is, namely, whether natural science can get by with a mathematics that is limited to the part of mathematics that deals only with a so-called enumerable infinity of numbers or other mathematical objects. As it’s been proved beginning about a hundred years ago, and a little more, by Cantor, there are many levels of infinities, some infinities being bigger than others, and this enumerable infinity, so-called, is the smallest of these infinities. And this is all very strange and nonintuitive, but one can make sense of it by a little construction. The lowest infinity, which is the infinity that characterizes the whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, and so on without end, is a different infinity from what characterizes the irrational numbers, real numbers so-called. Feferman, and others before him, Hermann Weyl and also Hao Wang, thought that with some more ingenious construction all the mathematical needs of natural science can be met with a modest mathematics that doesn’t transcend that lowest level of infinity. Feferman now thinks that he has established this. The last time I talked with him, he said it’s just a question of deciding on the limits of the natural sciences to tell how much mathematics they are going to need, because he has found, he claims, how to reduce what’s the obviously useful mathematics to this modest level. So, here is one open question that I find particularly interesting. Question: Then we’re coming to a close. And I have only one last question which may be a silly question, but it’s one we asked all the philosopher’s we interviewed and it’s fascinating that all the answers were different, and it’s just: why do you think is it better to do philosophy than not to do it? Quine: I’m not sure it is. I think it’s better that philosophy be done than that it not be done. Yes, I do think that. I think, perhaps that is the question. But I mean, whether a particular individual should do it rather than another, is it the best thing one can do if one’s capable of doing it, I wouldn’t say so, I haven’t any opinion. But yes, philosophy should be done. Philosophy in the sense in which I see it, because it’s a matter of bringing more perspective and often rigor, clarity into the sciences that are obviously very much worth doing for our general understanding of the world, to say nothing of the advancement of technology. That clarification is of course a reward by itself just for the joy of it, but it could certainly also be a factor in the further progress of science itself. I’m encouraged that scientists and analytical philosophers are getting together

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and cooperating more and I keep hoping that it may, for instance, bring about that breakthrough that we, I guess most of us, have been longing for, to reconcile quantum mechanics clearly with traditional, classical mechanics, and similar advances in other sciences. I think of philosophy as very much a handmaiden of science and something that should go along with it rather than being a separate pursuit.

II Quine on Other Philosophers

Correspondence

9 Logical Correspondence with Russell 1937–1967

Sixty-one years ago, and a little more, I was approaching the end of my freshman year at Oberlin College. It was time to choose a field of concentration, and I was torn three ways. I was drawn to philosophy, to mathematics, and to linguistics, which I called philology and would have meant majoring in classics. My problem was solved when one of my friends, who was majoring in English, told me that Bertrand Russell had a “mathematical philosophy”. This would evidently combine two of my three competing interests, making the score two to one against philology. So I majored in mathematics, and arranged for honours reading in mathematical philosophy, which was mathematical logic. No logic was taught at Oberlin, but the chairman in mathematics made inquiries and got up a reading list for me. Russell dominated it, with The Principles of Mathematics, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and Principia Mathematica. Having thus decided that Russell was going to be important to me, I turned to him also for leisure reading. Marriage and Morals disposed me kindly to my new master. I read Sceptical Essays, Philosophy, Our Knowledge of the External World, Mysticism and Logic, and The A.B.C. of Relativity. These books gratified my philosophical appetite and whetted it further. The reading in mathematical logic induced a lasting enthusiasm in me for that subject. My admiration for Principia Mathematica was unbounded. Its other author, Whitehead, was teaching philosophy at Harvard, so I went to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy.1 Philosophically Whitehead and Russell were far apart. “Bertie thinks I’m muddle-headed,” Whitehead said, “and I think Bertie’s simple-minded.” Actually Whitehead’s appreciation of Russell spanned the gulf. He once told

1. I have lifted twenty-odd lines, some here and some later, from my autobiography in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (Library of Living Philosophers, 1986).

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me that he believed Russell to be the greatest analytic thinker the world had ever known, not excluding Aristotle. Whitehead’s hero, however, was Plato. My most dazzling confrontation of greatness occurred in October 1931, when Whitehead and Russell stood side by side on the podium of a Harvard auditorium. Russell had come to give a lecture, and Whitehead was introducing him. After the lecture, Whitehead introduced me to Russell. By then I was writing a doctoral dissertation on Principia Mathematica and I told Russell some of the innovations I had in mind. Three years later my first book came out: A System of Logistic. It was an outgrowth of my dissertation, and I sent a copy to Russell. He responded in June 1935 with a 600-word letter. I shall proudly quote two passages. Telegraph House, Harting, Petersfield 6.6.35 Dear Dr. Quine Your book arrived at a moment when I was overworked and obliged to take a long holiday. The result is that I have only just finished reading it. I think you have done a beautiful piece of work; it is a long time since I have had as much intellectual pleasure as in reading you. . . . In reading you I was struck by the fact that, in my work, I was always being influenced by extraneous philosophical considerations. Take e.g. descriptions. I was interested in “Scott is the author of Waverley”, and not only in the descriptive functions of PM. If you look up Meinong’s work, you will see the sort of fallacies I wanted to avoid; the same applies to the ontological argument. . . . He went on to remark that the notation of the logic of relations in Principia was mainly Whitehead’s. He proceeded to some technical points, and then closed in this gratifying vein: In any case, I have the highest admiration for what you have done, which has reformed many matters as to which I had always been uncomfortable. Yours very truly, Bertrand Russell2 2. Quoted in full in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2: 1914–1944 (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968), 323–25.

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This is one of several immodest quotations, but it would be ungrateful to him not to take pride in them. In the present case what pleases me most is the care with which Russell read my book. He dealt thoughtfully with one specific point after another. One novelty in my book had been an extensional version of propositions, construed as sequences. Russell raised two objections here, and his points were well taken. Actually my sequences were working well and achieving a certain economy, but I would have done better to dissociate them from propositions. Propositions were a legacy of Principia Mathematica that I should simply have dropped, and soon did. Russell expressed misgivings also over my abandonment of propositional functions in favour of classes and my elimination of his axiom of reducibility. Also he echoed, tentatively, an allegation of Sheffer’s that there is a circularity in the notion of ordered pair. These three misgivings are all traceable to a failure to maintain a sharp distinction between the use and mention of expressions—a failure that had likewise caused the fogginess and complexity of early portions of Principia Mathematica. It is not to be wondered that my answer to Russell’s 600-word letter was three times that long. My admiration of Principia, despite its faults, was well known to my friends. My first daughter was born that same year, 1935, and Charles Leslie Stevenson suggested that I name her Principia. It was four years later that Tarski came to America. Pre-war Poland was mildly antisemitic, and Tarski’s academic status was consequently incommensurate with his stature. Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, J. H. Woodger, and I managed to get him invited to an international philosophical congress at Harvard in September 1939 with expenses paid, and with some difficulty we persuaded him to accept it. Our hope was that it might lead to his being offered a good job in America. In fact it saved his life. He had just arrived when the Nazis invaded Poland, and Tarski’s parents were among the first Polish Jews to be massacred. Various of us proceeded to try to find him a job. I wrote to Russell, who was at UCLA, and he responded in October 1939 that he had tried them in vain. I went so far [he continued] as to hint that if I could, by retiring, make room for him, I might consider doing so; but it seemed that even so the result could not be achieved.

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He had begun the letter thus: I quite agree with your estimate of Tarski; no other logician of his generation (unless it were yourself) seems to me his equal. This parenthetical reference to myself was kind but uncalled for; I was never under the illusion of equalling Tarski in logic, but I could cite many living contenders: Gödel, Bernays, Church, Turing, Kleene, and Post. Anyway he concluded his letter thus: You may quote me anywhere as concurring in your view of Tarski’s abilities. I shall recur to this a little later.3 Meanwhile Russell was invited to give the William James Lectures at Harvard the following year, 1940. Russell wrote to William Ernest Hocking on the matter on the last day of 1939; I shall read his note if only to parade another of my highly prized bouquets. I could very well draft off the severer portions of my “Language and Fact” into discussions in a seminar. In a place containing Quine (for whom my respect is unbounded) I should not dare to say much about pure mathematical logic; but the subject has applications to “Language and Fact” that I should like to develop for advanced students. So Russell and I were colleagues at Harvard through the fall term of 1940. I made less of the opportunity for his society than I ought to have done, perhaps out of diffidence. At any rate, we were together at the department luncheon meetings every week or so, and I was of course a regular auditor at his lectures, which were published as An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Also I must surely have attended the associated seminar, if it took place. It was a banner semester, for Tarski was still there, on some makeshift research appointment, and Carnap was there as visiting professor; and I was vigorously engaged with them. There was an effort, issuing from Brown University as well as Harvard, to promote periodic gatherings for discussion. Our three-star cast managed to 3. Quoted in full, ibid., 344.

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bow out after two of these unwieldy sessions, and to meet in the seclusion rather of I. A. Richards’ study or Carnap’s flat along with a few of us younger devotees. Tarski’s introductory logic textbook was published in English translation the following year, 1941, and Russell was up in arms over the blurb on the publisher’s circular. In March 1941 he wrote to Hocking: I have been very much distressed to find myself quoted, in an advertisement of Dr. Tarski’s Introduction to Logic, as saying that Dr. Tarski is the ablest man of our generation in logic and semantics. I have a very great respect for Dr. Tarski, but I hope that he will forgive my disowning this statement as exaggerated. The words “our generation”, which are in any case unsuitable, since Dr. Tarski and I belong to widely different generations, would include all logicians and writers on semantics now living, for example Dr. Whitehead. The words that I used in fact were these: “Dr. Tarski is the ablest man of his generation in logic and semantics.” This was not meant to refer to men a few years older or a few years younger than Dr. Tarski; and in fact the statement was not intended for publication at all, but as a confidential recommendation for a professorship. On the same day he sent a protest to the publisher, and also wrote to Tarski, in part as follows: I see that your publishers have got hold of a confidential statement that I made about you to the College of the City of New York, and . . . have exaggerated it. Of course I realize that you are in no way responsible for . . . this I am only sorry that it is necessary for me to embarrass you by disowning the statement. . . . To make public even my original statement would seem like showing favouritism among my children. From these two letters and his protest to the publisher we see that Russell was deeply troubled by the thought of having hurt anyone’s feelings by an invidious comparison. In saying that his original statement had been confidential, however, he was perhaps forgetful. You will recall that in his letter to me of October 1939 he said of Tarski that “no other logician of his generation seems to me his equal”, and added that “you may quote me anywhere as concurring in your view of Tarski’s abilities.”

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I had ten more letters from Russell over the next twenty-seven years. In 1941 he wrote me about a longish manuscript by R. L. Goodstein on the foundations of mathematics: I want to unload this manuscript on someone. Are you willing to be the someone? In 1949 he wrote to me in part as follows: Thank you for . . . your paper “On What There Is”—a somewhat important subject. When I first sent my theory of descriptions to Mind in 1905, Stout thought it such rubbish that he almost refused to print it. . . . I was lucky in the aeroplane accident, as nearly half those on the plane ceased to be among “what there is”.4 Touching on that same harrowing experience on another occasion, Russell recalled that on entering the plane he had told the stewardess, “Let me sit at the back. I’ll die if I can’t smoke.” It was lugubriously prophetic. The passengers in the forward seats drowned. In 1956 he wrote me at length in praise of Robert Marsh, whom he was helping to find a job. The next year he wrote me as follows: I have been moved to write a polemical article against a man who says his name is Warnock, which is in a volume called Essays in Conceptual Analysis edited by Antony Flew. His article is largely concerned with you, but I have not attempted to defend opinions which belong to you personally as I am quite satisfied that you can defend them yourself better than I can if you think it worth while. I should, however, be very grateful if you could give your blessing to what I have to say. If you can do so, I should on the whole prefer to publish the article in America rather than in England and I should be glad of your opinion as to where, in that case, it ought to appear. The paper was “Logic and Ontology”. I responded with applause and discussion, and suggested the Journal of Philosophy. He then wrote me as follows, in part: 4. Quoted in full, ibid., vol. 3: 1944–1969 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 49.

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Dear Quine, I think we might drop the formality of “Professor” and “Lord” don’t you? Would it be too much trouble for you to send on the typescript that I sent you to the Journal of Philosophy. . . ? At the end of October 1962, I heard from Russell as follows: Many thanks for your letter of October 18. I am highly honoured and much pleased that you wish to dedicate your forthcoming book to me. If Kennedy and Khrushchev permit, I shall read it as soon as I get it, but, at present, it looks very doubtful whether any book not yet published ever will be. I shall be interested to see how you manage with weakened existence axioms. I always particularly admire your symbolic virtuosity and I am sure you will manage the job better than anybody else would. A year later he wrote as follows: Thank you warmly for sending me your book on Set Theory, and still more warmly for the dedication and inscription, both of which gave me the greatest pleasure. I am not capable of forming a critical judgment of your book, as it is nearly forty years since I last worked at mathematical logic and I have read very little on the subject during that long period, but what I have read of your book I have found extremely interesting. I do not quite understand your classes which cannot be members of classes of classes. I suppose I should if I could give more time to the subject, but my time is all taken up in trying to secure that the class of human beings alive in 2000 a.d. will not be the null class. I found your dedication particularly gratifying because so many logicians now-a-days seem to consider Principia Mathematica worthless. I do not at all mind any number of emendations, but I like to think that, considering its date, it was not without merit. It is comforting to find that you think so. In 1966 I had a long letter from him urging me to will my possessions to his Peace Foundation, as he had done. No doubt much the same letter went to others. A month later, at the age of ninety-four, he wrote me again about logic:

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I have read your recent paper with considerable interest. There is one minor point which I thought to clarify. On page six you say that Frege is said to have commented “Arithmetic totters”. In fact, in a letter to me he says “Die Arithmetik ist ins Schwanken geraten”. The comment of Frege is, therefore, quite authentic. My last word from Russell came in January 1967. It was this: I enclose a paper by G. Spencer-Brown, which I have given one careful reading, but no more. I am very lazy at the moment, but thought I should draw Spencer-Brown’s work to your attention. I looked into Spencer-Brown’s work and was not moved by it. When his little book Laws of Form came out two years later, it bore this blurb from Russell: Reveals a new calculus of great power and simplicity. At first glance the blurb as printed looks longer and more extravagant; one must look sharp for the quotation mark. The last time I saw Russell was decades earlier—November 1950—when he came to Harvard to give a public lecture. My wife and I picked him up at Mrs. Whitehead’s, where he had gone to pay his respects, and we drove him to his lecture. It was scheduled for New Lecture Hall, but as we drove down Kirkland Street our way was blocked by a great flock of young people hurrying across the street from the New Lecture Hall to Sanders Theatre, where there was more room for the unexpectedly large turnout. What with the girls’ bright dresses and sweaters flying in the wind, it was a gala welcome, and Russell was pleased. Mrs. Whitehead had nursed some minor grudges against Russell down the years. She told Irving Singer after this last occasion that she had been reluctant to receive Russell, and had resolved to give him a piece of her mind, but that when he came his sprightly talk and engaging way had charmed all her resentment away. I had a posthumous and wordless message from Russell as recently as 1980. It was when I visited the Russell archive at McMaster, where Russell’s personal philosophical library was set out. I was pleased to find six of my books in it, only three of which I had sent him. A pipe cleaner, by way of

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bookmark, still marked the place in my Mathematical Logic where I departed from his definition of singular description. I should like to conclude by reading a short letter of my own which I wrote on the occasion of Russell’s ninetieth birthday. April 5, 1962 Dear Russell: A young man decides to be a philosopher. “How do you mean, ‘philosopher’?” they ask him. “Well,” the young man pursues, “take Bertrand Russell.” I was one of the many down the years who answered thus. You have followers and followers’ followers, apostates and apostates’ apostates. For generations you have been head empiricist in a land celebrated for empiricism, and along the way you have sired the Vienna Circle and grandsired the Russell-baiting Oxford philosophy itself: So I hail your ninetieth birthday as a momentous anniversary. I could have done so on the score of your mathematical logic alone; for Principia Mathematica was what, of all books, has influenced me the most. Sincerely yours W. V. Quine5 5. First published in Into the Tenth Decade: Tribute to Bertrand Russell (London: Malvern Press, 1962), 36.

Articles

10 Thoughts on Reading Father Owens 1967

The concept of existence has made for philosophical perplexity in a variety of ways. In his lively essay, lightly poised on its scholarly groundwork of footnotes, Father Owens has brought the variety of issues vividly before us. And he has suggested certain points where we might seek initial agreement, on which to build. He begins by proposing that we accept “as a starting point the things experienced in sensation . . . that these things exist.” Conformity to this proposal is in one sense assured: we all did accept that starting point. In another sense it is not assured: we do not necessarily remain true to that starting point as our ontology evolves. Let us examine this matter in terms of learning. The learning of language early and late is largely ostensive, and in its earlier phases it is mainly ostensive. Such learning consists in learning a sentence, often a one-word sentence, by learning under what observable circumstances to assent to the sentence. It is a question of currently and intersubjectively observable circumstances. Only thus can we begin to apply words in conformity with the speaking community. Hence the terms first acquired are predominantly terms for things that admit of comparatively direct observation—mostly general terms like “cat,” “mat,” “red,” and “round,” which apply to mediumsized bodies. Even the verb “exists,” or “there is,” will first be learned in application to such bodies; thus “There is a cat on the mat,” “There is no cat on the mat.” Now let us look to the next phase. Besides the part of language that we learn by direct ostension there is all the rest of language, learned indirectly through its connections with the ostensive part; learned contextually. The learning of this is an intricate process, hard to schematize. The process is far from fully understood, but in particular this point about it is evident: the

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existential idiom, “there is,” becomes an integral part of a systematic apparatus of pronominal cross-reference, identity, and number, that is geared to fussier work than the announcing of cats on mats. With help of this apparatus, talk is evolved concerning objects or purported objects that are not observable. Such talk is theoretical. The warrant for such theory is that we get a simpler systematic account of the observable bodies by reckoning them thus to a more inclusive universe. Man, down the ages, came increasingly to project the apparatus of existence and reference thus beyond the domain of observed things. Such anyway is the picture that suggests itself. What is more evident is that still today each child, learning the language, has to learn to affirm existence first of observables, such as cats on mats, and to get into theory afterward. Theories go on evolving in divergent ways, as individuals variously bring their ingenuity to bear. It can even happen that, in the quest for a simpler systematic account of the observable bodies, those bodies themselves get dropped from the universe of the theory. This means, in logical terms, that they cease to be reckoned as values of the variables of quantification; for quantification is the crux of the referential and existential apparatus when language is regimented in the manner of modern logic. When this happens, when observable bodies are dropped from the universe of the theory, the contrast between appearance and presumed reality is complete. This situation may seem absurd, since the very point of the theory was to explain the observable bodies. But it is not absurd. The phenomenon of there being a cat on the mat is still accommodated. What happens is just that sentences about cats and mats get construed in the theory in such a way as to call only for things other than cats and mats as values of quantified variables. Someone might protest in a different vein, relating to the use and learning of words. He might protest that the verb “exists” or “there is,” having been learned in the cat-and-mat sort of setting, cannot justly apply to unobservables, and is doubly and intolerably misapplied if the observables themselves get passed over. Again, however the objection is mistaken. I remarked that “exists” and similar expressions acquire multiple allegiances early. Not only are they learned early in ostensive settings, as of cats on mats; they are also integrated early into the systematic apparatus of pronouns, identity, and number. Initially there is no conflict here, but a strain sets in if the merit of retaining the observables as values of the theoretical variables begins to be questioned. And there is no absurdity in acceding to the strain. If the sim-

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plest theory that accommodates and predicts sense experience has exclusively theoretical entities as values of its variables, then it is the part of wisdom to conclude that appearance is one thing and reality another. At this point a confusion can arise between theoretical and vulgar usage. The theoretician who has given up cats and mats as values of his variables still knows what visual experience to expect when told “There is (or: exists) a cat on the mat.” He will even revert to this idiom himself, for popular communication, when the theoretical point is not at stake; though presumably he knows how to paraphrase the sentence to suit his refined ontology when there is reason to do so. We could say therefore that there are for him two senses of existence, the theoretical and the vulgar. But when we understand the situation, as I think we do, we have here no cause for confusion. Father Owens expressed the hope that, having agreed on the existence of experienced things, we might see our way to extrapolating the existence concept by analogy and so arriving at an existence criterion usable in the domain beyond the experienced objects. I have now urged, to the contrary, that even the experienced objects themselves remain in our ontology, if at all, only on terms of good behavior; on terms, that is, of conducing to relative simplicity on the part of an overall empirical scientific theory. Simplicity, if we were to come to understand it better, might indeed serve as a sort of criterion of existence; but it would not be a criterion ordinarily so-called, a standard applicable distributively to the several candidates. It would be a criterion applicable only to systems as wholes. Thus when I despair of a criterion of existence I am not making the simple point that the criterion varies with the type of existence concerned: that we verify the existence of cats on mats by looking, of prime numbers by computing, and of electrons in less direct ways. For I would hark back to my point that even cats on mats, however conspicuous, may go by the ontological board as theory progresses. The better line is to recognize that criteria in science, while more than welcome, are not the general rule. At some point we have to settle, however tentatively, for scientific hypotheses whose only claim is that they round out the system more simply than the visible alternatives. This is where the ontological decisions come. A statement of Father Owens on which I shall comment more briefly is that existence is restricted to a present. Nothing exists in the past; things did, but they don’t anymore. Nothing exists in the future; things will, but give them time. Yet the past and the future are not to be simply dismissed. Now temporal puzzles of this sort are due, surely, to a failure to keep all verbs

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equally subject to tense or equally free from tense. I am persuaded moreover that, as between tensed usage and tenseless, the philosophical, logical, and scientific advantages are all on the side of the tenseless. One rightly thinks here of Einstein’s theory, but it is not the main point. The most decisive consideration is that we are enabled to form classes of things that are not contemporary with one another. In closing I shall touch briefly on another suggestion of Father Owens that is well suited to controversy, namely, that existence admits of degrees. A stone or tree exists fully in the external world and to a lesser degree in the mind. A character of fiction has only that lesser degree of existence. An attribute has perhaps no first-grade existence but two sorts of second-grade existence, one in the mind and one in the material objects that have the attribute. To me, grades of existence are uncongenial. There are no half-way stages about belonging to a universe of discourse, and being admitted as a value of a variable of quantification; and quantification is the way of schematizing the existence concept that seems clearest to me. The relation of a stone or tree to the mind is that of being thought about; and I don’t see that we clarify this relation at all by calling it low-grade existence of the stone or tree in the mind. If in trying to systematize psychology, or perhaps a theory of myth and fiction, we find it efficacious to admit ideas as objects of reference, or values of variables, then I am for admitting them as such and not as something else, a stone or tree, in an existentially diluted state. Such a dodge is unavailable anyway for the fictional characters. I grant that these shadowy ideal objects are an unsatisfactory stopping place. The worst thing about them is not their immateriality, but their want of adequate individuation. What revision can a fictional character undergo without becoming another character? Surely a theory is untenable whose objects cannot in principle be counted. And it is well known that attributes are in trouble over individuation too, insofar as they are not taken simply as classes. Whenever we see how to free some portion of scientific theory from dependence on posits of this shadowy sort, we have made a welcome and substantial theoretical advance. But a theory that makes good and bad posits and assigns them different degrees of existence does not strike me as a promising solution.

11 Carnap’s Positivistic Travail 1984

Abstract—My paper would touch on the phenomenalism of Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt, his crusade against metaphysics, the debates over protocol sentences, his worries about “dispositions” in “Testability and Meaning”, his retreat from the thesis of syntax to intensionalism, and finally the resolution of these quandaries from a more naturalistic standpoint.

The significance of the Vienna Circle, as a concerted movement, can be overestimated. We are told of the evolving doctrine of the Circle when what is really concerned is the doctrine of an individual, usually Carnap. A local group had been drawn from various disciplines by shared philosophical leanings. Neurath was an economist, Menger and the Hahns were mathematicians, Frank was a physicist. A manifesto, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung”, deploring metaphysics and celebrating scientific method, was issued in 1929 over the corporate signature “Der Wiener Kreis”, and this engendered an air of solidarity. Ernst Mach had represented a somewhat congenial point of view in the Vienna of the preceding generation, so he was seen as the forerunner of the Circle; though a foreigner, Russell was historically more to the point. Vienna’s role was rather incidental; Carnap and the ranking local philosopher, Schlick, were German; Hempel and Reichenbach remained in Germany, but were closer philosophically to members of the Circle than some of these were to each other. When one speaks of the Vienna Circle or logical positivism, one thinks primarily of Carnap. We do better to think of him as Carnap, and to sort out the various influences upon him, Viennese and other, according to their merits. We know from his autobiography that he began imbibing mathematical logic from Frege in Germany at 19, and pressed on afterward into

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Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. In 1921, when he was 30, he read Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World, and this is what inspired his first great project, Der logische Aufbau der Welt. He tried to carry out in explicit and rigorous detail what Russell had envisaged as a remote and speculative possibility: the derivation of our scientific account of the physical world from sensory experience by logical construction. The phenomenalistic starting point had been Russell’s in Our Knowledge of the External World, and the logical apparatus was Russell and Whitehead’s as of Principia Mathematica. The Aufbau saw the light of day after 7 years, in 1928. Meanwhile Carnap was becoming militantly anti-metaphysical. This was partly a natural revulsion against the murkiness and irresponsibility of current Continental trends. Partly it was prompted by the last part of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Partly it was due perhaps to the influence of Neurath. In any event, the epistemological status of metaphysics and indeed of all philosophy is bound to be a challenge to anyone who takes his own empiricism seriously. The upshot was that in 1928, the year of the Aufbau, Carnap also brought out his tract Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie, in which he declared the classical polarity of idealism and realism to be a distinction without a difference. The Aufbau shows consequent signs of strain, since its starting point is so emphatically phenomenalistic. Carnap tried to ease matters by urging somewhat lamely that phenomenalistic and physicalistic beginnings would be equally legitimate, and that what matters are rather the structural interconnections that emerge. It is significant that the line of the Aufbau was not further pursued by Carnap, and for many years he declined to authorize a translation. Metaphysical theses are meaningless, Carnap held, because it is impossible in principle to muster empirical evidence for or against them. But what then is the status of good philosophy, such as his own? And what is the status of mathematics and logic, which are evidently devoid of empirical content and yet indispensable to science? John Stuart Mill had tried to answer the latter question by finding empirical content in mathematics and logic after all; arithmetic, for example, was inductively supported by our experience of counting various combinations of aggregates. Carnap rightly rejected this desperate line, and took his cue from Wittgenstein’s doctrine of tautology. The truths of logic and mathematics are meaningful, useful, and yet devoid of empirical content because they are true by virtue purely of the meanings of their words.

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Thus it was that Carnap made what Rorty has called the linguistic turn. It served him also on the companion problem, that of the epistemological status of good philosophy. The business of good philosophy, he proposed, is the syntax of the language of science. It can be descriptive or normative. In its normative capacity it proposes a language form as a convenient one for science. Rival philosophies, in so far as not disqualified as meaningless metaphysics, are alternative proposals of language forms for scientific purposes. Carnap counseled tolerance of alternatives, for it is a question of relative efficacy, if anything, and not of truth and falsity. Tolerance is all very well, but efficacy also has its place; and on this score Carnap did not remain indifferent as between phenomenalism and physicalism. Physicalism was gaining the upper hand already in Scheinprobleme, thanks probably to Neurath’s influence, and by 1932, in Carnap’s “Psychologie in physikalischer Sprache”, physicalism had prevailed. The phenomenalism that Carnap imbibed from Russell had had its day. Carnap completed his linguistic turn in 1934 in his Logische Syntax der Sprache. Here he set forth his linguistic conventions explicitly and showed how they generated truths of logic and mathematics. He transcribed philosophical theses from the inhaltliche Redeweise into the formale Redeweise so as to set them forth in their true colors as statements about language. Thus the ontological statement “Five is a number” was rephrased as treating of words: “‘Five’ is a number word”. Some sentences, called quasi-syntactic or pseudo-object sentences, only seem to treat of things, and shine forth in their true colors when transcribed as sentences of syntax. Carnap held that philosophical sentences were of this kind. But where does the difference lie? How does a purportedly quasi-syntactic sentence such as “Five is a number” differ from a genuine object sentence such as “Rubies are precious” or “Mendès-France is a galactophile”? The transcription seen in “‘Five’ is a number word” can be applied across the board; thus “‘Ruby’ is a precious-stone word” and “‘Mendès-France’ is a galactophile word”. Evidently the difference is that “Five is a number” is true by virtue purely of the meanings of its words; it is analytic. The others depend for their truth partly on non-verbal circumstances, such as one man’s palate or many men’s admiration of bright red stones. If this was the point, then all philosophical truths counted as analytic for Carnap, and conversely all truths of logic and mathematics, being reckoned as analytic, were quasisyntactic. He undertook to make the world safe for extensional logic by reckoning

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the modalities of necessity and possibility as quasi-syntactic. Thus “Necessarily A” and “Possibly A” became “‘A’ is analytic” and “‘A’ is consistent”. This expedient was suited, at best, to logical necessity and logical possibility; not physical. To cover the latter he decreed physical analogues of analyticity and consistency; thus a statement was P-analytic, or what he called P-true, if it followed from the postulates of the physical theory. But does this render physical necessity and possibility quasi-syntactic? Only if the choice of one’s physical postulates is viewed as part of one’s choice of a language—surely an unattractive position. Carnap also reckoned the semantic idioms of meaning and reference as quasi-syntactic. He cited the example: “Evening Star” and “Morning Star” have different senses but designate the same object and declared it quasi-syntactic, transcribing it thus: “Evening Star” and “Morning Star” are not logically synonymous, but they are physically synonymous. Things have at this point slipped wholly out of control. Any identification of objects, however factual and contingent, would qualify as quasi-syntactic by this standard; and with a minimum of ingenuity the expedient can be extended to all true statements. After a few years, recognizing these difficulties, Carnap gave up his “thesis of syntax” and reconciled himself to semantics. Philosophy came to be the semantics, not the syntax, of the language of science. He expressed indebtedness to Tarski on this point, but the outcome was ironical. Tarski’s socalled semantics was steadfastly extensional, treating of truth and denotation, or satisfaction, and shunning intension, or meaning. On the other hand Carnap’s stalwart earlier stand for extensionality and against modal logic was soon to crumble. He came to appreciate, with my help I may say, that by transcribing “Necessarily A” and “Possibly A” as “‘A’ is analytic” and “‘A’ is consistent” we can accommodate only the most trivial contexts of the logical modalities. We cannot thereby accommodate modal contexts containing a bound variable that is quantified from outside. Carnap found at length that, far from reducing modal logic to the socalled syntax of analyticity and consistency, he was unable even to treat the

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semantics of modal logic without admitting the modal operators into his metalanguage. Guided still by his principle of tolerance, moreover, he felt obliged to deal with the semantics of modal languages, distasteful though those languages be; and thus he found himself committed not only to the examination of modal languages but to the use of one as well. Distaste gave way in time to taste. Once a steadfast opponent of modal logic, he became its champion. Quantification into modal contexts from outside gives rise to semantical problems that seem to be cleared up by limiting the values of the variables to intensional objects: such objects as properties and individual concepts, as opposed to classes and individuals. I found in 1961 that this expedient does not suffice, but that is later history1; meanwhile Carnap, having managed at last to swallow modal logic, found himself faced with unappetizing intensional ontology as well. In Meaning and Necessity, 1947, he tried to mitigate the situation by propounding a double-aspect ontology: the variables were allowed two interpretations, taking the mandatory intensional values on the one hand and the more palatable extensional values on the other. However, this was an idle move, a verbal quirk merely in the description of the object language and no distinctive trait of the object language itself. The variables could be characterized more simply and no less adequately as admitting just the intensional values, and they could not be described as admitting just the extensional values. Carnap was saddled with a modal logic and a purely intensional ontology, whether or not he became persuaded of the fact. After 1947 his attention shifted, at any rate, to his monumental project in the theory of induction and confirmation. Instead of following him into those two forbidding volumes, let us look back 15 years to his early thoughts on confirmation. We saw that he repudiated metaphysics for want of confirmatory or infirmatory evidence. A doctrine had meaning, he held, only if accessible to empirical evidence— allowance being made for the analyticity of mathematics, logic, and true philosophy. The repository of empirical evidence was seen as the so-called protocol sentence. A meaningful scientific statement was expected to imply some protocol sentences, not outright, presumably, but conditionally upon other protocol sentences. Just what sentences should count as protocol sentences was in 1932 a matter of discussion between Carnap and Neurath: 1. W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 152–53.

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whether sentences about sense data or sentences about an observer’s report of sense data or sentences about an observer’s report of external events. Views varied also regarding the relation of protocol sentences to the scientific sentences that they could be said to support. An ill-considered early view was that meaningfulness resided in outright verifiability or falsifiability by observation. Consideration of mixed quantifiers made short work of that. Where “F” is an observationally decidable predicate, the existential quantification “∃x Fx” can indeed be verified by a single observation; and the universal quantification “∀x Fx” can be falsified by a single observation; but, where “F” is a two-place predicate, “∀x ∃y Fxy” is neither directly verifiable nor refutable. “All men are mortal” is already an example; ∀x ∃t (x dies at t). In “Testability and Meaning”, 1936, consideration of disposition terms such as “soluble” led Carnap to renounce radical operationism: the demand that every scientific predicate be defined by observable criteria. He settled instead for what he called reduction forms, which stated various observable conditions, some necessary and others sufficient, for the predicate in question. Cases would remain in which the necessary conditions were met but no sufficient ones were met. In such cases, application of the predicate remained observationally indeterminable but was still admitted as meaningful. Carnap’s positivism was waning sensibly. There is a vast gulf between definition and any weaker alternative such as reduction forms. To define is to eliminate, to excuse, to exonerate. Statements containing the defined term import no content, no risk of error, not already present in statements lacking the term. Reduction forms, on the other hand, can jointly imply consequences that are devoid of the new term and that could even turn out false. Carnap recognized this latter point. Twenty years later in “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts” he proposed an ingenious way of separating the factual content of his reduction forms from the linguistic or quasi-definitional component. His method was inspired by what we have come to call Ramsey sentences. Given a set of reduction forms introducing some predicate, Carnap supplanted that predicate, throughout the reduction forms, by a variable taking sets or properties as values. Then he conjoined the results and quantified the variable existentially. This gave the factual content. The conventional or quasi-definitional component he then formulated as a conditional having that same quantification as its antecedent and the conjunction of the original pristine reduction forms as consequent. This

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conditional he could still declare to be analytic, or true purely by the meaning of the introduced predicate. Carnap’s reduction forms were an uninterestingly special case of what he came to refer to more generally as meaning postulates. His method of separating the analytic component from the factual is applicable to his meaning postulates generally, provided that each meaning postulate is reckoned as helping to introduce just one of its contained predicates, and provided further that there is a noncircular order of introduction over all. Matters having reached this stage, however, there is no evident point in distinguishing meaning postulates from the rest of the statements of a scientific theory. Theoretical terms admittedly enter science in a historical order, and they enter a science textbook in a pedagogical order, same or different, but they all interact timelessly and on an equal footing in the subsequent tests and applications of scientific theory. A statement that happens to have been first affirmed in explaining some new term will be rescinded no less readily than other statements when occasion arises to revise the theory, and no light is shed by declaring some such changes to be semantical and others doctrinal. Science is indeed an amalgam of linguistic convention and sensory evidence, but there are no clear grounds for separating these two components by distinguishing two classes of sentences. Sensory evidence is not something that can in general be sorted out over the component sentences of science, investing some of the sentences and sparing others. Pierre Duhem stressed already in 1906 that what implies a predicted observation is ordinarily a whole cluster of present observations and theoretical sentences in concert; failure of the prediction falsifies no one sentence of the cluster rather than another. A typical single sentence of a theory has no distinctive empirical content of its own; it can be singled out for testing, but only by agreeing meanwhile to hold other sentences of the cluster immune. It was characteristic of the Vienna Circle from its earliest days to seek empirical content for sentences one by one. The content was null in case of analyticity, and otherwise it should be analyzable somehow in terms of protocol sentences. This, as Duhem appreciated, was a grave mistake. It was a strange one, too, not only because Duhem’s point seems so evident, but because Carnap himself recognized it and failed to appreciate its significance. Already in his Scheinprobleme, 1928, there is a hint of the Duhemian holism, and that same year in the Aufbau the very mechanism of

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the Duhem effect is strikingly and imaginatively depicted. What I think of in the Aufbau is Carnap’s account of the assigning of perceived colors to positions in physical space. Direction from the eye is determined directly by the positions of the color in the visual field, but distance from the eye is assigned in the light only of systematic considerations affecting all the assignments together. The guiding principle is the principle of least action: so choose the distances as to minimize the differences of color within short intervals of space and time. This is a very perceptive caricature of the role of simplicity considerations in scientific theory, and it is holistic. It is one of Carnap’s deepest insights, and we can only regret that it did not play a fundamental role in his subsequent philosophy. Let us turn back now to the question of protocol sentences. There was debate and indecision regarding their form, their nature, and their logical relation to scientific theory. No clarity on this latter point can be hoped for until we are clear on what to count as protocol sentences. The notion had lingered on as an unassimilated vestige of the phenomenalism that Carnap espoused in the twenties. Having renounced phenomenalism by 1928, he was no longer prepared to represent protocol sentences as reports of sense data. But if they were reports rather of events in the external world, what should distinguish them from other sentences about the external world? I shall say what I think Carnap’s answer ought to have been if his conversion to physicalism had really been complete and unreserved. He should have said that protocol sentences are distinguished from other sentences about the external world merely by their causal proximity to sensory stimulation. Epistemological priority gives way to causal proximity to sensory stimulation. A protocol sentence, he should have said, is an occasion sentence that the speaker will consistently assent to when his sensory receptors are stimulated in certain fixed ways, and consistently dissent from when they are stimulated in certain other ways, regardless of what may meanwhile have been concerning him. They are occasion sentences that the speaker could easily have learned by direct conditioning to those stimulations, though he may learn them also in less direct ways. They are what I have called observation sentences. Protocol sentences so construed share the vocabulary of science and can accordingly enter into logical connection with scientific theory. Schematically I picture the connection in two steps, as follows. Scientific theory at its most primitive consists, I suggest, of rudimentary generalizations of the form “Whenever this, that”—where “this” and “that” stand for protocol sen-

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tences. These rudimentary generalizations are arrived at by primitive induction, which is to say conditioning. The rest of scientific theory, then, in all its sophistication, gains its empirical content hypothetico-deductively by implying some of these rudimentary generalizations and implying the negations of others. My position here is unreservedly physicalistic and naturalistic. The epistemological question is seen as a naturalistic question about natural man’s discourse about the rest of the natural world, in relation to the stimulation of his receptors. Protocol sentences fall naturally into place, and their relation to science becomes simple and unproblematic. What now of the status of mathematics? Our recognition of a moderate holism brings on a blurring of boundaries, notably the boundary between mathematics and natural science. Theoretical statements, even of physics, gain their empirical content only through participating in a system. Observational consequences are implied by the statements jointly, and some of the statements that contribute to the implication are purely mathematical. Mathematics does not imbibe its empirical content in the inductive way that John Stuart Mill supposed, but it imbibes it in the hypothetico-deductive manner of theoretical science. The seeming immunity of mathematics to empirical refutation can be accounted for by the holism. When an observation requires a scientist to change his theory, he is free to choose for retraction any one or other of the statements that contributed to the unacceptable implication; and it behoves him to choose one whose retraction will be least disruptive not only of his particular theory but of the rest of science. He spares mathematics because there are always other ways to save the appearances, ways that would not reverberate so resoundingly through the whole structure of science. The blurring of the boundary assimilates pure mathematics to theoretical physics no more than it assimilates theoretical physics to pure mathematics. The proper message, I repeat, is that science is an amalgam of convention and discovery, but that there are no clear grounds for separating these components sentence by sentence. I see the boundary between natural science and responsible scientific philosophy as wavering in the same way. Philosophy is, in my view, not somehow logically prior to natural science. It is integral to our system of the world, and distinguished from other departments of science only in the topical sort of way in which they are distinguished from one another. As for the philosophical effusions that Carnap denounced under the name of meta-

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physics, I can agree in large part case by case but again I see a blurring of the boundary. I see bad philosophy as one brand, or several, of irresponsible science. Carnap repudiated various of his tenets over the years, we saw, and I have been opposing others of them now. Yet his influence in philosophy has been profound. I, like many, have been influenced more by him than by any other philosopher. Amid all these repudiations and departures, then, what is his central and enduring contribution? I see two. One is the celebration of rigor and the scientific spirit. My own criticisms have been leveled according to those same Carnapian standards, urging more of the same. The other enduring contribution is the linguistic turn. It was above all Carnap that gave language its central position in the subject matter of serious latter-day philosophy, and the focus on language illuminates philosophical issues as never before. From this turn surely there will never, short of cataclysm, be a turning back.

12 Events and Reification 1985

When Frege introduced quantification, he illuminated three subjects: logic, language, and ontology. The bound variable of quantification clarified ontology by isolating the pure essence of objective reference, leaving all descriptive content to the predicates. The quantifiers clarified language by resolving the grammatical anomaly of the false substantives ‘everything’ and ‘something’. And quantification was the very making of logic, rendering it a substantial branch of science. When Russell defined singular description, he further illuminated those same three subjects: logic, language, and ontology. One logical and linguistic insight was the dispensability of singular terms in favor of predicates and variables, and another was the rich productivity of contextual definition. Furthermore, one saw how singular terms might be legitimized even when shorn of unwelcome ontological commitments. A third contribution that likewise impinges on those same three subjects—logic, language, and ontology—is Davidson’s theory of adverbs, in which he quantifies over events.1 I shall examine it and consider what lessons can be drawn from it regarding the nature of reification generally and the purposes served by it. Davidson’s problem of adverbs was how to accommodate them in predicate logic. Taking an example of his, we begin with ‘Sebastian walked’. It consists of a general or one-place predicate ‘walk’ and a singular term ‘Sebastian’, of which the general term is predicated. Or perhaps we should picture a two-place predicate and two singular terms, one for Sebastian and one specifying a time: ‘Sebastian walked at t’. But then what of ‘Sebastian walked slowly at t’? Do we need a new two-place predicate ‘walked slowly at’? And what if we want to say ‘Sebastian walked slowly and aimlessly at t’? 1. D. Davidson, Essays on Action and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 166ff.

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or ‘Sebastian walked slowly and aimlessly in Bologna at t’? The adverbs and adverbial phrases can be multiplied and concatenated without end. It would be an abdication of logical analysis to accept every such adverbial modification of every verb as a distinct and irreducible predicate. A language with a limitless basic lexicon is absurd, as Davidson has stressed. It could not be learned. Ajdukiewicz presented grammar neatly in terms of categories of functors.2 A verb is a functor that attaches to one or more singular terms to form a sentence. An adverb such as ‘slowly’ is a functor that attaches to a verb to form a longer verb. An adverb such as ‘very’ is a functor that attaches to an adverb or adjective to form a longer adverb or adjective. This is all very well, but it does not contribute to our present project, namely, adaptation to standard predicate logic. Functions can indeed be generated in set theory, and set theory can be formulated in standard predicate logic with membership as the primitive predicate; but the trouble is that Ajdukiewicz’s functors do not express functions. A function applies to objects to yield objects. His functors attach to expressions that are mostly not names of any objects, to form expressions which again need not name objects. There is a premium on providing for the adverbs within the clear and elegant structure of classical predicate logic if we reasonably can. It admits just truth functions, quantification, and predicates of one or more places with variables attached. Identity is accommodated as one of the two-place predicates, and constant singular terms and function signs are easily paraphrased, in context, to fit the scheme. The logic of this close-knit but powerful branch of language is susceptible of familiar proof procedures that are demonstrably complete. Furthermore, thanks to Tarski, the structure lends itself to a straightforward recursive definition of satisfaction and truth. Davidson was concerned to handle adverbs in these congenial terms. Let me return now to his point about the impenetrability of a language with an unlimited basic lexicon; for he has made it also in other connections.3 He applied it to something of mine about belief and other propositional attitudes, where I had propounded a series of belief predicates with increasing numbers of places. Along with the dyadic case ‘x believes S’, where

2. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, The Scientific World Perspective and Other Essays (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 95–109. 3. D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 13ff.

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S is a sentence, I recognized the triadic case ‘x believes P of y’ where P is a one-place predicate, and the tetradic case ‘x believes P of y and z’ where P is dyadic, and so on without end. It was a way of separating out the objects that were referred to de re, or on their own merits, rather than as a manner of speaking. Davidson saw these as an infinity of belief predicates, and cited the impossibility of an infinite lexicon. There was really no such difficulty in my belief predicates, for we can construe belief uniformly as a two-place predicate relating believers to sequences of arbitrary lengths. Tarski was confronted with the same situation, in his definition of satisfaction that is dear to Davidson’s heart and mine, and his expedient was the same: he treated satisfaction as a two-place relation borne to open sentences by sequences. As applied to the predicate ‘walk’ and its modifications, however, Davidson’s point about unlimited lexica holds. It cannot be circumvented by resorting to sequences, for there are no appropriate objects to make sequences of. The relevant multiplicity now is a matter of adverbs ‘slowly’, ‘aimlessly’, ‘in Bologna’, and so on, and these are not names; there is no talk of corresponding objects. In this contrast between the two situations there is already a glimmering of what will emerge increasingly as we proceed: namely, the part that reference to objects can play in making structure amenable to standard predicate logic. Because the various complements of my belief construction referred to objects, I was able to make a sequence of them, which, being an object in turn, could figure as one of two arguments of a two-place belief predicate. In this there is a hint of a solution of the Sebastian problem as well: why not reify? We might reconstrue the adverbs ‘slowly’, ‘aimlessly’, ‘in Bologna’, and so on, as singular terms, each naming a strange new object, and then form sequences of these objects. We would then take ‘walks’, like ‘believes’, as a two-place predicate relating men and other animals to sequences. The sequences consist now of these strange new objects, as many or few as desired, along perhaps with the time t. Thus ‘Sebastian walked slowly and aimlessly in Bologna at t’ becomes: Walk (Sebastian, ) relating Sebastian to the sequence of a time and three newly reified objects. But I shudder at the thought of infesting my well-swept ontology with these ugly new objects. Happily there are better ways.

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An easy way of eliciting a modicum of standard structure from the Sebastian example has been staring us in the face all along: we can convert the stacked adverbs into an explicit conjunction of sentences. (1) Sebastian walked slowly at t and Sebastian walked aimlessly at t and Sebastian walked in Bologna at t. Objective reference has contributed here again to the extracting of standard logical structure; for it is thanks to the references to Sebastian and t that we were able to convert here to sentential conjunction. It is only by having tied the three conjoined reports to the same agent, Sebastian, and the same time, supposed short, that we can be seen to have been reporting the same walk in all three clauses. This step has illustrated once more the contribution of objective reference in exposing standard logical structure, but it does not solve the adverb problem. The third clause of the conjunction could indeed be freed of its adverbial structure by saying simply that Sebastian was in Bologna at t, but the adverbs ‘slowly’ and ‘aimlessly’ are not thus easily to be dissociated from their verb. It was the fixed reference to Sebastian and t, throughout, that enabled us in (1) to resolve ‘slowly and aimlessly in Bologna’ into its three components, distributed through a conjunction of three sentences. What further fixed reference can we find, or stipulate, that will enable us to split ‘walked slowly’ in turn into its components distributed through further conjunction? In answer Davidson posited something that could be said to be a walk and to be slow. (2) ∃x[x is a walk and x is slow (for a walk) and x is aimless and x is in Bologna and x is at t and x is by Sebastian]. Here is his solution. The threefold conjunction has become sixfold and the adverbs have become predicates. All is resolved at last into lexicon and predicate logic. The line of reasoning that led him to the solution may not have been what I have been recounting, but I wanted to highlight what it is that objective reference or reification contributes. It contributes the link between clauses, a link that may be needed to reinforce the loose association afforded by mere conjunction and other truth functions.

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Let us pause for another example, in which to begin with there is no overt reference to objects, not even Sebastian or Bologna or t. Erupteth brightly, noisily and disastrously. I mean it as a sentence, but have left the verb without a subject to keep it impersonal, as if to say erumpit. Reification of an eruption enables us to adapt the sentence to predicate logic in Davidson’s way. ∃x(x is an eruption and x is bright and x is noisy and x is disastrous). The four elements of the original sentence thus fall into four sentences loosely joined by conjunction, but the reference to an eruption, recurring in each component, continues to link them as required. Adverbs that are modifiers of verbs are thus converted into predicates. ‘Slowly’ gave way to ‘slow’, ‘aimlessly’ to ‘aimless’, ‘brightly’ to ‘bright’. But what about adverbs that modify adverbs or adjectives? One thinks first of ‘very’, but it involves an independent problem, not peculiar to adverbs. It is a problem shared by what I have called syncategorematic adjectives4 and what philosophers now call attributives. They are adjectives such as ‘mere’, ‘would-be’, or ‘poor’ as in ‘poor player’: adjectives whose attributive use (in the grammarians’ sense of ‘attributive’) cannot be analyzed as conjunction (in the logicians’ sense of ‘conjunction’). Analysis of syncategorematic adjectives is a large topic, on which I defer to Wheeler and others.5 What of further adverbs, likewise modifiers of adverbs or adjectives but free of the syncategorematic character of ‘very’? Examples are not easily come by. One example is the parenthetical ‘as a walk’ in (2). Perhaps they can be adapted to predicate logic by unsystematic paraphrase case by case. At any rate Davidson’s analysis pertains specifically to adverbs in their primary and abundant use, namely, as categorematic modifiers of verbs. In illustration of that analysis we witnessed the positing of a walk and an eruption. They are events, one would say. That category is broad enough to cover all the examples that are apt to worry us. It is a familiar category, but still it invites further clarification. How are events individuated? Davidson 4. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of MIT, 1960), 103. 5. Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Attributives and Their Modifiers,” Noûs 6 (1972): 310–34.

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proposes this standard: events are identical if and only if they cause and are caused by all and only the same events. (3) x = y ↔ ∀z (z causes x . ↔ . z causes y : x causes z . ↔ . y causes z). He concedes that it has an ‘air of circularity’ but protests that it is not a circular definition, since there is no identity sign in the definiens.6 True, it is not a circular definition; but its air of circularity does not end there. Thus consider, first, this simpler proposal for the individuation of events: (4) x = y . ↔ ∀z (x ∈ z . ↔ . y ∈ z). Again the definiens contains no identity sign, and indeed it justly defines identity, for events and other things too; but it does not individuate them. And why not? Because, in quantifying over classes z, it makes sense only insofar as classes make sense, and hence only insofar as classes are individuated. But are classes not individuated to perfection by the law of extensionality, which equates classes whose members are identical? No; this law individuates classes only to the degree that their members are individuated. Since (4) explains identity of events by quantifying over classes of events, it individuates events only if the classes of events are already individuated, and hence only if events are already individuated. Here is the circularity of (4)— not as a definition but as an individuation. The circularity of (3) is similar but more direct: it purports to individuate events by quantifying over events themselves. An interesting point emerges regarding impredicative definition, that is, definition of something by appeal to a totality that includes or depends on the thing that is to be defined. (3) and (4) are examples. There have been mathematicians from Russell and Poincaré onward who espoused a constructivist philosophy and banned impredicative definitions, alleging a kind of circularity. Such was Russell’s so-called vicious-circle principle in the early years of his theory of types. Unlike Poincaré and the other constructivists, however, Russell presently found the ban intolerable and eased it with his axiom of reducibility, not appreciating that he thereby lifted the ban altogether.7 6. Essays on Action and Events, 179. 7. W. V. Quine, “On the Axiom of Reducibility,” Mind 45 (1935): 478–500.

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For my own part, I welcome impredicative definitions. I have remarked that there is nothing wrong with identifying the most typical Yale man by averaging measurements and tests of all Yale men including him. But we now observe that impredicative definition is no good in individuation. Here a difference between the impredicative and the predicative emerges which is significant quite apart from any constructivist proclivities. We can define impredicatively but we cannot individuate impredicatively. In events as thus far conceived there is also another cause for discomfort, apart from individuation. It is a case of indigestion: events intrude as foreign matter. We are comfortable with our spatiotemporal regions and the stuff that fills them, the bodies and their extrapolations into the gerrymandered, the diffuse, the very large and the very small; but the events are conceived to be none of these. This is not a fatal drawback. Classes offend in the same way and more so, but we reluctantly tolerate them because of the indispensable role that numbers, functions, and other classes play in natural science. However, I question whether in the case of events we are driven to these two major concessions, one to do with imperfect individuation and the other to do with heterogeneity. I hope we can do better. A physical object, in the broad sense in which I have long used the term, is the material content of any portion of space-time, however small, large, irregular, or discontinuous. I have been wont to view events simply as physical objects in this sense. If Sebastian chews gum all the way across Bologna, and no longer, that event of his chewing and that event of his walking have been for me identical; they take up the same place-time. We might break this tie by a spatial narrowing of the events, limiting the chewing to Sebastian’s head and the walking to his legs. But Davidson blocks this strategy with another example: a ball that was simultaneously rotating and heating up.8 The rotating had certain effects on the surroundings, and the heating had other effects. Can we say that its rotating is its heating up? I am not put off by the oddity of such identifications. Given that the ball’s heating up warms its surroundings, I concede that its rotating, in this instance, warms the surroundings. I am content likewise to conclude that Sebastian’s gum-chewing got him across Bologna, if it coincided with his walk. These results seem harmless to science, for they imply no causal connection between warming and rotation in general, nor between locomotion and chewing gum. But the ball example raises also a more stubborn prob8. Essays on Action and Events, 178ff.

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lem: if it is rotating rapidly and heating slowly, can we say that the event is both rapid and slow?9 Perhaps we must retreat after all to a more complex version, construing an event as the pair of a physical object in my sense and a distinctive set of some sort. Jaegwon Kim and Richard Martin have ventured on somewhat such lines.10 Such a construct could still be accommodated in the ontology that I have accepted, which comprises physical objects, classes thereof, and so on up. The problem of individuation of events would seem to be dissolved now by the assimilation of events to physical objects or to some sort of constructs upon physical objects. For physical objects are well individuated, being identical if and only if spatiotemporally coextensive. Yet it has been felt that physical objects, bodies in particular, are poorly individuated. Who can aspire to a precise intermolecular demarcation of a desk? Countless minutely divergent aggregates of molecules have equal claims to being my desk. True enough; but this circumstance attests only to the vagueness of the term ‘desk’, or ‘my desk’, and not to that of ‘physical object’. Each of these visually indiscriminable candidates for the status of being my desk is a distinct physical object, individuated by the requirement of spatiotemporal coextensiveness. Vagueness of boundaries has sparked philosophical discussion in the case of desks because of their false air of precision. Mountains meanwhile are taken in stride; the thought of demarcating a mountain does not arise. At bottom the two cases really are alike; our terms delimit the object to the degree relevant to our concerns. In the case of the mountain we care about the summit, its altitude, its immediate approaches, and perhaps whether to reckon some subordinate summit as part of the same mountain or as a lesser neighbor. We are indifferent to area, population, and the boundary of the base. The mountain is no particular physical object; any one of a vast number would serve. The desk is to be viewed similarly; the cases differ only in degree. Are we then to withhold the term ‘physical object’ from the very things that have been its prototypes—desks and mountains? Yes and no. A certain adjustment is required, and the place where I would make it is in the interval between formal logic and the terms to which it is applied. Consider, to begin

9. Here and elsewhere I am indebted to auditors at Brown University. A remark by Stanley G. Clarke in Ottawa also prompted an improvement elsewhere, and a critical reading by Burton Dreben led to several. 10. See Davidson, Essays on Action and Events, 129, 170.

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with, the classical notion of the extension of a general term. The extension of the term ‘desk’ is conventionally thought of as the class of its denotata, thought of as physical objects. Realistically we may recognize rather an extension family, as I shall call it. It is a family of vaguely delimited classes, each class being comprised of nested physical objects any of which would pass indifferently for one and the same desk. When we bring formal logic to bear on discourse of desks, then, we adopt the fiction that the extension is some one arbitrary and unspecified selection class from that family of classes; it selects one physical object from each. Similarly, and more obviously perhaps, for mountains. This strikes me as the reasonable way to accommodate vagueness: not in a logic of vagueness, but in the account of the application of a logic of precision. These questions of demarcation carry over to events. Sebastian’s walk is perhaps to be identified with a pair whereof one component is the temporal segment of his body over the period while he was walking, and there are then the vague limits of his body to reckon with, on a par with those of the desk. The accommodation is the same. Another event, an explosion, is comparable rather to a mountain: the nub of it is well placed, but its perimeter is as may be. Physical objects, despite the vagueness of terms that denote them, are individuated to perfection by spatiotemporal coextensiveness. No wonder: our conceptual apparatus of space, time, and physical objects is all of a piece. Space-time is a matrix that stands ready to cast objects forth as needed in the course of introducing logical order into one or another branch of science or discourse. We have examined the workings of reification in the logicizing of adverbs. In the light of those observations, I want now to speculate on the function of reification in general and in principle. I shall begin by considering the relation of scientific theory to sensory evidence. How do we muster sensory evidence for or against a theory? We formulate a deviously related question as to the outcome of a proposed experiment or observation and then we so situate ourselves that the stimulation of our sensory receptors will trigger our answer to that question—‘Yes’ or ‘No’. The theory is thereby sustained, for the time being, or shaken. On the one hand there is the set of theoretical sentences that is under fire. On the other hand there is the observation sentence, as I call it, that is subject to a verdict by dint of sensory stimulation. Where complexity comes is in the relation of the set of theoretical sentences to the observation sentence. They are connected by a network of intervening sentences, variously linked

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in logical and psychological ways. It is only here that we have to pry into the sentences and take notice of names, predicates, and objective reference, as Davidson well argued in “Reality Without Reference.”11 What are related are sentences first and last; terms intrude only along the way, in the interrelations of the sentences. Sentences, not terms, are the termini—the termini ad quos et a quibus. One thinks of Davidson again with his semantical focus on truth conditions of sentences. Terms are the means to a sentential end. I want to see more clearly how terms and objective reference contribute to that end of relating sentences to sentences. What we have seen in connection with adverbs may afford some leads. Consider, then, an observation sentence. To fit the typical scientific situation it should perhaps treat of a galvanometer, a pointer reading, a blue liquid in a test tube, or the like, but a homelier example will be more convenient: A white cat is facing a dog and bristling. The scientific theory that is being tested is perhaps ethological. This observation sentence, true to form, is one that we will directly assent to or dissent from when suitably situated and visually stimulated. It is in its global susceptibility to visual triggering, and not in its mention of two creatures, that its observationality consists. Its referential aspect belongs rather to its devious connections with the ethological theory to which it is meant somehow to bear witness. How the referential aspect contributes to that connection is now the question. Let us begin by so rephrasing the sentence as to mask its referential function, just as we say ‘It’s raining’ or ‘It’s getting dark’ without meaning to refer to any object, so we might say ‘It’s catting’ in the sensible presence of a cat. Our observation sentence, ‘A white cat is facing a dog and bristling’, then goes noncommittally into adverbs: It’s catting whitely, bristlingly, and dogwardly. Reference, then, is what emerges when we regiment the sentence to fit predicate logic, which is the chosen mold of our scientific theory. Analogously to the earlier example of the eruption, our sentence becomes: (5) ∃x (x is a cat and x is white and x is bristling and x is dogward). 11. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.

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I am not conjecturing about the genesis of reference, as I have done elsewhere, nor am I proposing a rational reconstruction of its genesis. I am concerned rather with scientific theory and observation as going concerns, and speculating on the function of reference in the linking of whole observation sentences with whole theoretical sentences. I mean predicate logic not as the initial or inevitable pattern of human thought, moreover, but as the adopted form, for better or worse, of scientific theory. Reification of the cat has adapted our observation sentence to predicate logic, but nothing as enduring as a proper cat is needed for that purpose. The briefest stage of a cat will suffice. The identity of a cat over time, in its goings and comings, is a further refinement that is called for at the level of scientific theory where causal chains are being traced. Reification of the briefest trace of cat sufficed for adjectivizing the adverbs: extrapolation to proper cats is wanted for further theoretical purposes. But the utility of the reification is basically the same in both cases: a forging of links between sentences or clauses. The effect is visible in (5), in the recurrence of ‘x’ from clause to clause, and it is no less evident in the case of the enduring cat. In pursuing causal connections at the crudest level we want to say this sort of thing: If something that a cat eats causes him discomfort, he takes increased care to sniff things before he eats them. The ‘if-then’ here is truth-functional, as loose as conjunction; and then the required tightness of connection is imposed by the recurring reference to an enduring cat—just as the required tightness of connection was imposed on conjunction, in earlier examples, by recurring reference to a walk or an eruption. Space-time is the matrix on which we can draw for all our reifications of concrete objects, however small or large, diffuse or irregular. The efficacy of reification in forging links between clauses and sentences has become evident from our examples. In Davidson’s case it linked clauses of conjunction to take the place of adverbial connections. In the case of enduring physical objects it links clauses and sentences according to causal connections. It could be said, going a step beyond Voltaire, that if things had not existed they would have had to be invented. And indeed we have found it fruitful to press our reifications beyond space and time. We posit abstract objects— numbers, functions, classes—and our natural science would be a pretty sorry affair without the loyal support of that ghostly host. Here again the

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utility of the reifications ultimately lies, we may be sure, in superimposing firm connections upon the looseness of truth functions. Deviant logicians have espoused strict conditionals and various brands of relevance logic to add tensile strength to the truth-functional connectives, but standard predicate logic gains the required strength through reification. Clauses are bound together by shared anaphora to a quantifier. Whitehead and Russell long ago cited the quantified conditional as their defense of the material conditional against its critics,12 and I am now suggesting that this mode of bonding the loose clauses of truth functions is the basic technical service of reification itself. In talking thus of the uses of reification I would not seem to impugn the reality of walks, eruptions, cats, or other physical objects, or even of numbers, functions, and classes. Let us identify our ball game and keep our eye on the ball. It is clear, surely, in the relation of science to sensory evidence, that sentences rather than terms are the gross termini—ad quos et a quibus. Objects of reference are invoked in between. In considering how they help to forge links between sentences of high theory and observation sentences, I am no more questioning their reality than I am questioning the reality of the sensory receptors that feed the terminus a quo. There is nevertheless an inescapable methodological lesson here, which has somewhat the air of skepticism or nihilism on first encounter. It is the lesson of what I call proxy functions. It hinges on the fact that scientific theory consists of sentences, presumed true, and that what are contingent on sensory evidence are also sentences. Terms figure only as nodes in the network of sentences and consequently their references could be shuffled or reconstrued at will without disturbing the connections. Thus suppose any arbitrary one-to-one transformation imposed on our ontology, and suppose every term, every predicate, reinterpreted to conform to the ontological shift. No word of any sentence is changed; words are merely reinterpreted. Observation sentences remain associated with the same stimulation patterns as before, and the relations of these sentences to those of the scientific theory remain undisturbed. This reflection is a reflection on epistemology, or the theory of scientific evidence, and not on the nature of the world. It tells us that scientific evidence is a matter of sensory stimulation and the structure of the network of 12. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 20ff.

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sentences. The nature of the world is another question, and a no less interesting one. It is to be answered in natural science, not in the theory of evidence for natural science; and robust realism is then the order of the day. In our methodological sophistication we appreciate that a reshuffled ontology would fit all evidence just as well, but it would not fit it any better. Predictions proceed and are confirmed apace, and we cannot ask for more.

13 Carnap 1987

The Rudolf Carnap of the thirties was the Relentless Rudolph of the philosophical world, the scourge of metaphysics. Many of us gained our first and last impression of Heidegger from Carnap’s Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, where Heidegger’s “Das Nichts nichtet”—“the nothing nothings”—was belabored to illustrate the meaninglessness of metaphysics. It is not to be wondered that the metaphysical establishment viewed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and Carnap in particular with disapproval and perhaps misgivings. Even the young science of mathematical logic was suspect, because of a mistaken notion that it supported logical positivism. Job-hunting philosophers of those Depression years were wary of flaunting logic as a qualification or of cultivating it as a specialty. Several of us young admirers accompanied Carnap to a philosophical congress in Baltimore in 1936. We were his henchmen, flanking him as we threaded hostile corridors to where Professor Lovejoy was presenting a paper in vigorous denunciation of logical positivism. Carnap’s response was in character, but not the character that many must have expected. Carnap was a mild man, and was given to what Emerson once extolled: he would divide and define. If Professor Lovejoy meant A, the answer is thus and so; if on the other hand he meant B, the answer is such and such. Carnap was victor, we felt, hands down. Granted, we were young, and partisan to boot. He was a kind man. I first wrote to him four years earlier when he was newly established in Prague and I was sitting in Vienna with a shiny new Harvard Ph.D. Unknown as I was, he extended me a prompt and thoughtfully detailed welcome for the spring term. He gave me books and a map, and his wife Ina spent days helping my wife and me find lodgings in Prague. I attended all his lectures and on intervening days I talked long hours with him at their house, mulling over the typescript of his Logische Syntax der

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Sprache. When we left Prague in April 1933 I was his ardent but unstable disciple. Carnap was vigorous. He skied and he relished Alpine walking tours with Herbert Feigl and other philosophers of a congenial bent. He was abstemious: no tobacco, no alcohol. He asked me why I drank poison. He saw me as a young man on the threshold of God knows what, and his kind heart bade him venture the point. Certainly he abstained also from coffee, for sleep was a delicate matter. Sometimes when he and I had spent the afternoon discussing his typescript, Ina urged my wife and me to stay for supper; but, we were warned, no “science” after supper. Only small talk, or Carnap will lie awake afterward. His work, his ideas and what might be done to improve and disseminate them, were what mattered to him. They mattered more than sleep, as Ina had observed. We see it also from his autobiography in the Carnap volume of Schilpp’s Library of Living Philosophers. Carnap vouchsafes us his place and date of birth and identifies his parents, but from there on the topic is his intellectual development, to the exclusion even of any mention of his first wife, or of his first hasty visit to the New World to join her and marry her in Mexico, or of his progeny, or of his eventual domestic felicity with Ina. Because he was the most significant spokesman of the Vienna Circle, people have thought of Carnap as Austrian. Because he became a professor at Prague, other people have thought him a Czech, and the more so for the strangeness of his name. He was neither. In Prague he was in the venerable German university, the Karlsuniversität, and never learned much Czechish. He was German, born 1891 in Westphalia, and his name, for all its oddity, was old German. Its ending, he told me, was presumably from the same Indo-European root as aqua; he had a lively interest in language. He had studied physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berlin; also logic at Jena under Gottlob Frege, founder by my lights of mathematical logic. He moved to Vienna in 1926 because he was called to a junior post on the faculty there. In those days the universities of Germany and Austria and the German university at Prague were all of a family in the recruiting of faculties; and so it was that in 1931 he moved to Prague as ausserordentlicher (associate) professor. For all the oddity of his name, Carnap wasn’t even Jewish. Still, like all informed and decent folk, he was shocked and outraged by the Nazi takeover in Germany. Worse, he was himself an outspoken socialist of the opposite kind, left rather than right. A further point was that his academic and hence

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financial advancement at Prague had lagged behind previous assurances. So, what with one thing and another, it would be rational to emigrate to America, the lingering Depression notwithstanding. It was with this in mind that in our lively subsequent correspondence we used each other’s language—I to keep up my German, which had been our sole medium in Prague, and he to improve his English for America. We enclosed carbon copies and returned them corrected. He and Ina moved to America in 1936 and were at Harvard intermittently pending a professorship at Chicago. Carl Hempel, a like-minded young philosopher, had meanwhile fled Germany with his Jewish wife Eva, and Carnap helped to bring them to America by contriving a place for Hempel as his assistant. The four of them, the John Goheens, the Albert Wohlstetters, the Feigls, Nelson Goodman, and others of us, some or all, gathered in and about Cambridge and on the beach at Ipswich from time to time for a memorable blend of good philosophical discussion and high spirits. Ina called Carnap Peterli for no apparent reason, and Eva called Hempel Peter on similar grounds; but Eva protested that she had been doing it first, and that the ambiguity was intolerable. Ina acceded, and called Carnap Carnap thenceforward. Hempel has been Peter to all of us ever since. The hard scientist’s world is a neat world, insofar as he has any choice in the matter; and such were Carnap’s proclivities. He was inspired early by Bertrand Russell’s sketchy idea of a logical construction of the external world from the data of sensation, and in 1928 he brought out his Logischer Aufbau der Welt, a masterful construction using sophisticated devices of mathematical logic and realizing in large part Russell’s dream. What mathematicians call arm-waving gave way in Carnap’s work to mathematical precision. Sharp boundaries were Carnap’s style early and late: a boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense, and a boundary between what is true by linguistic convention and what is true as a matter of fact. Dubious boundaries, I came to think. Carnap long regarded each sentence of empirical science as having its own separable empirical content, and this despite taking favorable notice of Pierre Duhem’s contrary view. There was further tension between the strictness of Carnap’s standards and the kindness of his heart: on the one hand his antimetaphysical stance and on the other hand his “principle of tolerance,” which legitimized any arbitrary framework for the language of science. It was this tolerance that seduced him into the modal logic of necessity

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and possibility, which earlier he had deplored. When I protested his defection, he replied, “What would you think of an entomologist who refused to study lice and fleas because he disliked lice and fleas?” But he developed a taste for modal logic and became its champion. Carnap’s drive for neatness was manifest not only in his philosophy. It showed in his politics: his advocacy of a planned economy. It showed in the turns that his interest in language took. He was sympathetic to the Esperanto movement, and he had his own system of shorthand for his manuscripts. Artificial and fictitious languages figured prominently also in his philosophy. Finally there was neatness in the abstemious and systematic regimen of his daily life. Early and late Carnap was gentle in argument and generous to the opposition. It was his idea to publish in his Meaning and Necessity a letter of mine in which I argued against a central idea of that book. Later he brought me to Chicago to address his seminar on points on which we disagreed. Carnap left Chicago in 1952 to spend two years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and then moved on to U.C.L.A. for the rest of his life. I saw him seldom in later years. My wife and I spent some happy days with Ina and him at their New Mexico retreat in 1949. I had a near miss in 1958: I was to come down from Stanford and lecture at U.C.L.A., but I came down with hepatitis instead. My last time with him was in London, 1965, at a big week-long conference staged by Sir Karl Popper. Popper envisaged as its climax a showdown with Carnap on induction—a concept that Popper rejected but on which Carnap was completing a two-volume work. The final confrontation came in a small seminar room after the end of the original program. Carnap met Popper’s onslaught with the unruffled calm and the show of sweet reason that I remembered from Baltimore in 1936. Whatever the philosophical rights of the matter, I counted him victor again.

14 Charles Sanders Peirce A Tribute from the National Academy of Sciences 1989

Charles Sanders Peirce was born 150 years ago today.* I have the honor of speaking for the National Academy of Sciences, which joins Harvard University, Texas Tech University, and the Peirce Society in paying homage to Peirce’s life and work. The Academy was founded during the Civil War, when Peirce was twentyfour. He was elected to the academy fourteen years later. Elections in those days were not classified according to scientific field, but Peirce is reported to have taken pride in having been chosen for his work in logic. However that may be, the papers he presented to the academy were not in logic, not for some years. His first seven presentations were in natural science. The Academy used to hold a four-day meeting each spring in Washington and another each fall in New York, Boston, or elsewhere. These first seven presentations of Peirce’s all took place in the first two and a half years of his membership, four of them on the successive days of the spring meeting in 1879. All seven were related to his work with the United States Coast Survey. He worked for the Survey for thirty-two years, partly here at the Harvard Observatory. The Coast Survey was the first federal institution for scientific research. During Peirce’s time it was expanded to the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Also it was responsible for weights and measures. Two of those first seven Academy papers of Peirce’s were on spectroscopy; five on gravity. The relevance of gravity to geodesy lay in measurement of *Editors’ note: The original text incorrectly read “last April.” Actually he was born in September 150 years ago and died 75 years ago last April.

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the mass and ellipticity of the earth by experiments with a pendulum. Peirce compared the swing of the pendulum at the top and bottom of a shaft at the Hoosac Tunnel. He made further tests at scattered places, from Montreal to New Orleans and Key West, and at various points in Europe. And then what of spectroscopy? Its relevance lay in weights and measures. In Napoleon’s day a meter was defined as a forty millionth of the circumference of the earth. Peirce was devising a precise redefinition in wave lengths, determined by spectroscopy. This approach prevailed until 1964, the birth year of the Peirce Society, when even higher precision was attained with help from Norman Ramsey’s atomic clock. Such were the topics that Peirce chose for the National Academy of Sciences. But other topics occupied him too. During his first two years in the Academy he published six essays on the philosophy of science in the Popular Science Monthly, under the collective title “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” Two of them, “The Fixation of Belief ” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” are his best known pieces. In the latter he propounded the “pragmatic maxim,” which gave pragmatism its name. Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we might conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. A further preoccupation of Peirce’s in his early years of membership was indeed symbolic logic, which was becoming less and less primitive in his hands. It did break into his presentations after the seven initial contributions that I told of. He spoke on the logic of number, on a fallacy of induction, and on the logic of relatives, at the next three meetings. In “The Logic of Relatives,” fall of 1882, universal and existential quantification emerged full blown, even by name. It is only with quantification, or some alternative apparatus to the same effect, that mathematical logic attains full power. It was anticipated by Frege three years before, but this was not known to Peirce or others for years to come. Peirce’s breakthrough was the one that mattered historically; Frege’s forbidding two-dimensional notation hid his treasure until the present century. This epoch-making paper of Peirce’s was but one of three he presented at that fall meeting of 1882. The others were in natural science: one on the shape of the earth again and one on Ptolemy’s catalogue of stars.

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By then Peirce was lecturing on logic and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, concurrently with his government job. He did so from 1879 to 1884, when he was dropped for living in sin with his future wife. Peirce served on the National Academy’s committee on weights and measures, a standing committee that was coeval with the Academy. The Academy had been founded partly to advise the government, a major role that it still plays today. The committee urged gradual adoption of the metric system. In the perspective of 126 years we see how gradual an adoption can be. As late as 1903 Peirce was serving on membership committees, both the one for mathematics and astronomy and the one for anthropology, which included psychology. From his first years in the Academy, Peirce was active in nominating candidates for membership, especially in psychology, which began to qualify as a science in the eighties. In 1884 Peirce himself presented a psychology paper to the Academy. It was on small differences in sensation, what came to be called j.n.d’s.* But he also gave a paper on logic and one on gravity at that same meeting. In the remaining sixteen years of the century Peirce’s presentations to the Academy were eight, on logic, mathematics, psychology, and astronomy. After 1900 he let himself go utterly philosophical in his Academy papers; thus the methodology of ancient history (1901), the classification of the sciences (1902), the theory of signs (1906), and finally reasons and grounds for inferring (1911). But papers on strict logic and mathematics were interspersed, right to the end. Besides presenting these dozens of papers to the Academy and serving on committees, Peirce wrote up nine of the meetings for newspapers: the New York Sun, the New York Evening Post, and The Nation. The Academy can take pride in having sensed Peirce’s gifts so early in his career, and it was richly rewarded. Peirce’s contributions to its business and to its scientific programs were vigorous and important for a third of a century. *Editors’ note: just noticeable difference.

15 Let Me Accentuate the Positive 1990

One of the quiet pleasures that a philosophical writer is sometimes vouchsafed is that of reading a colleague’s favourable and faithful account of one’s views. When, on the other hand, the account is favourable but mistaken, it is with some regret that one undertakes to set the colleague straight; for the colleague might no longer favour one’s views if he saw them aright. However, let truth prevail, come what may. In ascribing to me the ‘claim that there is no “matter of fact” involved in attributions of meaning to utterances, beliefs to people, and aspirations to cultures’,1 Rorty overstates my negativity. How words and sentences are used, in what circumstances and in what relations to one another, is very much a matter of fact, and moreover I cheerfully call its study a study of meaning. My reservations concern rather the ascription of a distinctive meaning or cognitive content to each separate sentence, as something shared by the sentence and its correct translations. I hold that two conflicting manuals of translation can do equal justice to the semantic facts, while distributing the meaning load differently sentence by sentence. The manuals can be counted on to agree over sentences whose affirmation is pretty regularly linked to concurrent sensory stimulation, but they may diverge over others. When we turn to attributions of belief, I see factuality as grading off from case to case. Some beliefs can be ascribed even to dumb animals, in the light of behaviour. Some beliefs can even be measured, in human subjects, by laying bets and offering odds. But the grammar of the general belief idiom, ‘x believes that p’, outruns the idiom’s factuality. The idiom counts as grammatical no matter what declarative sentence we put for ‘p’, but for some sen-

1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (hereafter PMN) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 192.

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tences there is nothing factual about holding the belief: nothing but pious lip-service. Partly because the grammar of the belief idiom outruns its factuality, the idiom is not acceptable as an idiom of an austere scientific language. It is this exclusion, evidently, that leads Rorty to suppose that I find no matter of fact in attributions of belief.2 I often do, and I would want to see it conveyed in scientifically more acceptable idioms. As for attributions of aspirations to cultures, I see factuality as threatened, again, only in the obvious way: by vagueness or dimness of criteria. Rorty writes that the ‘author of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” should have said that concepts and meanings are harmless if posited to give explanations of our behavior’.3 Not quite. They are often harmful in giving the illusion of explanation of our behaviour. Rorty raises again Chomsky’s old point that my indeterminacy of translation is just a case of the more general under-determination of science by observation.4 My answer, as usual, is that even the adoption of a full theory of nature, from among the under-determined options, still leaves translation indeterminate. Rorty levels again Putnam’s charge of essentialism5: that I gratuitously reckon some guidelines as intrinsic to translation and others as mere supplementary canons for choosing among equally correct manuals of translation. Boorse urged much the same point.6 No, I favour no such invidious distinction; my thesis merely comes to this: two complete manuals of translation can conflict with each other without conflicting with any speaker’s verbal behaviour or propensities. One of the manuals may still be better than the other in various ways. Rorty mentions my ‘holistic claim that there is no “first philosophy”’.7 No, it is a naturalistic claim. ‘Why’, Rorty asks, ‘do “believes in . . .” and “translates as . . .” owe more to the necessities of practice than “is the same electron as . . .” and “is the same set as . . .”?’8 Theoretical terms for hypothetical entities are a mainstay of sci-

2. Cf. ibid., 193. 3. Ibid., 194. 4. Ibid., 195. 5. H. Putnam, “The Refutation of Conventionalism,” Noûs 8 (1974): 25–40. 6. C. Boorse, “The Origins of the Indeterminacy Thesis,” Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 13 (1975): 369–87. 7. PMN, 199. 8. Ibid., 201.

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ence, and I agree that mentalistic terms bear consideration in that capacity along with ‘electron’ and the rest. Theoretical terms stand or fall according to how well they serve theory. The trouble with mentalistic terms is their want of theoretical promise and not their conflict with a prior dogma. For that matter, reservations are in order even regarding electrons and other elementary particles. In the Bose-Einstein statistic and again in quantum mechanics, there are reasons for saying that ‘is the same electron as . . .’ does not in general make sense. There are reasons for settling rather for point events, a sequence of which may sometimes conveniently be called an electron but with no assurance of making sense of its identity through thick and thin. Thus ‘electron’ fares, after all, rather like ‘x believes that p’ above: factuality succumbs to vagueness after a point. Rorty ascribes five tenets to me, numbered 1 to 5.9 I disown: (2) There is no special epistemological status which any sentence has apart from its role in the maintaining of that ‘field of force’ which is human knowledge and whose aim is coping with sensory indications. I deny that the sole or main aim of knowledge is coping with sensory input, though this was perhaps its prehistoric survival value. For us a major aim of knowledge is satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. Prediction, or the anticipation of sensory stimulation, is rather where confirmation lies. My further departure from (2) is on the score of observation sentences, which do have the ‘special epistemological status’ of being keyed directly to sensory stimulation and thus linking theory with outer reality. I can substantially agree with Rorty when he writes ‘that the world can be completely described in a truth-functional language, while simultaneously granting that pieces of it can also be described in an intentional one’.10 9. Ibid., 202. 10. Ibid., 204.

16 Exchange between Donald Davidson and W. V. Quine Following Davidson’s Lecture (1994)

Quine: First, historical trivialities. I did not come to Europe for that splendid year 1932–33 as a junior fellow; the Society of Fellows didn’t yet exist. I came as a Harvard fellow, Sheldon fellow, and then the Society of Fellows went into action the following year and I was one of the original junior fellows and had three splendid years there, all of them right there in Cambridge. Secondly a remark about scepticism. I don’t recognize an epistemic level. My notion is that the only organisation of our sensory input is the organisation which is science itself. That’s how we remember the past ordinarily; we don’t remember qualitative characters of our earlier encounters so much as we remember what happened in ordinary physical terms, physicalistic terms. That’s why I feel that such a project as Carnap’s Logischer Aufbau is the wrong line to take. As for the bearing on scepticism, my answer to scepticism is that reality itself, the term ‘reality’, the term ‘real’, is a scientific term on a par with ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘electron’, ‘neutrino’, ‘class’, that all these are part of our scientific apparatus, our terminology, so that the only sense I can make of scepticism is the kind of sense that maybe our theory is wrong, that in the future the checkpoints aren’t going to bear it out, checkpoints in observation, in experiment; that we could very well be wrong. I think that all reasonable people are sceptics in that sense, and it’s just a matter of degree. And scepticism becomes implausible when altogether too much is being doubted, when the doubts seem to be extravagant. But it’s all relative to our own apparatus of describing the world. Then getting into the question of translation. I never, even in Word and Object, perceived the linguist as being aware of nerve endings or of stimulus meaning, or comparing stimulus meanings. I’ve always seen

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the linguist as behaving very much the way I see him behaving from my present point of view: he’s projecting himself into the shoes or the sandals of the native informant, and the mother is doing the same with the child. The linguist is just being more sophisticated about it. He has an apparatus that he’s built up from other languages. The reform that took place, that Don was applauding, that took place between Word and Object and Pursuit of Truth was rather that I finally came to realise, partly through pressure from Don, partly because, as already evident at some points in Word and Object, I was uneasy about what seemed to be the need of assuming more or less a homology between people’s nerve endings. That shouldn’t matter, I claimed, and indeed it didn’t matter. I came to realise rather that we don’t need any such community of cause in the neural system, all we need is a meshing of outer behaviour, which is where we learn language anyway. That was the big improvement—I do recognise it as a big one. Stimulus meaning was what in Word and Object I was thinking of, and still do, as the shared cause of agreement of observers on observation sentences. Its role transcends translation theory. It figures in my thinking about the causes leading from the impacts of the external world to our theory about the external world: the causal chain from the external object to our output about external objects. Davidson: I’m shocked to have forgotten that it was a Sheldon. Actually I sort of dimly thought of that but then realising that people do go for a year to Europe when they’re junior fellows, I thought that must be the connection. Well, good. Unfortunately you didn’t answer the question I was really curious about and that was: Where did all these revolutionary ideas come from? Quine: They developed after my completely uncritical lectures in 1934 about Carnap but before 1940. In 1940 I was arguing with Carnap— Tarski was sitting there backing me up or vice versa—on analyticity. Tarski and I seemed always to agree on philosophical matters, such times as philosophical issues did arise in Tarski’s presence; usually it was mathematical. But within that interval, from ’34 to ’40, there was “Truth by Convention”, which I wrote in ’35, and there I was already expressing some misgivings about truth by convention, which was to say analyticity. But I was surprised, pleased, and puzzled to learn, just a couple of years ago from the Australian philosopher Neil Tennant, something he turned up in archives. Carnap in his methodical way kept a log and there was an entry in

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March 1933, the very first month that I was in Prague with Carnap. That day, according to his log, I had raised questions about analyticity, and Carnap thought that this was an interesting issue, and that perhaps, he conjectured, we have to recognise analyticity as a matter of degree. The reason I say I’m puzzled is that in 1934, a year later in those lectures, apparently I didn’t air these doubts at all. But the year after that, out they came in “Truth by Convention”. Why was I doubtful? Well, it was really, it seems to me, the sort of attitude, the sort of discipline that Carnap shared and that I owed, certainly, in part to Carnap’s influence: I was just being more Carnapian than Carnap in being critical in this question. I think quite a basic difference between us on this score was that I was more empirical, more behaviouristic, and I wanted anything having to do with language to be an empirical matter of human behaviour. And of course that’s just where the difference came over analyticity. Davidson: It’s on behaviourism I’ve been told, you don’t need to take this seriously, about B. F. Skinner, who was a junior fellow in that first batch along with Quine, that Quine said to Skinner one day: As a psychologist you ought to be interested in this behaviorism. Why don’t you read this guy Watson? And Skinner said: Yes, I guess I will! Also, Skinner said to Quine: You know language is an interesting thing to study, why don’t you take a look at it? So maybe we really have the history of this now. On scepticism. It’s true that in one sense Quine avoids scepticism through his naturalism. We have to start where we are in thinking about anything, and whatever we know about science and about the world, what we think we know anyway, that’s where we start and then we work out from that. That’s certainly right, and it’s certainly correct that you can’t do what Descartes invited you to do, that is, doubt practically everything because after your doubt has gone a certain distance you’ve already taken all the content out of whatever else you might doubt. So there’s just no way you can do that. But you can still be a sceptic by accepting everything, or let’s say accepting what you do accept, and then reasoning out from that that apparently you can’t really be in touch with the outside world, or at least you can be in doubt as to whether you are in a very fundamental way. That was Russell’s line for example. As he put it, very briefly, I have to assume that science is true to begin with, science teaches me that I can’t be in direct contact with the outside world, therefore science is false. If from the truth of science,

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you can infer that it’s false, it has to be false. So you can be a sceptic even though starting out with all of science. Whether Quine’s view actually does lead to this or not is a matter for study. But the point that he makes which, I must say, I misrepresented was not that the jungle linguist worries about or thinks about patterns of stimulation, but rather that it is—now I’m back with Word and Object, not the present view— the test of whether the jungle linguist has got it right is whether the result is one that matches up patterns of stimulation. That is the criterion of sameness of meaning, however it is that the jungle linguist actually arrives at it. Quine: No, I can’t see that it’s a test. How would you ever determine? By microscopic examination of the nerve endings? No, I never thought that. It’s the causal nature of the agreement that was my point rather. In physical terms, what is correctness in the case of translation of observation sentences? At the time of Word and Object I saw it as sameness (or homology) of neural implementation, though learned and recognised only from behavior. Davidson: In that case it seems to me the role of stimulus meaning in Word and Object looks rather different than it does to even the observant reader. Because then there is a sense in which it’s just speculation about causal chains. Stimulus meaning wouldn’t be playing any crucial role in the question of correct translation, which would be based upon the observations of the reactions of a speaker and correlating that not with stimulations but with things observed. So we could rewrite Word and Object without saying anything about stimulus meaning. Quine: It depends on what one is trying to do. There’s no call for any such notion in connection with the theory of translation, I should say. But there is my continuing and more central concern with our knowledge of the external world. Davidson: Yes. But that would require some rewriting. Quine: Apparently there is unsuccessful exposition. All I am aware of in the way of change, and I think it’s an important bit, is in describing or defining the agreement of two speakers on the score of observation sentences without positing anything in the way of shared neural structure. But already in Word and Object I was making the point about the outer shape of bushes as contrasting with the inner structure, and what happened in moving on to Pursuit of Truth was merely following that line of thought down the line.

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Davidson: Or up the line! The idea that the stimulations are playing a causal role in our relations to the world is one that one has to accept, of course. The only question is whether they also in some way play an epistemic role, and it seems to me in a sense what you are saying now is that they don’t. And that answers at least one of my doubts almost completely. May I just say one other thing, and that is, in the revised edition of Pursuit of Truth we still have the 1981 definition of what is an observation sentence, and the definition of an observation sentence is “a sentence where one gives the same response to the same set of stimuli”, right? I just read this. You say you have said this back in an earlier essay and you say you’re still keeping this. Quine: And notice: definition, not criterion. Davidson: Right, O.K., definition. But now, it is meant to be a definition that does concentrate our attention on the right sentences, to begin translation and so forth. Quine: No, the way we spot them is different, the way we spot them is by observing behavior. Davidson: I understand that. I just thought, since I still have my doubts about the importance of the pattern of stimulation, it seems to me—it depends on how long a span of time you’re allowed here—that there aren’t going to be any observation sentences if you take this seriously. Because as we learn things about the world, more about the objects (to put this in an ordinary way) that are before us, the patterns of stimulations that prompt assent are bound to change. Quine: A sentence is an observation sentence with a given stimulus meaning for a given speaker at a given time, long or short, if at that time he would assent if appropriately stimulated. It is a question of disposition, which can be long-lasting or short. The disposition is a physical state of nerves, and observationality is a theoretical trait, fallibly testable.

17 Foreword to Kurt Gödel, Unpublished Philosophical Essays 1994

Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem shows that no formal proof procedure can reach every truth of mathematics, not even of the elementary theory of positive integers. His proof of this theorem, strictly mathematical of itself, wrought an abrupt turn in the philosophy of mathematics. We had supposed that truth, in mathematics, consisted in provability. Gödel is celebrated in the philosophy of mathematics for this great discovery and also three other philosophically significant results, all strictly mathematical. Beyond these he published sundry brief notes in technical logic, many reviews, and some speculations on his friend Einstein’s relativity physics, but of outright philosophy he published virtually nothing. It was new for philosophers, therefore, when Gödel’s Nachlass was found to contain manuscripts on the philosophy of mathematics, including even a substantial one on the philosophical bearing of his theorems. This is one of the two that Dr. Rodríguez-Consuegra has meticulously edited and presented in the present volume. At last we can glimpse Gödel’s own philosophical adjustment to his bewildering discovery. His philosophy of mathematics is at odds with the attitudes of most latter-day philosophers who deal with mathematics and logic. For him the abstract objects of mathematics are as real as sticks and stones, and their laws are objective matters of discovery on a par with those of physics. The other paper, written and repeatedly revised for a volume of commentaries on Carnap but never submitted, brings out these divergences very directly, for Carnap was a leading representative of the more dominant view. Both manuscripts were tangles of revisions within revisions, labyrinthine transpositions, cryptic abbreviations, smudged erasures. These reflect

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Gödel’s continuing sense of not having got the philosophy quite to his satisfaction. Clearly the deciphering and linearizing of the manuscripts and the annotating of successive layers cost Dr. Rodríguez-Consuegra a lot of drudgery and demanded much scholarly ingenuity and a deep understanding of the subject. Rodríguez-Consuegra is a bright new light in the study of mathematical logic, set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics as these developed over the past twelve decades. His painstaking analysis The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell: Origins and Development has already appeared as a book in English (Birkhäuser, 1991). With the present book he establishes yet another milestone in Spain’s impressive latter-day progress in scientific philosophy.

18 Where Do We Disagree? (Originally “Where Do We Differ?”) 1999

Readers of Davidson and me are bound to be struck by how deeply we agree, and hence puzzled the more by occasional points of apparent disagreement. I shall try to assess these differences. We are in long-standing agreement regarding the indeterminacy of reference, which seems undebatable, and even the more speculative indeterminacy of translation of sentences as wholes. Regarding the former, Davidson has expressed misgivings over my phrase ‘ontological relativity’. My first presentation of the thesis under that title, in 1968, seemed to relativize the ontology of any one language to the firmer ontology of some other, inviting an infinite regress. However, what I see as the appropriate relativity stands forth in my later writings. Indeterminacy of reference pertains only to the translation relation between languages, and ontological relativity is relativity to manuals of translation. ‘Lapin’ denotes rabbits relative to my favorite French-English dictionary. All languages are equal here, none more basic than another. Further detail is in order, not for Davidson but for many readers. A manual of translation from one language to another, say to English, may be conceived mathematically as defining inductively a many-many relation of sentences of the alien language to English sentences. The relation is holophrastic, no particular correspondence of words or structure is called for. A manual of translation is good insofar as it conduces to smooth dialogue and successful negotiation. My thesis or conjecture of indeterminacy of translation, taken holophrastically, is that smooth dialogue and successful negotiaReprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Peru, IL. Copyright © 1999 by The Library of Living Philosophers.

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tion can be fostered as well as you please by each of two incompatible manuals of translation. Their incompatibility could be revealed by using the two manuals alternately, sentence by sentence, and coming out with an incoherent translation of some text that proves coherent when translated by either manual alone. Such is the indeterminacy of holophrastic translation. Indeterminacy of reference, on the other hand, concerns the translation specifically of predicates and singular terms. It applies only to languages in which, thanks perhaps to previous holophrastic translation, we can recognize predicates and singular terms. What it says is that an arbitrary one-to-one reassignment of denotata to the terms and predicates preserves all truth values. The proof is trivial. If x was an F, then its proxy is one of the proxies of the Fs; and only then, since the reassignment was one to one. In all this we agree. But a second point where Davidson sees us diverging is between what he calls his distal and my proximal theory of meaning. It concerns the causal chain from a thing or event in the external world to the act of utterance by which the subject reports it. He finds the meaning of the utterance at the distal end of the chain, at the thing or event reported, and he has me locating it proximally, at the subject’s surface in the activated receptors. My misleading term ‘stimulus meaning’ was no doubt at the root of the trouble, and should be neutrally paraphrased in terms of the triggering of nerve endings, as is now my way. The triggering is proximal and the external object or situation is distal. Meaning is as may be, and may best go without saying. My observation sentences are and were about the distal external world. Like Davidson, I have always represented the translator as coordinating his speech with the native’s by consideration of presumed distal reference and with no thought of nerve endings. My concern with the proximal was epistemological rather than semantical. It concerned not what the translator does or should do, but why it works. Let us consider the first step in acquiring a language. The translator learns a word from the native, or the child from the mother, on the occasion of their jointly observing a distal object or event. There are two causal chains from the distal subject matter, one to each observer. The chains are alike at their distal ends, except for a slight difference in angle of view. The translator learns the appropriate word from the native, or the child from the mother, and comes up with it on similar occasions to the satisfaction of all

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concerned. Apparently those chains, so similar at their distal origins, found termini in the two observers that were similar enough to each other to make similar use of the input. Hence my conjectural ascription, in Word and Object (1960), of an at least approximate intersubjective homology of neuroceptors. I have been putting the matter in terms of translation and language learning, but it applies equally to the use of observation sentences in the checking of scientific theories: the experimenters have to agree on the observations they are reporting. By 1965 I felt that such homology of receptors should not matter.1 At best it would explain little, if we reflect with Darwin2 on the diversity of internal neural networks from individual to individual. But I had nothing in mind to take its place in my reasoning. My conference with Davidson, Dreben, and Føllesdal at Stanford in 1986 left me single-mindedly rejecting the homology, though still with nothing to take its place. The explanation of this harmony at the proximal pole struck me only years later3: it is an intersubjective harmony of our subjective standards of perceptual similarity of neural intakes. Each of us is born with his standards of perceptual similarity, which then change somewhat with experience. Though private, they are testable for each individual by reinforcement and extinction of responses. We make no sense of perceptual similarity between one subject’s intakes and another’s; what does prevail is this distal parallelism between one subject’s standards of perceptual similarity and another’s. If Paul and Maud jointly witness two events, and Paul’s intakes are perceptually similar for him, Maud’s will probably be similar for her. This harmony is caused by neither interaction nor anatomical homologies. It is preestablished by natural selection, which has favorably slanted the inductive expectations of our forebears down the ages by molding their innate standards of perceptual similarity to mesh with environmental trends. Thus it is that translators and experimenters can blithely ply their distal trades and no questions asked. A third divergence between Davidson and me appears in his term ‘radical interpretation’, as over against my ‘radical translation’. The difference is not 1. In “Propositional Objects,” a lecture that appeared a year later in my Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 2. Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 45–46. 3. See my From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 20–21.

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just terminological. Interpretation is broader than translation. There are scientific sentences in today’s English that cannot be translated even into the English of 1900, let alone classical Arabic or Swahili, but still they can be adequately interpreted in all those languages. Any non-trivial context of the word ‘neutrino’ is an example. New terms like that one are not introduced by definition, we are not told how to translate a sentence containing the term into a sentence of our prior language, and in general it cannot be done. We are just told enough about neutrinos to be able to bandy the term effectively where needed. Such is interpretation in the absence of translation. I characterized a manual of translation as an inductive definition of a relation between sentences. I think of no comparably crisp characterization of a manual of interpretation, but any actual inter-linguistic dictionary is in fact just that: a manual of interpretation. Similarly indeed for any domestic dictionary. Though interpretation is broader than translation, the techniques called for do not diverge much. The data for either enterprise are observable behavior in observable circumstances, and the criteria of success in either are smoothness of dialogue and success in negotiation. Davidson is right in tackling interpretation in general rather than translation in particular, concerned as he is with semantics, or the theory of linguistic communication. My own thought experiment of radical translation had a narrower purpose: I was challenging the notion of propositions as meanings of sentences. Indeterminacy of translation meant failure of sentence synonymy to qualify as an equivalence relation, hence failure of individuation of propositions; and there is no entity without individuation, without identity. In Davidson’s actual methodology, even so, there is one point on which I have misgivings: his maxim of maximizing truth on the part of the native informant’s utterances. I would maximize the psychological plausibility of my attributions of belief to the native, rather than the truth of the beliefs attributed. In the light of some of the natives’ outlandish rites and taboos, glaring falsity of some of their utterances is apt to be a psychologically more plausible interpretation than truth. In the absence of such exotic behavior, however, and apart from domains where the natives are presumably uninformed, the practical working assumption is indeed that they think as we do and hence that most of their utterances should be interpreted as true by our lights. Truth is central to Davidson’s theory of interpretation also in another

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way: his focus on Tarski’s T-sentences as the very vehicles of interpretation. I applauded this move on Davidson’s part from its very inception in 1966.4 It is a neat inversion of Tarski’s procedure. Tarski took the interpretation of the sentences for granted, as a basis for defining truth; Davidson takes truth for granted, as a basis for interpreting the sentences. I do not know whether this strategy can press interpretation beyond the limits of translation, nor how it might accommodate pairs like ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’, whose difference is not reflected in reference. At any rate there is also another cardinal idea in Davidson’s treatment of interpretation: the complementarity of belief and desire. What is directly observable in behavior is the seamless resultant of the two; but if we contrive to factor out the two components, their interpretation is forthcoming. I return in conclusion to Tarski and the truth predicate, where some obscure issues await sorting out. Because of their dimness, I shall not try to pinpoint my differences from Davidson here; we surely agree on the tangibles. I shall just set forth my own views. The keynote of truth is disquotation: ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Denotation, or reference, is likewise disquotational: ‘rabbit’ denotes x if and only if x is a rabbit. The insight is Tarski’s, but the word ‘disquotation’ is of my own making, so far as I know, and I have not meant it disparagingly. The last section of Word and Object is devoted to the indispensability of the truth predicate as an instrument of semantic ascent. Far from being trivial, indeed, truth in its disquotationality is like class membership in bursting the bonds of naive theory; for it engenders much the same paradoxes. I have always deplored Ramsey’s imperceptive dismissal of the disquotational account as “the disappearance theory of truth”. It was a crowning outrage of my primordial bugaboo: the confusion of use and mention. My attitude here is closer to Davidson’s than he seems to have thought.5 Does disquotation give the essence of truth? I am not sure how to deal with that. Disquotation gives the extension of truth within the home language. Translation is then needed to extend it to other languages. Truth and denotation are sisters in disquotation, as we saw, and Tarski’s truth definition is a definition of the one in terms of the other. Denotation is 4. Davidson, “Truth and Meaning” (abstract), Journal of Philosophy 63: 586–87. 5. Cf. Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 283.

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the relation of a one-place predicate to each thing of which it holds. More generally, it is the relation of an n-place predicate to each ordered n-tuple of which it holds. Generalizing further, we may think of a sentence with n free variables as an n-place predicate, and then that sentence may be said to denote each n-tuple that satisfies it as values of the variables. Tarski’s construction, then, defines denotation in this full generality by recursion from atomic denotation, that is, denotation by one-word predicates. Truth then falls out as the degenerate case of denotation by 0-place predicates, that is, closed sentences. And why did Tarski want to define truth on the basis of atomic denotation, rather than, say, vice versa? Simply because, in any specific language, the one-word predicates are finite in number, so that atomic denotation can be defined by exhaustion of specific disquotations. The disquotational account renders truth vividly transcendent. For, through the liar paradox it shows that the truth predicate for a language cannot be fully expressed in the language. The paradox comes when truth is predicated of sentences which themselves contain the truth predicate or kindred predicates.6 A second-order truth predicate may still be defined within the language to cover these cases, but it breaks down when applied to sentences containing that predicate. We can proceed thus up a hierarchy of ever better approximations to the disquotationally perfect truth predicate, which itself transcends the hierarchy. The aggressive naturalist just might cite the liar paradox as supporting this naturalism: it shows that the transcendent, in this instance anyway, leads to contradiction. There is also another consideration, equally familiar, that incontestably gives truth a transcendent status in any likely sense of that redoubtable term. Namely, usage dictates that when in the course of scientific progress some former tenet comes to be superseded and denied, we do not say that it used to be true but became false. The usage is rather that we thought it was true but it never was. Truth is not the product of science, but its goal. It is an ideal of pure reason, in Kant’s apt phrase. Putting names to these two ways of transcendence, we might say that truth is semantically and doctrinally transcendent.7 Semantic transcendence

6. Cf. my Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, 1992), sect. 34. 7. In Philosophy of Logic I used ‘transcendent’ in yet a third and more mundane sense, having to do with syntax. It is irrelevant to issues of naturalism.

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followed inescapably from disquotation itself. Doctrinal transcendence follows from disquotation by less compelling considerations, but compelling enough—notably the law of excluded middle. Thus let ‘p’ stand for a sentence to the effect that there were an even number of blades of grass in Boston Common at the inception of 1901. By excluded middle, p or not p; so, by disquotation, ‘p’ is true or ‘Not p’ is true. Yet science in even the broadest sense—informed belief—takes no stand on either ‘p’ or ‘Not p’, and never will. In a naturalistic spirit, C. S. Peirce tried to warp the doctrinally transcendent concept of truth over into immanence by identifying truth with the limit that scientific progress approaches. This rests on optimistic assumptions, and worse. Neither the ‘p’ nor the ‘Not p’ of the example would be approached by scientific progress at the most glorious imaginable extreme. And Peirce was never, to my knowledge, one to question the law of excluded middle. John Dewey proposed, in the interest of naturalism, simply to avoid the truth predicate and limp along with warranted belief. Otto Neurath in his last years took a similar line. But surely neither Dewey nor Neurath could have denied that the truth predicate is rendered crystal clear by disquotation, and presumably both philosophers subscribed to ‘p or not p’. So they did not circumvent the problem, they just did not sense it. Anyway it is odd that we naturalists should bridle at truth’s doctrinal transcendence, for it consists precisely in consigning truth to nature rather than to man’s faltering approximations. The reason for bridling was that naturalism countenances no higher source of knowledge than enlightened scientific method. Very well, but truth is not knowledge. The concept of truth belongs to the conceptual apparatus of science on a par with the concepts of existence, matter, body, gravitation, number, neutrino, and chipmunk. Like Davidson, I make my peace with truth in its doctrinal transcendence. An ideal of pure reason, yes, and hallowed be its name.8 8. This paper is much the richer for comments on earlier drafts by Burton Dreben and Michael Shepanski.

Reviews

19 Review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache 1935

Logische Syntax der Sprache. By Rudolf Carnap. Wien, Julius Springer, 1934. Pp. xii, 274. By logical syntax Carnap means semantic, not in Peirce’s sense, but in Chwistek’s; not the study of the modes of denotation of signs, but the study of the conventional manipulations of the signs themselves. He calls a predicate Q syntactic if it applies only to signs, or marks, and can be determined as true or false of a given sign on a purely definitional or conventional basis, rather than on the basis of properties of the object denoted by the sign. A sentence is syntactic if it assigns a syntactic predicate. Now clearly any sentence P(a) predicating P of an entity a can be set over into a syntactic sentence if there is a syntactic predicate Q such that, for any entity x, P is true of x if and only if Q is true of signs denoting x: namely, P(a) can give way to Q(“a”), where “a” denotes a. Under these circumstances P and P(a) are called quasi-syntactic; Q and Q(“a”) are their syntactic translations. To whatever extent sentences can be construed as syntactic, problems of import and validity are solved; for a syntactic sentence admits of clear and exact formulation in terms of marks and their manipulations and acquires apodictic validity through convention. But ordinary language obscures the bounds of syntax. It is Carnap’s main thesis that all sentences expressing principles of mathematics or logic, including the logic of science, are syntactic or quasi-syntactic. Granted this and the further thesis—which Carnap mentions here without assertion, but has developed elsewhere (see his bibliography)—that philosophy, when freed of meaningless verbiage, is wholly Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

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logic of science, it follows that all noetic method reduces to syntax and experiment. The bulk of Carnap’s book is occupied with founding a rigorous science, or perhaps formal syntax, of formal syntax. But even formal syntax must be relative to a given language; Carnap therefore introduces the skeleton of an exact universal language—in fact, of two alternative ones—for syntactical study. What I shall have to say here with reference to “the model language” applies with sufficient approximation to either of the two. The model language contains the basic signs of mathematical logic and mathematics. Empirical matters are expressed with help of a system of coördinates whereby proper names give way to historico-geographical designations—conceivably quadruples of numerals “x, y, z, t” where the respective numerals measure the longitude, latitude, altitude, and tarditude of the given point-event. Extended regions in space-time can be rendered as classes of point-events by quaternary equations. The language contains an indefinite multitude of empirical operators, or relatives, whose referents are numbers correlated systematically or arbitrarily with a series of empirical properties: such operators as “te” (“temperature at, in degrees Centigrade”), “co”1 (“color at, in coördinates of the color pyramid”), “si” (“sign at, in terms of a certain arbitrary calibration of typographical patterns”), etc. Thus “te (x, y, z, t) = n” means that at time t the temperature of the place x, y, z is n degrees; “si (x, y, z, t) = n” means that at time t the place x, y, z is occupied by a sign of Style No. n (perhaps a left-hand parenthesis). In this simplified language the descriptive operators “te”, “co”, “si”, etc., carry the entire empirical burden; the rest of the language is logic and mathematics. In the calibration of the realm of signs, mentioned above, simple signs are first assigned numbers, at random except for the fact that the various syntactical categories are systematically correlated with certain arithmetical categories. Then complexes of simple signs are calibrated relatively to their constituents as follows: a row of k simple signs, s1, s2, s3, ... and sk, has k

∏p

n

i

i

i =1

as its correlated number where pi is the ith prime number (starting with 2) and ni is the number correlated with the sign si. This scheme, due to Gödel, 1. In inessential respects the notation of this review departs from Carnap’s.

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fulfills the vital requirement that the precise symbolic make-up of a complex expression be determinable from the correlated number. Syntactic concepts, such as variable, sentence, result of substituting this for that in such-and-such, and their more technical retinue, can now be defined within the arithmetical side of the established correlation. Just as the principles of color-mixture become purely arithmetical identities when rendered in terms of the calibration of the color pyramid, so the principles of the construction and transformation of signs become arithmetical under the given “calibration” of the realm of signs. The principles of logic can be provided for on the syntactical level by means of syntactic definition of deducibility as a relation between classes of sentences. This consists essentially in translating the rules of inference of logistic into terms of sign-manipulation. Under the arithmetization of syntax, deducibility then becomes an arithmetically defined relation between classes of numbers. In terms of deducibility and similarly constructed concepts, in turn, such notions as contradiction, tautology, synthetic proposition, synonymity, and even the content of a proposition are definable; all these become arithmetical concepts, correlated with concepts having to do with signs. Even the notions of syntacticity and quasi-syntacticity, described earlier, admit of rigorous arithmetical definition. Such are the foundations of a science of formal syntax within pure arithmetic. (The descriptive operator “si” obviously enters only in applied syntax, e.g., the discussion of a papyrus.) But arithmetic, and in particular this syntax, are expressed within the model language whose syntax is being described. Carnap shows, Wittgenstein to the contrary notwithstanding, that there is no vicious circularity in this syntactical analysis of a language within the language, nor, indeed, in the description, by a sentence of syntax, of its own syntactical make-up. There is not language, but languages; for an exact and thorough-going syntactical investigation a determinate model language is needed as object. Nevertheless, Carnap shows that general features of the analysis of his model language apply to ordinary language as well, despite the overwhelming chaos of the latter. Such concepts as “contingency”, “impossibility”, etc., also “entity” and perhaps “number”, turn out to be quasi-syntactic and give way to syntactic constructs. Even propositions dealing with relations of meanings, and with inter-linguistic translations, turn out likewise. Problems of the foundations of mathematics and of science, problems largely classifiable

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as metaphysical, prove upon translation from quasi-syntactic into syntactic form to depend wholly upon conventions as to the adoption of one or another variety of syntax, and thus to involve at most, according to Carnap’s creed of linguistic tolerance, a question of expediency. With remarkable cogency in view of the generality involved Carnap leads up to his main thesis, mentioned earlier, and leaves one with many considerations favoring the unasserted secondary thesis as well. The book marks the advent of mathematical procedure in the logic of science. It clarifies the status of the problems of that field and provides tools for their investigation. In the course of achieving these ends Carnap presents an abundance of technical and non-technical developments which are of first importance to the logistician at the one extreme and the metaphysician at the other. He who is concerned with either of these extremes to the exclusion of the other will find the book well adapted to selective study. In clarity of style, rigorousness of procedure, and wealth of apt illustration the high standard of Carnap’s earlier writings has been maintained.

20 Probability Review of Harold Jeffreys’s Scientific Inference 1937

Scientific Inference. By Harold Jeffreys. Reissue with additions. Pp. vii + 272. Cambridge [Eng.], University Press, 1937. (First published in 1931.) Jeffreys treats probability as relating a proposition to another one which expresses the data. He postulates that the probability of p given q be equal to, greater than or less than that of r given s, and that it be maximal or minimal if p is a logical consequence or contrary of q. To these he adds two more postulates (in the Addenda). Then, by way of conventions determining the assignment of numbers to probabilities, he adopts the usual additive law and assigns 1 to logical consequence. From this basis the other usual laws are derived. But the basis is somewhat vague. In speaking of the probability of p given q Jeffreys presupposes, not a simple relation of p to q, but a binary function; i.e., a triadic relation connecting p, q and some third object figuring as value of the function. These third objects are not numbers, for Jeffreys assigns numbers later. Then what are they? Is “greater than,” as applied to them, a further primitive relation? Does its transitivity demand another postulate? Possible adjustment: assume just the tetradic relation, “p is more probable given q than is r given s”; adapt Jeffreys’s postulates to this, and add a transitivity postulate. Further, an anomaly appears in the probability of p given q, where q is a contradiction. In an appendix Jeffreys argues that this probability is indeterW. V. Quine. 1937. “Probability.” On Jeffreys, Scientific Inference, in Science 86: 590. Reprinted with permission from the AAAS.

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minate, rather than 1. But this is in exception to the second postulate above, because p is a logical consequence of any contradiction q. The opposite case, where q is logically necessary, is left unconsidered; we might expect it to yield absolute probability, in some trivial sense. Jeffreys’s decision to treat probability postulationally, rather than definitionally, typifies his general program: formulation, not substantiation. He applies empirical method to empirical method, seeking to isolate a minimum of principles which would, if true, justify the scientist’s observed behavior. The most notable result is resuscitation of the principle that the probability of a law increases with simplicity—a principle which Poincaré described as long since repudiated. Supposing all quantitative laws expressible as differential equations, Jeffreys proposes measuring their simplicity inversely by the sum of the order, the degree and the absolute values of the coefficients. Whatever other difficulties this theory may involve, one cited by Jeffreys himself is that it requires the totality of possible laws to be denumerable; but on this point his worry seems unwarranted, for the expressible laws are in any case denumerable—they form a progression when ordered according to increasing typographical length and lexicographically within each length. Jeffreys presents and supports Laplace’s analysis of the probability of inferences from samples to totalities; stressing, however, that the analysis applies only where we have no prior clue as to how many objects have the investigated property. Closing his statistical studies with an account of the estimation of error, he proceeds to a brief operational analysis of the physical magnitudes. Like Carnap (“Physikalische Begriffsbildung”) he construes measurement as assignment of pure numbers to objects, and eliminates the magnitudes themselves, or impure quantities, as mere abbreviative idioms. Unlike Carnap, he insists on the basicness of the additive magnitudes and perceives no convention in the choice of their zero points and scale forms. In the exposition of number which Jeffreys includes in his analysis of magnitudes, there are remarks (pp. 85, 106) which suggest an over-estimation of Whitehead and Russell’s “elimination” of classes. Actually, the so-called propositional functions to which classes are “reduced” are subject like classes to the theory of types, and are indeed the same as classes, except for suspension of the extensionality principle. It is for this reason that classes are accepted as primitive in current logistic, supplanting the propositional functions. There follows an illuminating treatment of physical geometry, which

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Jeffreys constructs operationally and then compares with the Euclidean prototype. Then come two useful chapters in which the fundamentals of Newtonian dynamics and relativity theory are formulated from the point of view of methodology. Remaining matters include a brief criticism of the probability theories of Venn, Keynes and others, and some sensible remarks on cause and reality. The Addenda, appended as the distinguishing feature of this new edition, include indications of the applicability of the simplicity principle in testing the significance of added parameters; also a discussion of the simplicity principle in its rôle of substitute for the traditional postulate of determinism; also some corrections, among them the insertion of two postulates as mentioned above.

21 Review of Nelson Goodman’s Structure of Appearance 1951

The Structure of Appearance. Nelson Goodman. Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press. 1951. xv + 315 pp. $4.00. This book has two functions: it treats of techniques of logical construction, by precept and example, and it sets forth a logical construction for the theory of sense qualities. The principle of unification is that the latter is the example. Logical construction, in the sense treated in this book, is the definitional construction of extra-logical concepts from minimum extra-logical beginnings with help of the devices of elementary logic. Goodman’s adherence to the devices of elementary logic (truth functions and quantifiers, to the exclusion of class membership) is a restriction of his auxiliaries, be it noted, and hence a heightening of his objectives. Such a restriction of auxiliaries is very much in keeping with the basic objectives of a constructional system, viz., clarity and economy. Constructions which, like those in Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt and Woodger’s The Axiomatic Method in Biology, appeal freely to a classically mathematical universe of classes and classes of classes and so on up, can not be depended on to enhance clarity and economy beyond the degree to which those qualities are enjoyed by this prodigal universe of abstract mathematical entities itself. One importance of Goodman’s book is that it shows how well we can get on without those platonistic aids. The book as a whole, both in its technical constructions and in its broadly expository passages, is notable for the degree to which it refrains from platonistic presuppositions without conspicuous cramping of style. It was to be expected that the clipping of wings should be an aid to keeping

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our feet on the ground, but it is agreeable to observe, in addition, how nimble we can be once our wings are clipped. The truly rational animal, one begins to believe, is a featherless biped. Intermediate steps apart, definitions worth devising usually define terms already current in discourse prior to the definitions. In what kind of agreement must the definition stand to the prior usage of the defined term, then, in order to be acceptable? Goodman is not one to dispose of this problem by tossing off the magic word ‘synonymy’. A more serious criterion is that of interchangeability in extensional contexts salva veritate. But even this sort of agreement, loose though it seems, is—as Goodman points out—too strict. In illustration he cites Whitehead’s version of points as certain classes of regions; for it is no objection to Whitehead’s version that the statement ‘Regions are members of points’ is false or meaningless under ordinary usage and true for Whitehead. Actually what is wanted is interchangeability salva veritate not in all extensional contexts, but only in limited contexts in which we agree to interest ourselves. Goodman argues, with abundant explanation and illustration, that what matters in the end is isomorphism between appropriately delimited systems. Besides the question how the definiens should agree with the preconceived definiendum, there is the question how to choose the basis upon which to erect our definitions. One conspicuous consideration here is economy, or logical simplicity. But how is this to be measured? Not by counting primitive ideas, surely; for, given the auxiliary use of logic, we can easily and trivially define any desired multitude of extra-logical predicates on the basis of a single predicate of sufficiently high degree. Goodman has dealt with the problem of devising a significant standard of simplicity for sets of extralogical primitives, in three papers in the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1943, 1949); and the ideas of those papers are reproduced, with revisions and extensions, in the book. His measure of simplicity applies primarily to sets of predicates, and depends not only on the number of predicates and the degree of each, but also on considerations of symmetry and other less evident features. The guiding principle is that reductions of primitives should not be rated as gains in simplicity when similar reductions could be accomplished mechanically in all cases of the same “kind.” Whereas this guiding principle is admittedly vague, the simplicity measure with which Goodman eventuates is by no means lacking in precision and explicitness. Its only lack is simplicity. In his discussion of the simplicity problem, Goodman remarks that “a

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predicate of more than one place is not always replaceable by some symmetrical predicate having a greater number of places” (p. 69). But I can show that this is wrong. For, suppose we are given any two-place predicate, written say ‘R’. Take ‘Q’ then as a symmetrical three-place predicate such that, for all x, y, and z, Qxyz if and only if either x = y and Rxz, or y = z and Ryx, or x = z and Rxy. Then ‘Rxy’ is replaceable by ‘Qxxy’. A similar but more cumbersome argument is possible where ‘R’ is an n-place predicate for any n. However, such alteration in the rules for measuring simplicity as would be occasioned by this discovery has already been effected, for other reasons, in a forthcoming article by Goodman. So much for Goodman’s general theory of systems; we turn now to his specific constructions. Elementary logic is, as remarked, a part of the foundation. Another part is the calculus of individuals, which dates from LeÜniewski (1916, 1927–1931) and Leonard and Goodman (1930, 1936, 1940) and is presented anew here. This theory is Boolean algebra (minus the null element) reinterpreted as treating no longer of classes but of extended individuals, in their relationships of overlapping and part-whole (whence LeÜniewski’s term ‘mereology’). As developed in this book, the calculus of individuals has the two-place predicate of overlapping as its sole primitive in addition to elementary logic. It proves possible to define identity, partwhole, complement, common part, and sum or aggregation. In further preparation for his constructional theory of sense qualities, Goodman explains by example what he means by a quale or simple quality. Examples of qualia are single colors, sounds, moments of subjective time, and positions in the visual field. A color, to be a quale, must be precisely fixed in all respects (hue, brilliance, saturation); a position, to be a quale, must be fixed in visual altitude and azimuth, and minimal in extent. As the objects of his universe, i.e., the values of his variables of quantification, Goodman takes qualia and sums of qualia. ‘Sum’ here is used in the sense, ostensibly, of the calculus of individuals; and indeed the sense is quite clear when the summed qualia are visual positions, for their sum is then simply that total visual region (scattered or continuous) which the summed positions compose. The sense of ‘sum’ is clear also when the summed qualia are moments, for their sum is then simply that total portion of time (scattered or consecutive) which the summed moments compose. A sum of positions or moments is conceived not as a class of the summed positions or moments, but as a whole containing those positions or moments as parts; thus the sum a + b + c is thought of as containing a, b and c only in the

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part-whole manner in which it contains also the subordinate sums a + b, a + c, and b + c. Where the summed qualia are colors or sounds, however, we have only an analogy to help us understand the notion of sum. The sum is supposed to be, again, a whole having the summed qualia as parts; but it must be recognized that the notion of part, clear initially as a spatio-temporal concept, is here understood only by spatio-temporal analogy. Goodman remarks that the sum of several color qualia corresponds to that total portion of the color prism, or color sphere, which embraces the representations of the summed color qualia; but this again is a spatial analogy. When finally we proceed to sums of heterogeneous qualia, say a color and two sounds and a position and a moment, the analogy tries the imagination. Analogy is not to be scorned. It can be the only link between existing common sense and an important advance of science. But the present case is less desperate. Goodman could, if he chose, construe the summation of qualia quite explicitly in terms of existing common sense (such as it is); viz., by interpreting the sum simply as the class of the summed qualia. This would mean interpreting the part-whole predicate complexly as meaning membership when the ‘part’ is a quale, and class inclusion when the ‘part’ is a sum of qualia. Or, in case of allegiance to the theory of types, reinterpret the qualia as unit classes of qualia and then construe sum and part-whole simply as logical sum and inclusion. I recommend one or other of these reinterpretations to those who find mystery in Goodman’s application of the calculus of individuals to non-spatio-temporal qualia. Qualia themselves are abstract entities, and qualia other than moments are universals in the sense of being repeatable; these points are brought out by Goodman. So the admission of qualia as values of variables is, in some sense, a departure from nominalism; and the admission of sums of qualia, if interpreted classically as above, is a further departure. But Goodman’s theory remains nominalistic in spirit in that it does not assume the usual platonistic logic which guarantees a realm of classes or properties corresponding to all combinations of given entities, and then a further realm corresponding to all combinations of those classes or properties, and so on. Goodman’s atoms are abstract qualia, and his superimposed so-called calculus of individuals is equivalent in power to a theory of non-empty classes of qualia, but he can by no stretch of the imagination be accused of a bigger ontology than this. His universe is indeed finite, for the qualia are conceived to be finite in number.

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A sum of qualia is called a concretum if it is a “smallest concrete part of the stream of experience.” A visual concretum, e.g., is said to consist of three qualia: a visual position x, a color y, and a moment z such that as a matter of historical fact the position x is colored y at the moment z. Concreta of other senses than sight may be supposed construed in some analogous way. An object (quale or sum of qualia) x is said to be with another y, symbolically Wxy, if x and y are non-overlapping parts of a concretum. In terms of ‘W’ plus the calculus of individuals and elementary logic, Goodman easily expresses ‘x is a quale’ and ‘x is a concretum’. Then he works up to relationships such as ‘x is a concrete portion of experience (a concretum or sum of concreta) qualified throughout (or: in part) by the quale or sum of qualia y’. Qualia may be so similar as to be immediately indiscriminable, but still be distinct in that one of them, but not the other, is discriminable from a third. Goodman speaks of qualia x and y as matching, symbolically Mxy, whenever they are not immediately discriminable. ‘M’ figures as the keystone of a theory of qualitative order; a theory, that is, for ordering the component qualia of a category such as color, sound, space, time. The category of a quale x (e.g., color, if x is a color) is preliminarily conceived (following Carnap’s Aufbau, in principle) as the class of all qualia which can be reached from x by a chain of matchings, or ‘M’-connections. In other words, the category of x is the class of all qualia y such that M*xy, where the predicate ‘M*’ is the ancestral of ‘M’. Actually Goodman does not conceive of a category as a class of qualia, of course, but as a sum; but we saw above that this distinction is inessential from a formal point of view. Formal definition of the category of x thus presents no difficulty once ‘M*’ is defined. For defining ‘M*’, Frege’s well known method suggests itself: M*zw if and only if z is a member of every class u such that w is a member of u and every quale which matches any member of u is a member of u. “However,” Goodman writes (p. 234), “with our restricted general apparatus, ‘M*’ is not automatically available to us; if we are to use it, it must be defined within our nominalistic language.” His point is that he does not have classes of qualia, to serve as values of the ‘u’ in the above version of ‘M*zw’. But I have stressed that he does in effect have classes of qualia, in his sums of qualia. The above version of ‘M*zw’ could be adapted directly to his system by simply rephrasing ‘class u’ as ‘object u’ and ‘member of ’ as ‘quale which is a part of ’. Actually he ends up with a logically equivalent definition of ‘M*zw’. Progress in ordering the qualia of a category proves to require an auxiliary

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notion of comparative size of sums of qualia. Goodman writes ‘Zxy’, as a tentative further primitive, to mean that x and y are equal in number of contained qualia. Here again is a concept which would be automatically available if Goodman were allowing himself the full machinery of higher set theory; here again, therefore, it behooves us to inquire whether, as in the case of the ancestral, the pertinent machinery is present after all. Classically, two classes are alike in size if they are the domain and converse domain of a oneone relation. On conversion from classes to sums of qualia, this tells us that Zxy if and only if there is a relation which relates each quale which is part of x to exactly one quale which is part of y, and exactly one quale which is part of x to each quale which is part of y. The obstacle to reducing this formulation completely to Goodman’s terms is the appeal to “relations” of qualia. Now classes of qualia are in effect at hand in Goodman’s system, as we know, and a relation is a class of ordered pairs; so the reduction would be complete if there were a way of construing ordered pairs of qualia as qualia. There is, however, no such way. For, if there are n qualia altogether, there are n2 ordered pairs of them; and n2 is bound to exceed n, for any finite n other than 1 and 0. Actually Goodman manages to fuse the three tentative primitives ‘W’, ‘M’, and ‘Z’ into a single symmetric two-place primitive predicate ‘A’ which, though a little complicated to explain in words, is very simple by his objective standard of simplicity measurement. The letter ‘A’ is supposed to suggest ‘affiliated with’—an unfortunate reading because of its connotation of asymmetry. Continuing his constructions, Goodman easily defines ‘greater than’: x is greater than y when Zwy for some proper part w of x. Also he defines x †y, which is the sum of all qualia which match x or y but not both. Finally he explains qualia x and y tentatively as more similar than z and w when z†w is greater than x†y. The size of x †y, in other words, is a first approximate measure of the qualitative distance between x and y. Then he defines a quale y as betwixt x and z when all three match and y is nearer (in the above sense) to x and to z than x and z are to each other. He defines a quale y as beside x when x and y are distinct but match and have no quale betwixt them. Then he is able to define a sum of qualia as (qualitatively) unidimensional when it has no three qualia beside any one. Among such unidimensional arrays he is able, further, to distinguish closed and open curves (to speak in a graphical analogy). Also his definition of unidimensionality is shown to admit of analogues for higher dimensionalities.

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If in the construction which led to the definitions of betwixtness and besideness, above, we substitute besideness for matching, we come out with what Goodman calls twixtness and (tentatively) nextness. The reason for this tentativeness is that he wants nextness to represent minimal qualitative disparity, and he is not sure that his construction achieves this end in all multidimensional cases. Goodman devotes considerable attention to graphing the matching relation and the derivative relationships noted above, and to a technique of rectifying queer arrays by positing vacant positions in the graph. These pages contain interesting suggestions toward a metric of finite arrays. Perceptiveness and ingenuity are displayed in the detection and resolution of subtle difficulties. The matters developed thus on the basis of ‘Z’ and ‘M’ may be thought of, Goodman suggests, as a theory of shapes and sizes. Shape and size thus undergo an interesting generalization. Color-shape or sound-shape or timeshape, e.g., stands to the qualia of color or sound or time as shape in the ordinary sense stands to the qualia of spatial position in the visual field; and correspondingly for size. “The color shape of an individual is, so to speak, the configuration that the colors of that individual mark out in the total array of colors sometimes called ‘the color sphere’” (p. 209). “Rhythm, when clearly dissociated from such factors as accent in accordance with Prall’s acute analysis, is simply temporal shape” (p. 210). It is notable, moreover, that shapes and sizes even in the familiar sense have a radically different status from qualia, such as colors or sounds or positions. Shape is a question of the structure of the matching relation among qualia; and size is a question of how many qualia. There is much in the book that is not hinted of in the above survey. Definitions indicated informally in this review are given formally in the book, and accompanied by representative theorems in full logical notation. There is some illustrative attention also to axioms and explicit deduction, though this aspect is not a major concern of the book. The proof of 7.13 (pp. 175 f.), by the way, can with a little tinkering be cut to a quarter of its length without departing from Goodman’s conventions of proof notation; and the proofs of 7.16 and 7.17 (pp. 176 f.) can be cut down by half. In the course of the book there is ample consideration of procedures alternative to those adopted. One such alternative is that of taking as objects the concreta and their sums, instead of the qualia and their sums, and then reconstruing qualia as appropriate sums of concreta. The book includes also

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a useful exposition and penetrating criticism of the constructions in the unteren Stufen of Carnap’s Aufbau. The concluding chapter comprises a useful discussion of time, particularly in relation to the vagaries of tensed language. Errata privately circulated by the author: Page 4, line 1, for “interpreted” read “uninterpreted.” Page 44, eighth line from footnote, for “intransitive” read “transitive.” Page 71, line 13, for “nonsymmetrical” read “symmetrical.” Page 130, delete lines 9–15. Page 192, at end of line 8 insert “but not in any other complex contained in that individual.” Further errata: Page 11, line 3, for “an r-class” read “a p-class of r-classes.” Page 38, last two lines but seven, for “human cells as parts also has all humans” read “humans as parts also has all human cells.” Page 111, last line but fourteen, for “equality” read “quality.” Page 192, tenth line from footnote, for “six” read “five.” Page 315, last line but fifteen, for “width” read “with.” Near the foot of page 28, the parenthetical enumeration of logical signs presumably ought, for the temporary purposes of the adjacent discussion, to be supplemented by mention of the identity sign.

22 Review of Peter Thomas Geach’s Reference and Generality 1964

Reference and Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories. By Peter Thomas Geach. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1962. Pp. xx, 202. $4.00. Those who know Geach’s appreciation of modern logic, his erudition in the medieval, and his taste for the quaint and curious will know what pleasures to expect from this book. Still they may be surprised by some positions taken. Chapter I opposes “the traditional doctrine of distribution.” One textbook writer will simply copy the stuff about distribution from another. . . . [Even] such elementary textbooks of modern symbolic logic as include a treatment of syllogistic . . . commonly include the doctrine of distribution as something unquestionably correct. . . . Now we need only look at the doctrine of distribution with a little care to see how incoherent it is [p. 4]. Alarmed by this account, I checked all textbooks within easy reach. The doctrine of distribution in most of them is that the categorical propositions A and E treat of all the things of which their subjects are true, and that E and O treat of all the things of which their predicates are true. Distribution comes to be registered by the word “every” when we paraphrase the four forms into terms of identity and distinctness thus1: 1. The idea is from Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.458.

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All S are P: Every S is identical with some P or other. Some S are P: Some S or other is identical with some P or other. No S are P: Every S is distinct from every P. Some S are not P: Some S or other is distinct from every P. If the textbooks do not put the matter thus, still they convey the idea. Geach’s main worry is the undistributed case, where the textbook writer may be caught saying that the proposition treats only of some, not all, of the things of which the term is true. “Just which ones, then, if not all?” is the question which, in one form or another and with varying success, Geach tries to render embarrassing. Other objections that Geach seems to level against the doctrine of distribution apply only to inept discussions of the doctrine. The culprit, when named, is always Keynes. I am moved to direct upon Geach a protest that he himself made in another connection: “one might as well denounce Boolean algebra by fastening on Boole’s mistakes and confusions” (p. 18). One confusion that Geach cites in Keynes is the familiar one between general terms and names of classes. Another is the notion that “some man” just refers to some man. Reference cannot be made to some man, unless to a specific one; and “some man” is an instrument to such reference in some only of its uses. These two confusions are familiar apart from the distribution doctrine. Geach’s campaign against that doctrine may be a way of linking things that he wanted to record. Thus, take his discussion (pp. 16 ff.) of the sentence “Every donkey that belongs to a villager is running in the race.” The problem here raised turns on an ambiguity between “every donkey of every villager” and “there is a villager each of whose donkeys.” The case is worth noting as a Renaissance specimen, but its place in a campaign against the doctrine of distribution is contrived. Geach even manages, in these pages against the doctrine of distribution, to question the null class: “Boole and Schroeder introduced the null class into logic with a forged passport identifying it as the class signified by the word ‘nothing’” (p. 11). I counter as before: “one might as well denounce Boolean algebra by fastening on Boole’s mistakes and confusions.” Chapter II is occupied mainly with the distinction, mentioned above, between general and singular terms. Geach urges various contrasts, for example that tense and negation can apply coherently to general terms and not to

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singular terms. I applaud his emphasis of the distinction, which I consider paramount. Late in the chapter one encounters, to one’s sorrow, the doctrine that “x = y” is meaningless except as relative to some general term as parameter: “x and y are the same F.” This doctrine is antithetical to the very notion of quantification, the mainspring of modern logic. Quantification depends on there being values of variables, same or different absolutely; grant quantification and there remains no choice about identity, not for variables. For a language with quantification in it there is but one legitimate version of “x = y” (not counting equivalent versions). There is even a general criterion of whether a given open sentence in a given language provides the legitimate version of “x = y.”2 Can we contrive an illustration of Geach’s doctrine, imagining x to be the same F as y and yet a different G from y? Geach hints an example, but it runs thin: “different official personages may be one and the same man” (p. 157). If the doctrine of distribution was incoherent, what are we to say of this? The nearest thing I find to a motive for his doctrine is that if we assumed that “x is the same A as y” does split up into “x is an A ...” and “x is the same as ... y” . . . it would mean that “the same A” always made sense, for any predicable term “A” [p. 152]. Yes, “the same A” would always be as meaningful as “x is an A.” Why should this be unwelcome? Perhaps because “intentional objects”—attributes, propositions—lack “any criterion of identity whatsoever; there is no saying what is the same intentional object” (p. 157)? But that is, for me, an objection equally against ever saying that x is such an object. Actually the sort of consideration that seems mainly to worry him is rather that there is no question of telling whether there were as many red things in this room as nonred things; for there is no telling whether d is or is not the same red thing as e, there being no criterion of identity [p. 153]. This, however, is a consideration gone awry. Because of the conceptual divisibility of red things into red things, there is indeed no counting the red

2. See my “Reply to Professor Marcus,” Synthese 13 (1961): 325 ff.

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things; but this is not to say there is no telling whether d is the same red thing as e. To one’s further bewilderment, by the time Geach gets to Heraclitus and the bath water he is ready to declare that he does know what is meant by “same water,” though this would seem less evident than “same red thing.” Further he asserts that “‘being the same water’ cannot be analyzed as ‘being the same (something-or-other) and being water’” (p. 151). These subtleties emerge from his struggle with the following problem: rivers are water, and Heraclitus bathed in the same river twice, and yet we do not want to say that he bathed in the same water twice. Now surely this crisis is overdrawn. A mass term like “water” or “sugar” does not primarily admit “same” nor “an.” When it is subjected to such particles, some special individuating standard is understood from the circumstances. Typically, “same sugar” might allude to sameness of shipment. Now in the sense in which one resists saying that Heraclitus bathed in the same water twice, a water is an aggregate only of molecules that were near a man when he once bathed. But a river is not such a water. I said that Geach’s relativized notion of identity threatened quantification. And sure enough, he follows up his Heraclitus problem with a revised idea of quantification (p. 155), unaware that it is straight LeÜniewski3: the idea of allowing variables of quantification in every semantic category, and counting an existential (or universal) quantification as true if and only if some (or every) substitution instance is true. Much of what I have reported since tangling with Geach’s identity doctrine is from Chapter VI. Now let us go back. Chapter III is occupied in part with the distinction, mentioned above, between phrases as instruments of reference and the same phrases otherwise used. The phrases concerned, called referring phrases, are those of the forms “an F,” “some F,” “no F,” “the F,” “every F,” “most F,” and others. He observes that “a cat” in “Jemima is a cat” is not used for reference, since it would be odd to ask “Which cat?” He rules similarly upon singular descriptions after “is”; here he pleads intuition and Polish grammar. The donkey example, above, typifies the tangles that referring phrases engender. The medievals tried to cope by distinguishing several sorts of suppositio. In Chapters III–IV, Geach reviews these efforts and moves toward what 3. “Grundzüge eines neuen Systems der Grundlagen der Mathematik,” Fundamenta Mathematicae 14 (1929): 1–81.

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we know to be the proper solvent: the logic of quantification. Thus he comes to treat of scopes of referring phrases. Also he strikingly depicts differences of behavior between referring phrases and proper names, and rightly urges that the latter be viewed as only apparent subjects of predication. Russell’s views of 1903 on meanings of referring phrases are duly presented and deplored. In Chapter V, Geach follows Frege, Peirce, and other clear heads in demonstrating that pronouns in their most important uses do not “go proxy” for their grammatical antecedents. In this and other chapters there is also much curious detail that is new to me and rewarding; mostly it has to do with anomalies of grouping and cross-reference and conflicts between the two. The examples savor gratefully of the antique, being largely vintage Scholastic. Chapter VII, finally, develops what Geach calls a logic of lists. This is in effect a specialization of his study of referring phrases, covering cases where the general term in the referring phrase is a finite enumeration. Or again it is a generalization of the logic of the compound singular terms that are formed from names by conjunction and alternation. Geach’s book overlaps portions of the middle chapters of my Word and Object, a book that Geach had reviewed.4 To distinguish between that in Geach’s book which was substantially in Word and Object and that which is new, is a task that appeals to me as little as it did to him. Even in areas of clearest overlap the reader already familiar with Word and Object will still find Geach’s book rewarding for the ingenuity of his examples, for the links with medieval efforts, and for frequent novelties of analysis as well. 4. Philosophical Books 2 (1961): 14–17.

23 Review of Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations 1977

Lakatos, Imre. . . . Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery. (Edited by John Worrall and Elie Zahar.) London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. £7.50 cloth, £1.95 paperback. Pp. xii, 174. This posthumous volume is a supplemented reissue of the similarly entitled essay that appeared in four parts in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1963–4. The hundred pages of that remarkable essay ring changes on a single geometrical theme: Euler’s law that the faces and vertices of a polyhedron together outnumber the edges by two. After explaining the classical proof, Lakatos produces an exception: a hollow solid whose surfaces are a cube within a cube. Its faces and vertices outnumber its edges by four. Then he examines the classical proof to see how it falls foul of such examples, and what stipulations would be suitable for excluding them. Having thus narrowed the scope of Euler’s law, he produces a further exception: a solid consisting of two tetrahedra with only an edge or vertex in common. A further tightening of the law is thus indicated, and still the exceptions are not at an end. A polyhedron with a square tunnel through it occasions a further restriction; a cube with a penthouse on top occasions yet a further restriction; and so the dialectic of revision and exception goes its oscillating way. The geometry is fascinating, but the purpose is philosophical. Lakatos is opposing the formalists’ conception of mathematical proofs, which represents them as effectively testable and, once tested, incontrovertible. He is op-

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posing the notion, so central to logical positivism, that mathematics and natural science are methodologically unlike. In respect of sprightliness the style contrasts markedly with the subject matter. The text is a spirited dialogue among a teacher and sixteen pupils. The footnotes, nearly as voluminous as the text, furnish historical precedents for ideas and attitudes expressed in the dialogue. Lengthiness of footnotes is in most writings a sign of poor organisation: failure to worry one’s material coherently into one-dimensional prose. But not so here, where the two levels of the page distinguish systematically between the fictitious participants of the dialogue and real mathematicians of the past three centuries. The lower level is fully as rewarding as the upper, the invidious distinction between nine- and twelve-point type notwithstanding. The wealth of scholarship is overwhelming. The successive amputations from Euler’s law are cunningly contrived and ordered, so as not to disqualify too many counter-instances at any one time. A major amputation early in the treatment would mean losing most of the illustrations of the methodology of theory construction, as well as spoiling the fun. At points this prolonging of curtailments is strained. Thus one counter-instance that Lakatos exploits is Kepler’s star polyhedron, viewed as bounded by only twelve faces each of which is a star with an empty pentagonal centre. The more natural view of it, as bounded by sixty triangular faces, is allowed to emerge only later. The excuse for the first or dodecahedral account of the star polyhedron is that the five triangles composing each hollow star all lie in one plane, as befits a face. Yet in the fullness of time even the planarity of faces conveniently lapses, when a cylinder, of all things, is accepted as a three-faced polyhedron. This studied prolonging of curtailments serves not merely to prolong an iconoclastic holiday. It affords instructively varied illustrations of the dialectic of conjecture and refutation which Lakatos, following Popper, recognises as the logic of scientific discovery. A mathematical inquiry begins, he says, with a conjecture and, by way of tentative proof, a thought-experiment which decomposes the conjecture into subconjectures. Counter-instances to the original conjecture emerge; the proof is then re-examined in search of a guilty subconjecture, which at length is convicted in turn by a counterinstance. A new, tighter subconjecture is substituted; ‘counterexamples are turned into new examples—new fields of inquiry open up’. And, as he well illustrates, the process can repeat itself. The volume includes three supplements to the original essay, all edited

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from Lakatos’s Cambridge Ph.D. thesis of 1961. One of these added pieces continues the dialogue on faces, edges, and vertices of polyhedra, concentrating now on Poincaré’s proof of Euler’s law by methods of vector algebra. It is not easy. A second supplement brings a different case study: no longer of Euler’s law, but of a law noted by Leibniz, and professedly proved by Cauchy, to the effect that the limit of a convergent series of continuous functions is a continuous function. The final supplement follows up with further case studies, and at this point the concern is with pedagogical values. Lakatos does not in the end deny the feasibility of full formalistic rigour in mathematical proof, but he makes an eloquent and conclusive case for preferring the heuristic style of conjecture and refutation in mathematical treatises and textbooks.

24 Review of Derek Bickerton’s Roots of Language 1983

Derek Bickerton, Roots of Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1981, pp. xiii–351. Bickerton is an authority on pidgin and creole, our language family’s poor relations (Chs. 1–2). He tells how they are born, how they grow, and what they are like. The reader dawdles over the pages, mouthing and savoring such examples as tu macha churen, samawl churen (“too much children, small children”) (p. 15) and others that take more explaining. Presently he rises above this level of concrete and picturesque detail, to speculate on how the infant in any culture learns its language (Ch. 3). In the end he ventures bold conjectures on the origin of language (Ch. 4). But he is a scientist first and last, aware of margins of error and ready still to offer imaginative hypotheses, acknowledged as such. I had supposed that the European trader or planter deliberately concocted a pidgin language by pouring simple English vocabulary into the indigenous syntax. Bickerton explains that pidgin arises rather from the spontaneous efforts of heterogeneous groups to communicate. The people have been assembled from different lands by colonists or slavers, to work and live together. There is no medium of communication between the bosses and the laborers or between one of the transported groups and another (p. 2). Individuals venture their own words, listen to one another, and observe gestures and attendant circumstances. When an expression is sounded that has the desired effect, it is gratefully kept for further use. A faltering jargon evolves that varies unsystematically from speaker to speaker. It is poor in scope of expression and it is nobody’s mother tongue. Creole, on the other hand,

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which pidgin develops into, is a mother tongue of succeeding generations (p. 2). The predicament in which pidgin arises resembles that of the infant confronting his future speech community. There is the reciprocal venturing of sounds, the observing of attendant circumstances, and the harboring of successful expressions, in the one case as in the other. The mother is for a while the child’s main confrontation, but that is a detail (p. 139). Accordingly, if a trait tends to be shared by historically unrelated pidgins, we might hope to find it shared also by infantile speech in traditional languages. Bickerton draws abundantly on twenty-three pidgin and creole languages for shared traits, and then cites studies of child development to bear out his expectation (p. viii). Pidgin and creole afford promising suggestions not only regarding the infant’s learning of language, Bickerton argues, but also regarding the very origin of language. The inception of a pidgin language, as he has depicted it, is a brief reenactment of what the remote and age-long origin of language must have been. Pidgin emerges less slowly because the parties to it have the past experience of what language is like, and they have their own vocabularies for tentative contribution to the common pot. Still the situations seem sufficiently similar to encourage speculation, and Bickerton is amenable. His survey of pidgins, creoles, and child speech shows that the distinction between the specific and the general, or between the punctual and the diffuse, plays a basic role; also the distinction between state and process. The notion of cause is likewise there, but the general notions of past and future are absent (p. 212). On the basis of these and similar observations, Bickerton conjectures certain innate biases in human thinking that would have conditioned, equally, the earliest development of language. Language obviously presupposes innate aptitudes, slight or abundant. Chomsky, opting for abundance, has sought light on their nature through grammatical traits shared by all languages. Bickerton looks rather to traits of rudimentary language, thus illuminating the genetic side (Ch. 4). He vividly portrays the poverty of language before the advent of past and future tenses (p. 270). There is the exciting suggestion, which he tenders with becoming diffidence, that the added powers of thought and communication afforded by the development of tense accounted for the emergence of agriculture and towns nine thousand years ago (p. 296). It is the same development that he observes historically in the transition from pidgin to creole.

25 Review of Charles Parsons’s Mathematics in Philosophy 1984

Mathematics in Philosophy: Selected Essays. Charles Parsons. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. 365 [pp.]. $42.50. Nine of the eleven essays in this volume appeared in the years 1964–1977. It is a service to have brought them conveniently together, for several of them were major contributions and are frequently cited. The nine are reprinted here without emendation, but notes and postscripts have been added, and there is a twenty-page general introduction. One of the hitherto unpublished essays is new; the other, “Quine on the Philosophy of Mathematics,” was written in 1975 for a Schilpp volume that had been projected at that time.* Because of the attention paid me in that essay and others, I can perhaps be excused for devoting part of this review to my ideas. The first essay is “Ontology and Mathematics.” What are numbers? Are they to be identified with sets in von Neumann’s way, or Zermelo’s, or Frege’s? All these ways and others deliver the required structure, but they are incompatible. Such considerations have given rise to the . . . commonplace of the working philosophy of modern mathematicians that they are concerned with structures . . . such that it does not matter what the underlying objects are or . . . it can matter only if the structure is part of a larger structure (41). *Editors’ note: L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 18 (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986; expanded 2d ed. 1988). The pagination for Parsons’s essay is the same in both editions.

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Parsons subsumes this mathematical structuralism under my more sweeping thesis of ontological relativity, to the effect that all reference to objects, concrete as well as mathematical ones, can be reinterpreted in any arbitrary one-to-one fashion without falsifying any of our sentences or disturbing any of the evidence that supports them. He represents my thesis as derived from indeterminacy of translation, and historically he is right; but my more direct and conclusive argument, subsequently used,1 is by appeal rather to what I call proxy functions. Parsons sympathizes with one’s natural reluctance to ascribe reality to abstract objects such as numbers. He proceeds to show that to interpret elementary number theory we need talk only of concrete inscriptions and how we can go on making them. He recognizes that the modality of ‘can’ here obstructs direct application of my criterion of ontological commitment, preventing me from conceding that the construction is nominalistic. But that is the least of it; I prefer numbers and other abstract objects to modal operators anyway. Leveling of modalities is in my view a major service of abstract objects. Taking another logical tack, Parsons contemplates elementary number theory under substitutional interpretation of its quantifiers. He rightly reports my attitude toward the ontology of substitutional quantification; namely, that we can assess it only by paraphrase into an objectually quantified theory, and that the ontology is then apt to consist of expressions, or, by Gödel numbering, the natural numbers after all. Where the system under consideration is elementary number theory, then, the ontological upshot is the same whether we take the quantifiers as substitutional or objectual. Next he queries the ontology of a more meager arithmetic, in which the variables are unquantified—hence, in effect, schematic letters for numerals. If so construed, the formulas are schemata rather than sentences; so any question of ontology would devolve rather upon the actual sentences that the schemata schematize. But those sentences are mechanically decidable and hence, I should say, ontologically empty; they are all definable as transcriptions of ‘0 = 0’ and ‘0 ≠ 0’. One’s actual activity with such a theory, however, would go forward mainly in a metatheory, and there an ontology at least of expressions, or in effect again natural numbers, would no doubt be called for. In another venture in ontological economy Parsons begins with the natu1. Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1981), Essay l.

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ral numbers as real and then generates sets of them, sets of such sets, and so on, in such a way as to identify each predicative set with a natural number. His second essay is “A Plea for Substitutional Quantification,” where he proposes quantifying substitutionally over abstract objects and objectually over concrete ones. The plan is congenial to one’s feeling that abstract objects are “not ‘real’ independently of the expressions for them” (66). It invites a standard of ontological commitment alternative to the one associated with objectual quantification. It invites a double standard, one for particulars and one for universals. This conforms nicely to the old duality of existence and subsistence, endowing it at last with technical significance. His is indeed a philosophically appealing way of viewing quantification over classes, as long as they are predicative. In impredicative cases, however, the familiar truth conditions for substitutional quantification can fail to wind down. The substituted class abstract can contain a class quantifier in turn, whose subsequent elimination traps us in a cycle. We may have to resort to a Tarskian truth definition, and in that event it is not clear that our quantification was justly described as substitutional. I gather from correspondence that Parsons agrees here. He has espoused his substitutional treatment only for predicative classes. A technical problem is raised by collisions between the objectual quantification over individuals and the substitutional quantification over classes. Parsons resolves it by skillfully refining the truth conditions governing the substitutional quantification of sentences containing free objectual variables. On another point his misgivings strike me as over-scrupulous. He notes that the semantics of substitutional quantification calls for quantifying over expressions in the metalanguage, and that these, being types rather than tokens, are abstract objects in turn. If this quantification is objectual, he reasons, then the substitutional interpretation of quantification over abstract objects has bogged down after all; and if it is taken as substitutional in turn, then our semantics of substitutional quantification faces an infinite regress. For my part, on the other hand, I see no distinction between substitutional and objectual quantification when all the objects are blessed with designators; and the expression types, like the natural numbers, are so blessed. The third essay explores the relation between mathematical common sense and its axiomatization. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is set over against the intuitive truth of his undecidable sentence. Gödel’s theorem

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about consistency proofs is set over against Gentzen’s use of transfinite induction to prove the consistency of number theory. A hierarchy of ever stronger systems is generated by systematically incorporating erstwhile indemonstrable truths. A similar hierarchy is generated in set theory by systematically incorporating further truth predicates, each widening the range of expressible sets. The reading public is not clearly envisioned here. Readers who are more than abreast of much of the technicality will be caught short at other points: what is Cantor normal form? what are those little superscripts for? (83, 87) Some things could be done more simply. Tarski’s theorem, to the effect that truth is indefinable in a consistent object language, is said to be “almost trivially” demonstrable, and the proof is then rather obscurely sketched (76). If the theorem were put in terms rather of satisfaction, it could really be proved trivially and clearly: the open sentence ‘x does not satisfy x’ directly encapsulates Grelling’s paradox. On another page we encounter, as so often in model theory, the ponderous phrase ‘functions from Dn to [truth values]’ (76) where a straightforward ‘subsets of Dn’ would tell the whole tale. The next two essays are given over to meticulous Kantian scholarship. Kant held that our knowledge of the external world is limited to objects of possible experience, but still he accepted the infinite divisibility of space. Parsons refines the pertinent notions, notably that of possibility, with a view to easing the conflict, but concludes that Kant’s position is not fully defensible. Turning to Kant’s doctrine that arithmetic is synthetic a priori, Parsons examines and rejects a suggestion of Beth and Hintikka that would trace the syntheticity to what I have called the flagged variable of universal generalization and existential instantiation. Trying a different line, Parsons expands ‘2 + 2 = 4’ into first-order logic by Frege’s method of numerically definite quantification and then offers two conjectures as to why it might be viewed as synthetic: (1) the expansion is a conditional whose proof requires more quantifiers than appear in its antecedent, and (2) existence assumptions are needed to preclude truth also of ‘2 + 2 = n’ for higher n. Finally he speculates inconclusively on Kant’s view of the place of intuition in arithmetic. The next essay is squarely on Frege. Parsons muses that Frege must have thought that his choice [of how to model numbers in set theory] was more natural than any alternative (155).

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and he surprises me by wondering why. A number is the size of a class; hence it is the attribute of being a class just that large; and hence, extensionally conceived, it is the class of all classes just that large. Parsons observes that a number so conceived would itself be too large a set for today’s usual set theories; however, Frege was innocent as yet of the antinomies and the limitations of size that they prompted. Cantor, I grant, was heedful of limitations of size, but he was aware also, precociously, of antinomies. Parsons rightly rejects Frege’s claim to have reduced arithmetic to logic, pointing out that set theory is involved. The point controverts Frege’s claim to have shown arithmetical truth to be analytic. Existence of sets is required, and that, Parsons holds, is scarcely analytic. Parsons next questions whether Frege and others really reduce arithmetic even to set theory. We depend on mathematical induction, he argues, in the very process of devising an adequate set theory and verifying its adequacy to arithmetical purposes. Evidently, then, what Parsons wants in the way of reduction is not just a truth-preserving translation; he is concerned also for the phenomenology of the thought processes. This concern will be seen to dominate some later pages. In his seventh essay, “Quine on the Philosophy of Mathematics,” he suggests that A Quinian argument against the necessity of mathematics would [rest on a claim that] mathematics is not known a priori (178). and then he questions the supposed argument. I feel like a third party here, owning no such claims or argument. Necessity makes sense to me only as indexicals do; namely, relative to situation and context. ‘Necessarily’ merely heralds a sentence that the speaker sees as following from some belief or assumption that his interlocutor shares; such is the paradigmatic use. Again Parsons has me wrong when he writes: Quine seems not to challenge the assertion that the axioms and theorems of mathematics have the character of laws rather than accidental generalization (183). Law for me is on a par with necessity: context-bound. In a footnote (176n) of slightly later vintage he sets the record straight. What then of logical truth? He represents me as recognizing it. Yes, I rec-

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ognize the notion as I recognize the notions of chemical truth, physiological truth, and the rest; namely, in terms of the essential occurrence of words from the appropriate lexicon. If this is all that is meant by logical necessity, well and good. Parsons, however, then contemplates explicating a modal necessity operator by disquotation of logical truth. He notes that modal statements so construed turn out contingent, because of the contingency of English grammar and semantics. Parsons’ motive in pursuing this and other degrees of modality is the quasi-nominalistic one noted earlier: avoidance of the unending reification of numbers in favor of the unending possibility of augmenting inscriptions. But in the end he apprehends a circularity in basing mathematics thus on a physical possibility, since “physical theory as it stands is founded on mathematics” (185–6). Averse still to according mathematical objects full-fledged existence on a par with bodies, he tries viewing them as incomplete—thus recurring to the structuralism noted in the first essay. Some trace of substantiality is retained by relating these structures to concrete representations. By counting spatiotemporal regions as concrete, he avails himself of a fund of 2c representations, where c is the power of the continuum. He notes that the expedient leaves higher reaches of set theory unexcused. He recognizes that for me sets and concrete objects are ontologically on a par; ‘exists’ is univocal. “However,” he pursues, the notion of object in set theory, and the structures whose possibility it postulates, are much more general than the notion of . . . physically representable structure. How can [Quine] still maintain that these possibilities are “natural” possibilities and that the necessity of logic and mathematics is not “higher”? (193) So much of mathematics as is wanted for use in empirical science is for me on a par with the rest of science. Transfinite ramifications are on the same footing insofar as they come of a simplificatory rounding out, but anything further is on a par rather with uninterpreted systems. Possibility and necessity are as may be. Parsons comes closer to my views when he cites my “claim that there is not a clear line between mathematics and empirical science” (193). Well, I can draw lines between all manner of disciplines, in terms again of essential occurrences of words; but I equate them epistemologically. As for the dispar-

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ity of subject matter between physics and mathematics, which he stresses (195), let us remember that physics quantifies over numbers as well as over physical objects. In concluding this essay Parsons contrasts my conception of classes, which he justly characterizes as Fregean, with the hierarchic or iterative conception that “is characteristic of contemporary thought on the foundations of set theory” (198). The tacit psychogenesis of classes (or sets; no difference here) was indeed hierarchic, on my theory, but the levels of the hierarchy merged as they emerged, and impredicativity prevailed.2 The eventual separating of levels, all the while condoning impredicativity, was an artifice for blocking the antinomies. Alternative artifices to that end are my “New Foundations” and its variant in Mathematical Logic. I do not agree with Parsons that Donald A. Martin . . . seems a little unfair in saying that NF is “the result of a purely formal trick intended to block the paradoxes” (200n). but I hold that Martin was mistaken in not saying the same of the hierarchic conception. Parsons notes (200n) the important difference between the range of variables in the theory of types and in “New Foundations,” but is wrong in thinking that I “may have neglected to consider” this. I intended it from the start (1936), and it got into my writing in 1938.3 In 1956 I showed further that when the theory of types is translated into a notation of general variables, a system results that is akin not to “New Foundations” but to Zermelo’s.4 For many or most of us the terms ‘set’ and ‘class’ have been interchangeable. This lexical superfluity proved useful after 1928, however, in accommodating an innovation due to von Neumann: a new brand of classes that are not members of any classes. These have come to be known perversely as proper classes, and may more suggestively be called ultimate classes. The term ‘set’ has then remained limited conveniently to classes that are members of classes. In his eighth essay Parsons treats of ultimate classes. 2. The Roots of Reference (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), sects. 26–28. 3. “On the Theory of Types,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 3, no. 4 (December 1938): 125–39, esp. 132. 4. “Unification of Universes in Set Theory,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 21, no. 3 (September 1956): 267–79.

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What I have called virtual classes are another matter: a mere notational simulation of classes, eliminable by contextual definition.5 Expressions for them are better seen simply as general terms, relative clauses.6 Ultimate classes, on the other hand, like sets, figure genuinely as values of bound variables. Parsons proves that the adding of ultimate classes to a theory is equivalent to adding Tarski’s two-place predicate of satisfaction. I think it a brilliant result. He notes further that this strengthening of a system is conservative; that is, it generates no further theorems couched in the original notation. Parsons, like von Neumann, requires his ultimate classes to be predicative; that is, the open sentences determining them must not themselves quantify over ultimate classes. In 1940 I propounded the unrestricted alternative as a supplement to the universe of “New Foundations,” unsuccessfully at first,7 and in 1942 I discussed the same unrestricted expedient in relation to Zermelo’s system.8 The Zermelo system as thus enlarged was called NQ by Wang9 and BQ by Stegmüller,10 but has come in later years to be attributed by Parsons and others to subsequent writings by Kelley and Morse. The results just now cited from Parsons depend, however, on the restriction to predicative classes. Parsons’ ultimate classes are all expressible as the extensions of open sentences. Accordingly, as in his second essay, he proposes quantifying substitutionally over them. This means using two styles of variables, and thus invites a distinction even between the sets and the corresponding nonultimate classes. Classes are then thought of strictly as the extensions of open sentences; some sets fail to correspond to classes, namely the unspecifiable sets, and some classes fail to correspond to sets, namely the ultimate classes. But impredicative classes change all that. In the next essay, “The Liar Paradox,” Parsons illustrates the parallelism of 5. Set Theory and Its Logic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1982), sects. 2–3. 6. See my Methods of Logic, 4th ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1982), sects. 21, 46. 7. Mathematical Logic (New York: Norton, 1940; corrected edition, thanks to Hao Wang, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1951). 8. “On Existence Conditions for Elements and Classes,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 7, no. 4 (December 1942): 157–59. 9. Hao Wang, “On Zermelo’s and von Neumann’s Axioms for Set Theory,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 35 (1949): 150–55. 10. “Eine Axiomatisierung der Mengenlehre, beruhend auf den Systemen von Bernays und Quine,” in M. Käsbauer et al., eds., Logik und Logikkalkül (Freiburg: Alber, 1962), 57– 103.

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the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes by coordinating propositions with classes and truth with membership. Where the predicate ‘F’ determines the class y, we have x ∈ y if and only if Fx; and, correspondingly, where the sentence ‘p’ expresses the proposition y, we have y true if and only if p. He proposes accordingly to obstruct the semantic paradoxes by measures parallel to those taken in set theory. He lets some sentences fail to express propositions, just as some predicates fail to determine classes. Any of these missing classes, such as that of all non-self-members, can be added by enlarging the universe, as was done in the adding of ultimate classes; and the universe of propositions can be enlarged analogously. The process can be repeated indefinitely, generating in the one case a hierarchy of set theories and in the other a hierarchy of propositional theories of truth and reference. In either case the hierarchy can be seen also as a hierarchy of widening ranges of distinctively styled variables within a single inclusive theory. But Tarski’s familiar hierarchy of metalanguages can likewise be viewed as a single language with an infinite hierarchy of predicates asymptotically approaching the forbidden predicate of absolute truth. What then profited it Parsons to posit propositions? It was just a flurry. He next tries dropping the propositions, taking truth and falsity as applying rather to sentences, and admitting truth-value gaps. It is a matter, he notes, of dropping his earlier analogy, where classes corresponded to propositions, in favor of a new analogy where classes correspond to truth values. It is a better analogy; truth values are properly akin to classes, and propositions rather to attributes. On this approach, just as not all predicates can determine classes, so not all sentences can have truth values. He explains that a straightforward two-place predicate ‘T’ of relative truth remains consistently available, where ‘Twx’ means that x is a sentence that comes out true when the values of its bound variables are restricted to the set w. Ascriptions of relative truth are themselves true or false, and no gaps. Thence he derives predicates of truth and falsity that are absolute but do not cover all sentences; here come the truth-value gaps. The essay ends with a consideration of ordinary language, inspired by Tarski’s remark that the truth predicate makes ordinary language inconsistent. Parsons sees ordinary language as intensional and committed to propositions. Some sentences, then, may fail to express any propositions; here is one loophole whereby ordinary language may escape paradox. Also Parsons sees the universe of objects of quantification in ordinary language as differ-

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ent from occasion to occasion—another loophole. Flexibility in the interpretation of indirect discourse makes for yet further latitude. A major purpose of logical regimentation, after all, has been to sharpen and clarify the otherwise vague and ill-defined question of what follows from what. The unregimented and unregenerate vernacular is just too flabby to sustain a decisive test of consistency, as Parsons’ thoughtful examination abundantly illustrates. He then ponders ways of so ruling upon the indecisive points of ordinary language as to safeguard its truth predicate from paradox. To this ten-year-old essay he appends fifteen new pages, difficult at points, regarding subsequent work on the subject by Kripke, Feferman, Burge, Herzberger, and Gupta. The goal as he envisages it is a consistent set of rules, as neat as may be, that fit English speakers’ “use of ‘true’ and related locutions” (266). In his tenth essay Parsons takes up again the hierarchic or iterative conception of sets. On this conception, typified by Russell’s theory of types but not limited to it, each set is in some sense posterior to its members. But in what sense, Parsons asks? Not temporally; the picture of progressive fabrication of sets from members cannot be taken literally, despite its persistence in the literature from Cantor through Shoenfield, Wang, and others. Parsons tells how Wang elaborates the metaphor: to form a set we “look through or run through or collect together” various of the objects in a “multitude” whose “range of variability is in some sense intuitive.” We must be able to “overview” the multitude, “in an idealized sense” (275). Parsons joins Wang in these phenomenological gropings, sympathetically and critically. Unresponsive myself to the phenomenological nuances, I should have thought it sufficient to say of the hierarchic ordering that it was perhaps inspired by the metaphor of progressive fabrication and that it is intuitively somewhat sustained by it despite the aberration of impredicative sets, but that its strength lies in its perspicuity and its security from paradox. Well, almost sufficient; there is also my psychogenetic speculation (note 2 again). The metaphor of fabrication imposes, along with the hierarchic structure, the axiom of foundation. But that axiom is warranted also, I might add, by an argument from individuation. Sameness of members serves to individuate classes only insofar as the members themselves are individuated; so an ungrounded class induces a regress. My version of individuals as self-singletons is a violation of the axiom of foundation that can easily be accommodated, as Parsons remarks (201n), by adjusting the axiom to allow the exception. As individuals they may be sup-

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posed individuated independently of set theory as usual—e.g., by space and time. It would be regrettable to forfeit the version of individuals as selfsingletons; for it confers the same gains in simplicity for which some set theorists have been prepared to abandon individuals altogether and thus divorce set theory from general science. Let me stretch this digression to two more remarks. (1) The seeming unnaturalness of my version of individuals can be mitigated by thinking of it rather as a renunciation of singletons of individuals and a reinterpretation of epsilon as ‘member of or same individual as’. (2) Though my systems in “New Foundations” and Mathematical Logic abound in ungrounded classes quite apart from individuals, my version of individuals as self-singletons is suited equally to Zermelo’s set theory and the others. Back, then, to Parsons’ tenth essay. Later in it he recurs to classes, and ventures again to distinguish them from sets even when they are not ultimate. Phenomenologically, sets are gatherings up, whereas classes are extensions of predicates or generalizations of such. Resorting to modal logic, Parsons suggests that a set has its members necessarily but a class in general does not; and I am bound to say that it is a cute idea if you like necessity. His next quandary concerns the ranges of bound variables. It disturbs him that the totality of sets over which the variables range does not itself exist as a set. He feels that the unreality of the range marks a failure in the interpretation of the variables. Note, then, that in my “New Foundations” and in Mathematical Logic the range of the variables is indeed accounted a set, though I had not reckoned Parsons’ point among the virtues of that feature. (Nor do I have a single-minded commitment to those systems; this is clear from Set Theory and Its Logic.) Parsons is exercised also about the indeterminacy of the range in respect of how far it probes the transfinite potentialities of the iterative hierarchy. A perplexing ‘R’ then intrudes, with Greek subscript, and exposition falters. A cross reference to page 218 engenders hope, but 219 would have helped more, and 87n would have cleared it all up. At any rate he proposes viewing the range of variables as systematically ambiguous, in the manner of the “typical ambiguity” of Principia Mathematica. As an alternative he suggests a modal account in terms of possible existence. His long last essay is a new one, written for the book. In it he explores modal set theory in depth. Modality no longer figures as an alternative to the reification of abstract objects. By now Parsons is reveling in both. His variables range over objects in all possible worlds, and his predicates

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vary in extension from world to world unless they enjoy rigidity, whereof two senses emerge. Predicates determine classes as usual, and these are distinguished from sets, but now they come to be disposed in an iterative hierarchy like that of sets. Moreover, the modalities infect the classes with an intensionality that accords them rather the character, Parsons suggests, of attributes. An assortment of alternative systems is developed. One of them invokes a bracketing device to indicate that the bracketed segment of the formula is to be read as governed by just the first n of the outlying modal operators. Brands of modality vie with one another. [E]ither we have to leave the two modalities side by side, or we must seek a third interpretation of modality, more general than both metaphysical modality and our own restricted modality. . . . One’s first thought might be that it should be a strictly logical modality. . . . I conclude that what we should be looking for is a form of mathematical modality (327). [W]e must regard the problem of formulating [a perfectly general modal set] theory as unsolved, and we must even leave some doubts concerning what its logical framework should be (331). This concluding essay, we see, is one that will richly reward those who are bored by clear skies and desert landscapes. The book contains dozens of misprints, some of which bear notice. Page 31, line 15, read “intuitionism.” Page 59, line 4, for “y” read “Y ”. Page 120, sixth line up, for “2 =” read “2 + 2 =”. Page 122, eleventh line up, and page 133, tenth line up, and page 161, line 19, read “is”. Page 213, formula (4), for “(n)” read “(n, s)”. Page 246, line 11, for last “that” read “from”. Page 310, line 5, for alpha read “a”. Pages 315–6, all three formulas, for “a” or “a” read “y” or vice versa. Page 332, line 12, wrong symbol; consult context. Page 351, fourth line up, read “Jean-Louis”.

26 Four Hot Questions in Philosophy Review of P. F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties 1985

If one man were to be singled out as personifying Oxford analytic philosophy over the past thirty years, Sir Peter would be he. In these four lectures, which he delivered at Columbia University in 1983, he weighs issues in four traditional arenas of philosophical contention. In one arena the existence of external objects is at stake, in another the grounds of morality, in a third the status of mentalistic language, and in a fourth the existence of abstract objects. Skeptics have long challenged our evidence for the existence of external objects. In response Strawson toys first with a “transcendental argument,” somewhat reminiscent of Kant, which purports to show that our very ability to entertain the question of the existence of external objects presupposes our belief in them. Dissatisfied, he rallies to the naturalism, as he calls it, of Hume and Wittgenstein. Their position is that belief in external objects is ingrained in human nature and is never really suspended, the skeptic’s pretensions notwithstanding. It is not open to doubt or, therefore, to substantiation. If this dismissal of the problem is felt to be lame, I would suggest that the feeling can be relieved by taking a more fully naturalistic stance. Our words have no meaning beyond what they acquire through our learning of them, and all our learning of them goes back directly or indirectly to the association of utterances with concurrent sensory stimulation. The sentences of science, no matter how theoretical, acquire what meaning they have through a network of sentence-to-sentence links whose starting point is sensory stimulation. All evidence for the truth of a scientific theory, moreover, is drawn

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from sensory observation through that same network. The existence of external objects is itself just one among the tenets of our scientific theory, albeit a primordial one, and it is sustained to the degree that the theory as a whole conforms to observational data. The very meaning of the existence thesis lies no deeper. The skeptic who challenges the existence of external objects, in that first arena, has in the moral arena a confederate who challenges the objectivity of moral judgments. Strawson seems to suggest that this challenge would be met if we could show that human action is not ultimately determined by external causes. This connection is not clear to me, but no matter, for Strawson recognizes that “no one has been able to state intelligibly what such a condition of freedom . . . would actually consist in.” Tentatively he opts rather, as in the first arena, for the strategy of what he calls naturalism: human nature is inescapably committed to moral values, and there is no scope for challenge or defense. He distinguishes between this brand of naturalism, which he calls “liberal,” and another which he calls “reductive.” In dealing with the moral matter the reductive naturalist is at one, it seems, with the skeptic. Strawson is responsive to the claims of both the liberal and the reductive naturalist with regard to morality, and he seeks to reconcile them by adopting a relativistic position. From the standpoint of participation and involvement, moral values are real; from an external standpoint they are just behavioral data for the annals of the anthropologist. Strawson draws an analogy in perception: from the percipient’s standpoint a table is smooth and hard, but from an objective standpoint it is a seething multitude of particles. I see no need of contrasting standpoints in the case of the table. The molecular physicist can agree with the percipient that the table is smooth and hard; he just goes on to provide the surprising microphysical detail of what constitutes smoothness and hardness. He reveals the fine structure. This way of relating the physicist to the percipient restores a welcome unity of outlook. And what then of morals? We can say with the reductive naturalist that moral law has no objective support in nature, being merely a pattern of human response and behavior rooted in natural selection and moral training; but we can still accept it for what it is, and as human beings among other human beings we can continue to espouse it and conform to it. The purported difference between reductive and liberal naturalism, in these contexts anyway, looks verbal.

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In the third arena, which features the confrontation of mind and body, Strawson opens the proceedings by dismissing, as most of us do nowadays, the dualistic view of mind and body as distinct substances. it is the physical person, rather, that satisfies mental and physical descriptions; and what is in question is just the relation between these two sorts of descriptions. Each single, dated mental event or state is an event or state of the body and could in principle be described exhaustively, Strawson grants, in physiological language. However, the words we use to describe mental events or states— “mental predicates”—are general, like any predicate; each is fulfilled by any number of individual events or states. The same is true of the physiological predicates, and it is between the groupings imposed by the two sorts of predicates that the incommensurability between the mental and the physical subsists. Such is Strawson’s view, if I interpret him right, and it is shared by Donald Davidson and, I like to think, many others. Strawson demurs still over the “identity thesis,” which identifies mental states and events flatly with physical states and events; but what is at stake here seems to be just a question of phrasing. The opposition between reductive and liberal naturalism reappears in this third arena, according to Strawson, as a contrast between physical and personal histories—the latter being couched in mentalistic terms of motives, purposes, desires, beliefs, and the like. Here again the notion of an opposition between two parties—between “the tough-minded and the tenderminded,” in William James’s phrase—strikes me as unfortunate. Anyone, however tough his mind, is well advised to recognize both the irreducibility and the indispensability of personal history and the mentalistic idiom. And the tender-minded, conversely, if not too tender for “liberal naturalism,” is well advised to recognize the business of theoretical physics and astronomy as the exploration of the uttermost principles and mechanisms of nature. This is not to say that even physiology or entomology, let alone economics or personal history, is translatable into terms of electrons, quarks, spin, charm, weak force, gravitation, and the rest of the theoretical physicist’s austere lexicon. Who would reduce Gresham’s law to quantum mechanics? Once more, as in the morality arena, the opposition of reductive and liberal naturalism seems to waver and dissolve. A final joust between the reductive and the liberal naturalist is staged in the arena of ontology, the study of what there is. Strawson represents the reductive naturalist at first as repudiating abstract objects of “intensional” kind, by which he means thoughts, ideas, propositions, properties, as op-

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posed to natural objects. But presently he has him repudiating abstract objects of all sorts, including numbers, functions, classes. The merits of the two cases are very unlike, and Strawson ought to have distinguished and contrasted them. There are reasons for shunning intensional objects, quite apart from any reductive proclivities. A major reason is that it is not clear when to say of two sentences that they express the same proposition, or when to say of two conditions that they determine the same property and not just two coextensive properties. As a means of settling such questions, philosophers have been led to invoke a notion of metaphysical necessity according to which two properties are the same insofar as they are “necessarily” equivalent (like the properties of “bachelor” and “unmarried man”); and for this, again, no clear criterion is evident. Moreover, none of these troublesome intensional objects seems to be needed for a scientific account of nature. Intensional or mentalistic locutions have their place still in personal history, and we are already agreed that personal history is an indispensable mode of discourse. Ontological questions, however, are best seen as questions not of personal history but of the realities of nature; and in the scientific mode of discourse appropriate to those realities the existence of intensional objects may justly be denied. Numbers, functions, and classes, on the other hand, for all their abstractness, are not to be lightly dismissed even from the scientific system of the world. Numbers are referred to as abundantly in the laws of physics as are forces or particles. It is not just a matter of the use of numerals, which might or might not be viewed as naming; it is a matter of wholesale reference to numbers as the objects denoted by general terms and pronouns and as the values of variables in scientific statements couched in mathematical language. Even in what seems to be down-to-earth and ontologically uncommitted talk about words, moreover, as Strawson remarks, we talk mostly not of individual cases of a sentence being spoken or uttered, but of sentence types, which at the very least are classes of inscriptions or utterances. Even when we speak of a sentence like “The sun is hot,” we can say we are referring to the class of all the instances of the sentence—written, spoken, printed, engraved, etc. However enticing to the tough mind, nominalistic repudiation of all abstract objects is simply incompatible with all levels of science as we know it. Intensional objects can indeed be banished, and good riddance; but the extensional abstract objects, numbers notably, remain to be reckoned

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with, and that not in one sense alone. If Strawson’s reductive naturalist shuns all abstract objects while still championing science, then he owes Strawson and the rest of us an account of what he means by the unreality of objects that he is still seemingly making full use of. If he merely means that they are not in space and time, he can count on agreement from liberal naturalists and even tenderer minds. On this point I find Strawson underestimating the strength of his own position.

Responses

27 Replies to Professor Riska’s Eight Questions 1992

Why have contemporary philosophers been so much preoccupied with the problems of logic and language—during the time of great social upheavals, nationalistic and ethnic conflicts, etc.? Your question conjures up the picture of someone interested and trained at all branches of philosophy and faced with the question of where to direct his efforts. The trouble here is terminological: the breadth of the term ‘philosophy’. Terminology aside, it is like asking why people work in economics when there are grave problems in medicine. To my mind logic and analytical philosophy differ from ethics and political philosophy nearly as much, in respect of pertinent drives and aptitudes, as economics from medicine. One may still wonder about philosophers’ increased concern with language. I attribute this not to an interest in language as such, but to an appreciation that talk of ideas, so dominant in earlier philosophy, can be much sharpened and clarified by talking rather of words. The motivating concerns here are still metaphysical and epistemological. As you said in your autobiography, you do not like to be classified as a pragmatist. Nevertheless, do you find your philosophy to be continuous with the teaching of such pragmatists as John Dewey and Clarence I. Lewis? I do feel philosophically akin to Dewey and C. I. Lewis, as well as to Carnap and Hume, and in part (like Lewis) even to Kant. Less to James and Peirce. My hesitation over the classification of pragmatist was only my uncertainty over what distinguishes a pragmatist from any other empiricist. Was Carnap whom you visited in Prague a different philosopher from the “American” Carnap?

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Carnap’s philosophy changed significantly more than once. Three phases are epitomized by Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Logische Syntax, and Meaning and Necessity. His years in America began between the second and third. But all three were dominated by his scientific spirit and his respect for mathematical rigor and clarity of thought. Have you been satisfied, or rather disappointed, by the working mathematicians’ reactions to your systems of set theory and foundations of mathematics? Intensive study of the set theory of my “New Foundations” (1937), and its variant in my Mathematical Logic, has gone on over the past fifty years in Belgium, Switzerland, and America by perhaps a dozen gifted mathematicians, with ingenious and very surprising results. On the other hand the system has never threatened to displace the neo-classical Zermelo-Fraenkel system or von Neumann’s variant, and I have not felt that it should. My Set Theory and Its Logic (1963) compares and interrelates all four systems, plus Russell-Whitehead. Do you find anything positive and perhaps illuminating in the works of intensional logicians and possible-worlds metaphysicians? I am unsympathetic with metaphysical necessity and possible worlds, but I have dabbled sympathetically in the intensional logic of propositional attitudes. Does the current appreciation of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth overrate or underrate its contribution? There has been a puzzling tendency to underrate Tarski’s truth theory and to misunderstand its claims. There is a considerable interest in developing a phenomenological type of philosophizing in Czecho-Slovakia (Husserl was born in Moravia and Jan Patoïka, an outstanding Czech philosopher, was a phenomenologist). Would you like to offer your comments on the viability and fruitfulness of such a method of philosophizing? I tried Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen briefly long ago, but despaired of grasping the rules of the game, because of the lack of intersubjectivity in introspective data. Yet I sense that there are affinities with my concerns. By the way, another great native of Moravia was Kurt Gödel. Are the computer scientists today stealing the show from the logicians (both mathematical and philosophical)? There seems to be less excitement with regard to the activities of logicians today, compared with the historical pe-

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riod which gave us the results of Gödel, Tarski, and your own distinguished contributions. Strict formalism has flourished in logic and the foundations of mathematics beginning with Frege, 1879. Many mathematicians scorned it as idle pedantry. But with the rise of computers, since 1936, mathematical logic has become a tool of technology, and strict formalism is the sine qua non of programming. It is a delicious irony and a joy to contemplate. If research in logic apart from the needs of computers has fallen off, as you suggest, it may be because Gödel’s epoch-making discovery, together with the related subsequent developments in recursion theory (Kleene) and model theory (Tarski) and the earlier work in foundations of mathematics by Whitehead and Russell, have left us with little in the way of burning problems. I do think still of one, the perhaps hopeless project of deriving enough mathematics from predicative set theory to serve all the needs of natural science. Feferman and Wang are sanguine about this.

28 Comments on Neil Tennant’s “Carnap and Quine” 1994

In his essay “Carnap and Quine,” Neil Tennant reminds us that although Carnap’s Aufbau (1928) was phenomenalistic in its foundation, Carnap assured us that this was an arbitrary choice, and that a physicalistic basis could serve as well. Tennant sees, in this neutrality, a foreshadowing of Carnap’s principle of tolerance. I have a further hypothesis to account, in turn, for that initial tolerance: to account for Carnap’s profession of neutrality between a phenomenalistic basis and a physicalistic one.1 I picture Carnap as having been a singleminded phenomenalist when he devised the constructions that went into the Aufbau. When the book was about ready for printing, I picture Neurath pressing the claims of physicalism. I then picture Carnap writing and inserting those paragraphs of disavowal by way of reconciling the book with his changing views. Significantly, he took the physicalist line in his subsequent writings, and refused permission to translate the Aufbau for more than thirty years. Meanwhile the declaration of neutrality stood as a precedent, as Tennant suggests, for a subsequent general principle of tolerance. The phenomenalistic constructions of the Aufbau retain much significance even in a physicalistic setting. Tennant notes the affinity of Carnap’s basic relation, Aehnlichkeitserinnerung, to the basic relation of perceptual similarity in my naturalized epistemology. A similar affinity lies between Carnap’s ground elements, his Elementarerlebnisse, and my stimulations. An 1. In the margin of his copy of this article Quine wrote: “See the second page of ‘Carnap’s Positivistic Travail’ above.” Quine’s use of “above” in this remark indicates that he was preparing a volume of his writings in which both “Carnap’s Positivistic Travail” [chapter 11] and this reply were to be included. Similar remarks are found also in other papers included in this volume.

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Elementarerlebnis was the subject’s overall experience during one specious present, and I construed a stimulation correspondingly as the subject’s overall neural input during a specious present. At these points Carnap was clearly my inspiration (see Quine 1973, 16). I had been less aware of it at first. Speaking of perceptual similarity brings me to innate endowments. Since perceptual similarity is basic to all learning, some perceptual similarity must be unlearned, hence innate—though it changes with experience. Tennant evidently wonders that I as a behaviorist would accept such an innate endowment, and, accepting it, balk at others. Surely there is no tension between behaviorism and recognition of innate endowments. Conditioning hinges on perceptual similarity, some of which has to be innate, as no behaviorist would wish to deny. Where behaviorism asserts itself is rather in demanding and providing a behavioral test and comparative measure of innate perceptual similarity on the basis of subsequent conditioning. The bearing of behavior on things of the mind is generally criterial rather than substantive. A state of mind is a state of nerves, not a pattern of behavior. When neurologists look for the neural mechanism, it is the behavioral criteria that specify the problem. The state of mind can also persist with no inkling in behavior, and the subject may or may not verbalize it in mentalistic terms. But we have learned those terms only by relating them in turn to behavioral manifestations in one another. Symptomatology precedes etiology. By criteria, moreover, I mean only symptoms, not definitions. Definition is less the rule than the exception in physical science and mental as well. We read of the electron, the neutrino, and the strong and weak fundamental forces, unaided by definition; we are just given partial descriptions of these things, together with a systematic theory that relates them holistically to familiar things. Their warrant lies not in observability, but in their contribution to a coherent theory of nature that stands up under persistent testing at its observable periphery. I could be persuaded similarly of qualia by being shown how their reification as values of variables can conduce to a simpler or more powerful overall psychology, with no less promise of full integration in a comprehensive theory of nature. The prospect is dim only for want of plausible leads. In the case of synonymy, on the other hand, and propositions, or meanings, the considerations are emphatically adverse. Our theory of nature scouts te-

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lepathy and rests language learning strictly on observable behavior, which, I have argued, leaves interlinguistic meaning largely indeterminate. Wide ranges of innate language readiness are indeed live options, but they do not help here. Note, though, that even this strong negative is no more absolute than our developing and ever fallible natural science. So I have no brief against innateness. Indeed I am keen on D. Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology that thrives on innateness. For my own part, I dream of an innate endowment of perceptual modules whose combinations exhaust all possible perceptions; and I look to brain neurologists in the new tradition of D. Hubel and T. Wiesel to realize it. This would be a truly illuminating restitution of qualia in naturalized epistemology. Let us return to the Aufbau for one technical point, where my interpretation differs from Tennant’s. Thinking still of the principle of tolerance, Tennant interprets Carnap’s prefix “quasi” in “quasi-analysis” to mean that the analysis is just one of various admissible alternatives. I understand it rather as meaning that Carnap is in effect analyzing out a component of something by actually defining the set of all the things that share the component. Quasianalysis is Whitehead’s extensive abstraction. In regard to Carnap’s Syntax (1934b, 1935b), I am startled and delighted by Tennant’s discovery of Carnap’s memorandum of one of our conversations in Prague, March 1933. I was expressing misgivings over Carnap’s appeal to analyticity on my first exposure to it in his still unpublished Syntax. I had subsequently forgotten that, and could trace my misgivings back only to my writing of “Truth by Convention” ([1936] 1945) two years later. Turning to Gödel’s great theorem, Tennant writes: “Now it has been claimed that there is evidence in the Syntax that Carnap had not fully absorbed the implications of Gödel’s result for the claimed analyticity of arithmetic. . . . Limitations of space prevent me from taking issue here with this claim. . . .” Let me then take up the point. Pertinent material that Carnap had written for inclusion in the Syntax already in 1934, but too late, was published in two papers in Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik (1934a, 1935a). It was included in the English translation of the Syntax (1935b). In it he recognized the impossibility of a complete proof procedure for “logical validity” in his broad sense of “logic,” which included set theory and hence mathematics generally. Still he proceeded to offer a “formal” definition of “logical validity” in a correspondingly broad sense of “formal.” His definition is equivalent to the following two steps. Begin with the language of pure logic, in his broad sense, and construct Tarski’s truth definition for it. Then define a sentence of our overall language of science as logically valid if it is a

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substitution instance of a truth of the language of logic. Carnap’s construction is integral rather than bipartite, but it comes to this. Gödel’s theorem never shook Carnap’s view of logic and mathematics as analytic. Rather he chose to conclude that no complete proof procedure is possible for the analytic truths. I hasten to point out a natural but painful misinterpretation in Tennant’s next remark: “Carnap, anyway, would have been in exonerating company . . . for in ‘Truth by Convention’ . . . one finds Quine acquiescing with the main claim that Principia Mathematica . . . had successfully reduced arithmetic to logic.” The misunderstanding is terminological. In those days I still conformed to the usage of Frege, Russell, and Carnap in letting the word “logic” cover set theory. I still firmly agree that Principia reduced arithmetic to set theory, and for me this has had nothing to do with analyticity. What did and does qualify as analytic, if anything does, is logic in my later and better sense of the word: first-order logic. For Frege the unrestricted set-theoretic principle of class abstraction, or comprehension, was obvious and analytic until Russell’s paradox showed that it was false. So for Frege, unlike me, reduction of arithmetic to “logic” (set theory) did indeed show it to be analytic. I think Frege’s shock (“Die Arithmetik ist in Schwanken geraten!” [Quine 1988, 230]) on reading Russell’s paradox came mainly of his ceasing to see arithmetic as analytic. No need here of Gödel’s theorem. Granted, Carnap’s claim that set theory and arithmetic were analytic remained unshaken both by Russell’s paradox and by Gödel’s theorem. So did the Rock of Gibraltar. Analyticity was one prominent topic in my exchanges with Carnap. Another was ontology. Again I quote Tennant: “All one can judge, according to Quine, is not what there is tout court, but rather only what there is by the lights of a given theory.” This was never my position. True, what one can judge by my criterion of values of variables is only what there is by the lights of a given theory, but one can still try, in other ways, to judge what one might best take as values of one’s own variables. To judge this is to judge, rightly or wrongly, what there really is. And how to make such a judgment? By the hypothetico-deductive method. We devise the simplest scenario that conforms to all our past and predicted observations, meets all our tests, and we go on testing and adjusting. Settling our ontology, that is, the values of our variables, is just part of our theory construction, and it is neither more nor less subjective, parochial, and man-made than the rest of our theory about the world. There is indeed the lesson of proxy functions, namely, that any specifiable

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one-to-one transformation of the values of our variables would conform to observation equally well. This point did not come up in my discussions with Carnap. It is just a forceful reminder that theories and concepts, like language itself, are man-made, and reification is part of conceptualization. Brute fact intrudes only amorphously in the impacts of light and molecules on our sensory receptors. Thus I see the whole of science as Carnap saw the pragmatically adopted framework of science. He saw the reification of numbers and other abstract objects as a matter of framework rather than fact; I see all reification on a par, even to sticks and stones. Perhaps the roots of this difference in our outlooks lay in my orientation to sentences where Carnap took terms and sentences more on an equal footing. What is significant about my sententialism is that occasion sentences can be associated directly and holophrastically to unarticulated ranges of neural input, leaving all reification and ontology to the discretion of subsequent theorizing. Tennant moves on to some topics where Carnap and I were not so clearly at odds. He alludes to my remark that the law of excluded middle is “true by our lights” by saying that “[l]ight needs to be thrown on these lights.” He proceeds to do so, “[E]xcluded middle might be justified within the Quinean scheme by an appeal to systematicity, or elegance or simplicity.” He is right. Two-valued logic is on a par with our ontology and the rest of our global science, and it is open to review along with the rest. Tennant and Dummett seem to feel that my blithely pragmatic attitude toward excluded middle smacks too much of Carnap’s principle of tolerance of frameworks, and too little of Carnap’s verifiability theory of meaningfulness. Tennant writes: “I believe there is still the prospect of fashioning a criterion that would correctly trace the lines of impregnation by empirical meaning from periphery inwards: a criterion that will mark out ‘the best of these sentences.’” In Quine (1990) I remarked, “It would be a Herculean labor, not to say Augean, to sort out all the premisses and logical strands of implication that ultimately link theory with observation if or insofar as linked they be” (p. 17). I agree that we should elicit these hidden lines of impregnation or strands of implication as best we can, and that a more discriminating analysis of cognitive significance might be hoped for than I have managed on the basis of “critical semantic mass.” In responding to Tennant’s discussion of intensional language, it may be best just to sketch my current position, for it has evolved. I take the verbs of propositional attitude de dicto as governing sentences, phrased by the

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ascriber of the attitude but projected in empathy to the creature in the attitude. So I regiment propositional attitudes de dicto by prefixing the verb— “believes,” “hopes,” and such—to a sentence in quotation marks. Here there can be no question of quantifying in. Moreover the whole idiom can be adapted to predicate logic by analyzing the quotation into spelling, that is, into concatenation and names of letters. What then of propositional attitudes de re, where we would indeed hope to quantify in? I now relegate these to the category of indexicals, along with personal pronouns, demonstratives, and tenses of verbs, hence as useful language, but extraneous to the eternal sentences of scientific theory. My reason is that the de re interpretation of a term in intensional contexts depends on knowing what or who the designated thing or person is; and what qualifies as such knowledge varies with the problems and purposes of the occasion. Indexicals have their logic, too, but it can be left as a side issue apart from our philosophy of science. The propositional attitudes were, to me, the most stubborn residue of the mind/body problem. Now I am accommodating these idioms de dicto in the syntax of classical extensional logic, and I have cast propositional attitudes de re beyond the pale. Semantically, however, the verbs of propositional attitude even de dicto are still danglers from physicalistic theory. There Davidson’s anomalous monism applies, along with Feigl’s concept of nomological danglers. I remain inhospitable to metaphysical necessity. Necessity remains for me just a useful indexical, varying in application from one dialogue or expository passage to another. On dispositions, finally, Tennant alludes to my early allusion to promissory notes. They have nothing to do certainly with my view of dispositions in Quine (1973, 3–4) and later writings, notably Quine (1990, 76): “[T]here is no need to invest the dispositional suffixes ‘-ble’ and ‘-ile’ with any theoretical content. ‘Fragile’ and ‘soluble’ are physical predicates on a par with others, and the dispositional form of the words is just a laconic encoding of a relatively dependable test or symptom. Breaking on impact and dissolving on immersion are symptomatic of fragility and solubility.”

References Carnap, R. 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin-Schlachtensee: WeltkreisVerlag.

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———. 1934a. “Die Antinomien und die Unvollständigkeit der Mathematik.” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 41: 263–84. ———. 1934b. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna: Springer-Verlag. ———. 1935a. “Ein Gültigkeitskriterium für die Sätze der klassischen Mathematik.” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 42: 163–90. ———. 1935b. Philosophy and Logical Syntax. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Quine, W. V. [1936] 1945. “Truth by Convention.” Reprinted in H. Feigl and W. Sellars, eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton. ———. 1973. The Roots of Reference. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. ———. 1988. “Logical Correspondence with Russell.” Russell 8: 225–31. ———. 1990. The Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Russell, B., and Whitehead, A. N. 1910–1913. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

29 Responses to Articles by Abel, Bergström, Davidson, Dreben, Gibson, Hookway, and Prawitz 1994

Response to Abel Günter Abel’s difficult article is a deep and painstaking study of three indeterminacies: of translation, reference, and truth. As explained in my response to Bergström, I am pleased by Abel’s idea of reckoning the empirical underdetermination of scientific theory as indeterminacy of truth. His trinity of indeterminacies is intersected by three levels of interpretation. He shares the trichotomophilia of C. S. Peirce. His analysis conveys a lively sense of the distinctive roles of observation sentences, analytical hypotheses, and logical form or syntax. I shall limit myself to simplificatory and in a way deflationary remarks on indeterminacy of reference. This indeterminacy depends none on translation, though contributing a dimension to the indeterminacy of translation. Its thesis is that the truth-values of sentences are unchanged by any one-toone reinterpretation of the ontology. The reinterpretation has to reach the designatum of every singular term, the denotata of every one- or many-place predicate at each of its places, and the values of all variables. It is simpler to limit our attention to permutations of a fixed ontology, for this both assures the one-to-one restraints and obviates possible ontological quandaries about invoking alien and hence unreal objects. The thesis, then, is simply that truth-values are unchanged by permutation of ontology. The proof is equally simple. Each object is permuted into an object, same or different, called its proxy. No two objects have the same

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proxy, and no two are proxies of the same object. Consider then any oneplace predicate or general term, represented as ‘P’, and any singular term ‘a’. Under the permutation, ‘a is a P’ comes to mean that the proxy of a is a proxy-of-a-P. But these two sentences are clearly alike in truth-value. The same reasoning applies to many-place predicates, hence to atomic sentences generally, and so, up the tree of logic, to sentences generally. The notion chez John Searle et al. that the indeterminacy of reference threatens the distinction between things and their proxies comes of neglecting the requirement that the permutation must touch every reference to the object: every pertinent singular term and every pertinent place of every oneor many-place predicate. The indeterminacy is not surprising in the case of abstract objects, where it was noted by Frege, Russell, and Ramsey. It is nonsense to wonder whether your number seven is identical with mine as long as we use them alike. Shock comes only in the case of gross bodies and substances, and there it can be eased by simply agreeing upon direct ostension as our criterion of identity—thus not honoring what I have called deferred ostension. But this reassurance must not be allowed to obscure the lesson: truth-values are invariant under language-wide permutation of the ontology. Bare structure, through identity and diversity and quite apart from fleshier traits, is ontology’s contribution to our knowledge of the external world.

Response to Bergström Lars Bergström’s paper draws us with him into a strenuous bout of soulsearching. If my views as I emerge from it are felt not to square wholly with my past writings, let us not be alarmed; such is progress. He asks, rhetorically I suspect, whether I hold that “a sentence is true if and only if it follows logically from our theory or an idealized version of it.” No. Such an ideal theory is impossible by Gödel’s theorem. Or do I hold that “each . . . culture . . . or . . . system of the world . . . determines a truth of its own.” No. I in my naturalism only speak immanently from within our science. So speaking, I answer that truth of an alien’s sentence is relative to a manual of translation into our language (any of our languages will do nicely), and is identifiable with the truth, known or not, of its translation. Or do I hold that a sentence is true “if and only if implied by the best humanly devisable theory.” No; Gödel speaks again.

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Bergström asks what is wrong with “the realist view that true sentences correspond to facts.” It is an idle positing of entities solely to create correspondence. It is pernicious, engendering an illusion of explanation. His questions get harder when he gets to what he calls the empiricist theory of truth. His hardest is whether to say: An observational categorical . . . ‘Whenever X, Y’ is true if and only if, for every occasion O and (almost) every speaker Z . . . , if Z would assent to X on witnessing O, then Z would assent to Y on witnessing O. The position has its evident appeal, but it has an alarmingly Protagorean ring, making man the measure of all things. Perhaps the dilemma can be resolved by taking account of the subjunctive conditional, or the disposition that is implicit in “would assent.” Dispositions are theoretical, positing appropriate mechanisms. The appeal to human propensities to assent in unrealized cases is thus fallible theory over and above the observation categoricals themselves. It can thus be argued that truth even of all observation categoricals does not reduce utterly to observation. Anyway, I see truth in general as far exceeding, in turn, anything that can be checked in observation categoricals. This answers his next question: whether I would declare a theoretical sentence true “if and only if entailed by a theory which entails every true observation categorical and no others.” Contrary to the positivist spirit, I do not repudiate sentences for lack of empirical content. Let me quote from my next book, From Stimulus to Science: Much that is accepted as true or plausible even in the hard sciences, I expect, is accepted without thought of its joining forces with other plausible hypotheses . . . to form a testable set. Such acceptations may be prompted by symmetries and analogies, or as welcome unifying links in the structure of the theory. Surely it often happens that a hypothesis remote from all checkpoints suggests further hypotheses that are testable. This must be a major source of hypotheses worth testing. Positivistic insistence on empirical content would, if heeded, impede the progress of science. In softer sciences, from psychology and economics to sociology to history (I use “science” broadly), checkpoints are sparser, to the point where their absence becomes rather the rule than the exception. Having reasonable grounds is one thing and implying an observation categori-

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cal is another. Observation categoricals are implicit still in the predicting of archeological finds and the deciphering of inscriptions, but the glories of history would be lost if we stopped and stayed at the checkpoints. Bergström wonders whether I am empiricist or realist in my theory of truth. One claim of the empiricist theory of truth, in his sense, is that “what a theory says about the world is nothing over and above what is said by the observational part of the theory.” On this point I am not an empiricist regarding truth; theories say incomparably more. He rightly quotes me as saying that if a theory conforms to every possible observation, “then the world cannot be said to deviate from what the theory claims,” but this only requires truth to be compatible with observation, not determined by it. In my naturalism I do reckon truth as immanent, but that is another matter. It means that I view ‘true’ as a predicate within science; second-order, yes, like ‘sentence’ or ‘phoneme’, but not transcendent. When we find to our surprise that an accepted sentence was not true, this is on a par with finding to our surprise that light rays are not straight. I am a realist about truth in whatever sense I am a realist about light rays or straightness. A bright idea in the adjoining paper by Abel concerns the presumed empirical underdetermination of science: he aligns it with the indeterminacy of translation and the indeterminacy of reference, and calls it the indeterminacy of truth. This again fits nicely with the immanence of truth: no higher tribunal. Bergström takes disquotation to imply that truth is not a real property of sentences; it concerns rather what they are about. This argument eludes me, in its essentialism. ‘Property’ makes no sense to me except as ‘class’, and anything you can ascribe to anything, even truth to a sentence, ascribes a class (except as banned by paradox). ‘Aboutness’ is part of the same essentialist, intensionalist quagmire. He then challenges disquotation another way: saying that ‘Snow is white’ is true implies that the sentence exists, whereas saying that snow is white does not. I can understand implication in the sense of logical deducibility, but not always in the broader sense of analytic or semantic implication, which again is close kin of essentialism. As a last challenge to disquotation, Bergström asks why, if that “is all there is to truth, . . . truth is something we want to pursue.” It isn’t, on the whole, not indiscriminately. We choose to pursue truths conducive to our wellbeing and that of other deserving people, and truths that gratify our curios-

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ity about the world. As for just how a true sentence can serve any such purpose, that varies radically from sentence to sentence.

Response to Davidson Davidson began by questioning a passage in Word and Object that seemed, to his puzzlement, to offer aid and comfort to our common foe who would relativize truth to theory. The puzzle is resolved, I think, by reading the passage in context. Three lines earlier I wrote: Unless pretty firmly and directly conditioned to sensory stimulation, a sentence is meaningless except relative to its own theory; meaningless intertheoretically. The role of theory in the passage he quoted was not in legislating truth, but in clarifying the theoretical sentence. Disquotation explains truth only insofar as the disquoted sentence is intelligible. He goes on to seek clarification of the relativity that I ascribe to ontology when I say that ontology is relative to a translation manual. It is not, as he rightly observes, analogous to the relativity of temperature to a scale. It is a more desperate relativity. There is no clear sense in asking whether Edwin’s ‘rabbit’ refers to a rabbit or to a proxy, or whether Marcel’s ‘lapin’ refers to a rabbit or to a proxy. What does make sense is to ask whether a given manual gives ‘lapin’ as translation of ‘rabbit’. But I am with Davidson in liking ‘indeterminacy of reference’ as well. Then he turns to disquotation, and wonders whether my stress on it in discussing truth may properly be accounted deflationary. I do indeed see disquotation as fundamental to truth, and more generally to denotation. Predicates denote, and their disquotational paradigm is ‘Rabbit’ denotes x iff x is a rabbit or, indeed, ‘White’ denotes x iff x is white. Sentences are what is true, and their disquotational paradigm is, as Tarski taught us to say,

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‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white. There are one-place predicates, two-place predicates, n-place predicates, denoting single things, pairs, n-tuples. And what then of the degenerate case, as mathematicians say, where n = 0? The no-place predicates are outright sentences, true of nothing, just true or false. Truth as a degenerate case of denotation has a deflationary ring indeed. Still it is hard to think of disquotation as deflationary, or as mere, when we reflect that it pins truth and denotation down uniquely. No two truth predicates, or denotation predicates for n-place predicates, can fulfill disquotation across the board without being coextensive. It even pins them down more than uniquely. No one truth predicate can fulfill disquotation across the board, on pain of contradiction. Deflationary indeed! Full disquotation engenders contradiction in the case not only of truth, but of denotation on the part of n-place predicates for any n. The one-place case is familiar from Grelling’s paradox of ‘heterologous’, and this generalizes to n-place predicates for any n from 0, or truth, up. For consistency, consequently, disquotation needs a caveat, which can take the form of a second dimension: hierarchy. Predicates then proliferate not only into no-place, one-place, two-place, and so on, but also into first-order, second-order, and so on, with a distinct predicate of truth or denotation for each rubric. Some have wondered why a truth predicate, as mere disquotation, is needed. We need it when saying in general that all sentences of such-andsuch form are true, or that everything or nothing that the witness said was true. In such cases the specific sentences are not there for disquotation. It is these cases that create the need for a truth predicate, and it is they precisely that called for Tarski’s full definition of truth. Disquotation disposed of the others. Recognition of truth as a case of denotation nicely illuminates Tarski’s inductive definition of truth, for down to its last step the definition is an inductive definition of denotation on the part of n-place predicates, for all n. Such is, in Tarski’s terminology, the satisfaction of sentences in n-free variables. Truth then falls out as the zero case. If we switch to predicate-functor logic, thus dispensing with variables and quantifiers in favor of four combinatory functors, Tarski’s definition takes on an appealing elegance. There is a remarkable feature of our use of the truth predicate that lends truth a dignity beyond disquotation. When a scientific tenet is dislodged by

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further research, we do not say that it had been true but became false. We say that it was false, unbeknownst, all along. Such is the idiom of realism, integral to the semantics of ‘true’. Such is scientific method: interrogation of nature in a cosmic true-false test. Man proposes, nature disposes. This consideration seems eminently anti-deflationist. Davidson in his long last paragraph adduces other passages from my writings that he likewise sees as shielding me from that predicate. The facts are now abundantly before us, let classifications fall where they may.

Response to Dreben Burt Dreben’s selection of passages from my writings brings welcome emphasis to a number of points, central to my philosophy, on which my position has been unclear to many readers. I shall now touch further on three of them. First, there is the matter of nominalism. Early and late I should have been happy with nominalism if I could reconcile it with science; but I could not. Goodman and I tried in “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism” (1947), but managed only to bring out the limits. I can and do dispense with properties and other intensional entities, but classes remain. In later years I have felt easier with these than I once did, through coming to appreciate how purely structural the contribution of any ontology is to scientific theory. As Dreben remarks, there has been no lack of emphatic disavowals of nominalism in the course of my writings. However, these will have missed many readers who remain mindful of “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,” for no one can be expected to read all I wrote. There is nothing for it but to increase the coverage by cheerful repetition. A second stumbling block, grazed by some of Dreben’s quotations, is the difference between language and theory. In “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World” (Erkenntnis, 1975) I contrived a cumbersome definition of theory, that is, a prescription of when to regard two theory formulations as formulations of the same theory and when of two. But later, in Theories and Things (p. 24), I rejected that project as an inconsequential matter of words; we can just talk of theory formulations, more or less equivalent to one another, and drop the concept of a theory as such. In practice we can continue to use the word ‘theory’ by itself, but understand it as referring to formulations. Where that stumbling block has lain, however, is in a murkier place. Some

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readers have evidently felt that understanding words is one thing and understanding the theory underlying them is another. This is wrong in my view, as witness my threadbare example of two physicists each of whom posits a new particle. One posits a particle with rest mass, the other a particle without, but both coin the same word ‘neutrino’; and the empty question is whether they are positing different particles or disagreeing about the mass of the same particle. I see the distinction between language and theory as fading as soon as we rise appreciably above observation sentences. The august predicates ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’ are a third trouble spot. Dreben quotes my humdrum application of them to the terms of grammar. But I was courting trouble, for the august predicate ‘true’ is like the terms of grammar in denoting linguistic expressions: sentences. In my humdrum sense ‘true’ does prove immanent, as Dreben points out. But ‘true’, unlike the grammarians’ terms, is a predicate that broaches the question of immanence and transcendence also at the august level. There, I take it, the immanent is that which makes sense within naturalism, in mediis rebus, and the transcendent is not. Accordingly, truth better be immanent for me in that sense too. But still it harbors a vital quirk of usage that accords it the nearest approach to transcendence that the naturalist can grasp. I cite the quirk at the end of my response to Davidson.

Response to Gibson The first half of Roger Gibson’s paper offers an elegant and persuasive encapsulation of my views. It gives me a comforting sense of being on the right track. I would make one emendation where he writes that the “philosophical morals of radical translation are, for Quine, the indeterminacy of meaning and reference.” Reference, no; the argument from proxy functions is independent of translation. But its consequence, the indeterminacy of reference, does then add a dimension to the indeterminacy of translation. Gibson does well in sorting out the differences between my aims and Donald Davidson’s. Mine already diverge sufficiently from traditional epistemology to make some readers wonder, reasonably, whether to call them epistemological; but Davidson’s are still farther afield. He is concerned with communication or interpretation, and it is there that his concerns overlap so generously with mine. Gibson notes Davidson’s dissatisfaction with what he (Davidson) took to

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be my notion of evidence, namely, neural impulses. ‘Evidence’ has not been one of my basic words, and perhaps the only place where I came to grips with it is page 38 of Roots of Reference. “The evidence relation,” I wrote, summing up my discussion of it, “and the semantical relation of observation to theory are coextensive.” Günter Abel, in his essay in the present pages, quotes a neighboring passage to the same effect. I wonder if this notion of evidence could be what Davidson had in mind. Anyway, his misgivings led me in later writings to fight shy of the word. Gibson notes also a more shocking misunderstanding on the part of one or another of my readers: the notion that I was crediting the field linguist with a grasp of my concept of stimulus or indeed of any theoretical psychology. Since discovering that undreamt-of misconception, I have taken plans to guard against it. He reports Davidson as sensing an inconsistency between my definition of an observation sentence and my early claim that any sentence may be given up. I touch on that claim in my adjoining response to Hookway, but anyway its inconsistency with my definition of observation sentences eludes me. The same point was raised long ago, and my answer was somewhat like what Gibson now suggests. The bearers of truth-values are not observation sentences or other occasion sentences, but their utterances, which are flashes in the pan. What enter the web of belief as protocol are their records, as dated eternal sentences. These depend for their credibility on whatever theory attests to the fixity of records or memory. Record and memory may consistently yield to pressure, though it is prudent not to press them too hard. I can’t find where I made this point; perhaps only in lectures. Gibson wonders about the individuation of occasions, which are appealed to in my definition of an observation sentence. I had thought that time and place were enough.

Response to Hookway Christopher Hookway cites as an issue of epistemic evaluation the question why we are entitled to rely on induction. I suppose my position is that we are not entitled to, though up to a point we are bound to. We are bound to by an innate wiring of our nervous system, conferred by natural selection. Our tendency is to expect similar stimulations to have sequels that are similar to each other. The similarity here is subjective, and our scale or standard of similarity is innate but subject to modification through

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experience. Natural selection has favored in us a similarity standard that has made for largely successful induction by meshing pretty well with the regularities of nature over the past few dozen millennia. This, plus the happy circumstance that nature has apparently persisted pretty well in her old ways right down to the present day, accounts for the continuing success by and large of induction. Our genes account for our still continuing to rely on it. But all this is compatible with a major change, right now, in the course of nature, so I see no entitlement. Such a change would be contrary to our firmest scientific taws, but to argue thus is to argue inductively, begging the question. Or do I read ‘entitle’ too narrowly? Where evidence can be decisive is rather on the negative side: refutation of an observation categorical by an observed counter-instance. This is how some of our false inductions get weeded out, and how science keeps a grip on reality. In principle a hypothesis can be tested, if at all, by deducing an observation categorical from it in conjunction with auxiliary laws and then testing the categorical. Induction is our primary avenue to hypotheses worth testing, but there are also further expedients. A hypothesis may appeal to us by virtue of some analogy or symmetry, or as linking up some known laws. I see all this as the domain of normative naturalist epistemology: the norms of plausibility or subjective probability. It is the domain of statistical theory and, at a less technical level, the homely precepts of conservatism and simplicity. How to measure simplicity, and why it should enhance plausibility, are less than clear. Harold Jeffreys tried scaling it for applied mathematics,1 and Nelson Goodman for logic.2 I speculated inadequately on its contribution to plausibility in “On Simple Theories of a Complex World.”3 But traditional epistemology enjoys no evident advantage over naturalism in these normative matters. Nor do I see normative epistemology as solely for the generating of hypotheses for testing. It can generate hypotheses that are plausible as they stand, though not testable even in conjunction with auxiliary laws. See the long quotation midway in my response to Bergström. Hookway brings nostalgic echoes of “Two Dogmas.” Thus “Any statement can be held true come what may,” and its converse. I never found these use1. Scientific Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 37–51. 2. Journal of Symbolic Logic (1943): 107–21; 14 (1949): 32–41, 228–29. 3. Reprinted in Ways of Paradox and Other Essays.

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ful or illuminating, because of the extravagance they can call for in compensatory adjustments. Changing logic, e.g., is indistinguishable from word play, unless we change the overall strength. A really instructive holism is moderate, extending outward only to conjunctions having what I call critical mass; that is, conjunctions capable of implying an observation categorical. As for analyticity, I think the commonsense notion ‘true by meanings of words’ is covered by my definition in Roots of Reference, namely, ‘learned true in acquiring one of its words’, plus a couple of refinements. In particular this makes logic analytic. My quarrel with the analytic-synthetic distinction is rather with its application to theoretical sentences across the board. Fact and convention interlock in ways that cannot in general be sorted out thus sentence by sentence. Hookway finds “Two Dogmas” instrumentalist. I think this is fair, and that it applies to my later work as well. But realism peeps through at the checkpoints, and then takes over altogether when we adopt a sternly naturalistic stance and recognize ‘real’ as itself a term within our scientific theory.

Response to Prawitz Since for the most part a sentence of scientific theory has to join forces with other sentences in order to imply observable consequences, the empirical meaning of single sentences has largely defied isolation. Prawitz sees this as a challenge rather than a lost cause, and wonders if it can be met by a deft analysis of the logical role of the single sentence, call it S, within the more inclusive segment Σ of the scientific theory. The conjunction Σ as a whole does imply observable consequences, and they can indeed be said to constitute its empirical meaning. They will not be observation sentences in my sense, for those, being occasion sentences with transitory truth values, are never logically implied by theory. What are implied in their stead are what I call observation categoricals, affirming universal regularities between observables: ‘Whenever this, that.’ Truth of Σ, then, is contingent on the resistance of these implied generalities to sample observations. It is within the logical structure of Σ that Prawitz would analyze the role of S. So observation categoricals, which are universal conditionals, are the deductive empirical output of Σ. I expect universal conditionals will also play the main roles in the intervening steps from Σ to that output. They are the main links of implication almost anywhere. Indeed I have urged that the

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very utility of reification itself, as a tool of science, is in implementing the deductive work of universal conditionals. Citing the analogy of introduction rules and elimination rules in Gentzen’s natural deduction, Prawitz envisages a vertically symmetric strategy, taking account not only of what follows from S and its fellow members of Σ, but also what tenets S follows from. Clearly the upward end would transcend Σ. He expects that the idea of canonical form, of one or more sorts, would figure centrally in such analysis. His prime example of canonical form in the case of numbers is the Arabic numeral, in contrast to a singular description. We might then reflect on what distinguishes a canonical form in other cases, and how and why canonical forms pay off. Proof theory is rich in examples that pay off liberally. Another sort of example that Prawitz cites is observation sentence as over against collateral information—thus rabbits and rabbit flies. This case I prefer to dissociate from canonical form. It seems clearer to recognize a stimulus meaning as shifting or spreading. If almost all speakers come to respond with ‘gavagai’ to the rabbit flies, I would view the flies as coming to share the evolving stimulus meaning of ‘gavagai’. I see nowhere else to draw the line. Prawitz does not seem over-sanguine about isolating an empirical meaning for S, and I am perhaps less sanguine still, but nobody could be more pleased than I to see it succeed. In any event the logical analysis of science that it would call for is much to be desired independently of that objective. Imagine a pilot study of some fragment of science, say Newtonian mechanics, eliciting all the minor logical steps and tacit platitudes that link the theory ultimately with observation categoricals that it implies. If successful, it would not only vindicate our epistemological conceptions but probably contribute to hard science as well. For it would spark similar analysis of other branches, which would perhaps uncover unexpected logical connections and suggest new scientific hypotheses or simplifications.

30 Reactions 1995

The miniature states of Europe fascinated me from boyhood. There were the Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Andorra, and for a time Fiume and Danzig. Stretching a point, I might add Luxemburg. I pored over maps and what I could find in the encyclopedia and the National Geographic magazine. In 1929 I turned twenty-one, made my way to Europe, and visited five of them. I sat on the brink of Monte Titano, San Marino, marveling. Summer though it was, I was the only tourist. I felt like a reporter for the National Geographic. I returned to San Marino in 1933 and again in 1968. Tourists caught up with me, but the magic was still there, even as now. And now the magic has mounted beyond belief: A university was founded and was honoring me with a symposium, in San Marino of all places. I am deeply grateful to Umberto Eco, Paolo Leonardi, Ernest Lepore, and Signora Fausta Morganti for bringing it about and seeing it so successfully through, with the cheerful and efficient help of Patrizia Violi, Emmanuela Stacchini, and Louise Nunnink, and the generous support of the Fondazione Sigma Tau and the Republic of San Marino. I am grateful also to the many participants, some from the ends of the earth—California on the one hand, Siberia and Hong Kong on the other. The symposium papers have set me to pondering my philosophical tenets and touching them up. The outcome divides into seven sections. The first, on empathy and neural intake, and the fourth, on the immanence or transcendence of truth, were sparked by Davidson’s essay; the second, on ontological relativity, by Stroud’s and Higginbotham’s essays; the third, on logical and mathematical truth, by Putnam’s and Parsons’s; and the fifth, on quotation, by Boolos’. The sixth and longest section, on propositional attitudes, came of reading the essays by Higginbotham, Salmon, Bonomi, and

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Føllesdal. My concluding remarks, on sets and classes, are in response to Cocchiarella. Other essays have meant much to me without provoking reply. I think especially of Gibson’s clear and penetrating exposition and defense of my position. I delighted in the imaginative and flattering mise en scène of Eco’s semiotic reflections.

I. Empathy and Neural Intake The radical translator’s basic method is empathy, a gift of human nature. He projects himself imaginatively into what he sees to be the native’s situation, and considers what he, the translator, would be apt to say. He comes up with ‘Rabbit’, and adopts this tentatively as a translation of the native’s observed utterance ‘Gavagai’. Empathy guides translation not only of such observation sentences, but also of sentences where conjecture and imaginative construction come increasingly into play. Empathy is likewise the laywoman’s method, however unconscious, when she reacts positively and negatively to her child’s attempts at the home language. She notes what he is presumably observing, and assesses his utterance from his point of view. The field linguist differs from her in his technical equipment; he has a battery of syntactic concepts drawn from languages in his repertoire, and he knows the oral and pharyngeal mechanism of phonetic articulation. Concepts of psychology and neurology, however, such as stimulus, conditioning, or exteroceptor, have no place in his bag of tricks, any more than in the laywoman’s. These concepts do come into play when we turn to examine the causal connections between cognitive discourse and the world it describes. But observation sentences play a key role here too: They are the interface between cognitive language and the impacts of the external world, admitting as they do of direct conditioning to sensory stimulation. Our avenue of continuing information about the world is the bombardment of our sensory surfaces by rays and particles, plus some negligible kinesthetic clues to the ups and downs of our footpath. A vital endowment for processing this information is subjective “similarity space”: a rough scale or standard of perceptual similarity of bombardments. Degrees of perceptual similarity, for a given subject, can in principle be detected by the conditioning and extinction of responses. Perceptual similarity in turn is the key to salience, stimulus generalization, perception, and learning.

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What does perceptual similarity relate? What are perceptually similar? Bombardments, I said: raw inputs which, however unlike one another intrinsically, are similar in their perceptual effects. It is the overall bombardment of the subject on one occasion that is perceptually similar, for him, to the overall bombardment on another occasion, and their perceptual similarity for him can be known to us by his responses. But we should like some neater way of ticketing or packaging these miscellaneous disorganized bombardments, some more manageable terms of reference. The narrower the better, so long as they intercept all the causal chains into the subject’s behavior. If we knew more about the elaborate neural processing in the brain that issues in perception, perhaps a full and economical concept of raw neural intake could be defined by reference to the appropriate centers. As things stand, the simplest strategy is to monitor the intake at the frontier: at the exteroceptors. Much of the triggering of exteroceptors is indeed ineffective or redundant, but the triggering does catch all that matters, apart from the kinesthetic bit, and it is more economical than the bombardment. So let us define the subject’s global neural intake on a given occasion as the temporally ordered set of all firings of his exteroceptors on that occasion. The business of naturalized epistemology, for me, is an improved understanding of the chains of causation and implication that connect the bombardment of our surfaces, at the one extreme, with our scientific output at the other. The first link is causal: The bombardment of the exteroceptors causes a neural intake. The next link connects the neural intake with language: Observation sentences become associated with ranges of perceptually similar neural intakes, at first by conditioning. The subject learns to assent to the observation sentence on the occasion of any global neural intake in the associated range. Two observation sentences may be called perceptually equivalent, for a given subject, if they are associated with the same range of neural intakes. They may be called perceptually equivalent for a community if perceptually equivalent for each individual. The next link in the causal and logical chain from the external world to our theory thereof is, as I see it, the observation categorical: a standing sentence of the form ‘Whenever this, that’ whose two components are observation sentences. Being a standing sentence, rather than an occasion sentence, it can be linked to scientific theory by logical implication. The empirical test of a chunk of theory consists in first deducing an observation categorical,

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then bringing about the experimental condition stated in the protasis of the categorical, and watching for fulfillment of the apodosis. This I see as the essential connection between neural intake and scientific output, obscured though it is by the complexity, the ellipses and enthymemes, the tacit platitudes, and the frequent vagueness of scientific practice. Finally, two terminological remarks. My veteran readers will have noticed that I am suddenly taking to saying ‘neural intake’ where for years I said ‘stimulation’. It is by way of foreclosing inappropriate connotations or pointless debate on the part of readers who use the word ‘stimulation’ differently. Old readers will recall further that the range of neural intakes with which an observation sentence is associated is what I have in past years called the affirmative stimulus meaning of the sentence. But Føllesdal has noted that the word ‘meaning’ here is misleading, since a linguistic meaning should be the same for the whole linguistic community, whereas neural intakes are not clearly comparable from person to person. So I drop the term. What needs to be said with it can be said well enough in terms of perceptual equivalence, which, as we saw, does extend to the community.

II. Ontological Relativity Two retinal intakes may differ radically overall, and yet they may qualify as perceptually similar thanks only to a visible body centrally situated in the two scenes. Their perceptual similarity defines salience of the body in the two scenes. Our innate standards of perceptual similarity, molded by natural selection, make for such salience of bodies. Features conducive to such salience are convexity, compactness, continuity of coloring, and contrast with background in color and movement. What is more remarkable, the two intakes will qualify as perceptually very similar even though the body be differently oriented on the two occasions, projecting unlike profiles onto the retina. As Donald Campbell puts it, reification of bodies is innate in man and the other higher animals. I agree, subject to a qualifying adjective: perceptual reification (1983). I reserve ‘full reification’ and ‘full reference’ for the sophisticated stage where the identity of a body from one time to another can be queried and affirmed or conjectured or denied independently of exact resemblance. Such identifications depend on our elaborate theory of space, time, and unobserved trajectories of bodies between observations. Prior cognition of a recurrent body—a ball, or Mama, or Fido—is on a par

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with our recognition of any qualitative recurrence: warmth, thunder, a cool breeze. So long as no sense is made of the distinction between its being the same ball and its being another one like it, the reification of the ball is perceptual rather than full. A dog’s recognition of a particular person is still only perceptual, insofar as it depends on smell. Full reification across space and time is a major factor in fashioning conceptual structures that link sentences of theoretical science with observation categoricals and so with observation. My stock example is: If a cat eats a spoiled fish and sickens, she will thereafter avoid fish. When regimented in predicate logic, this is a universally quantified conditional quantifying over cats as enduring objects. The strength of the universal conditional, as over against a mere truth-functional conditional, illustrates the efficacy of full reification in forging implication between theory and observation. Such also is the efficacy of more recondite reifications, beyond the realms of commonsense bodies; thus reification of elementary particles, numbers, classes. These figure as indispensable nodes in the logical structure of science. The lesson of proxy functions, finally, is that the service thus rendered is independent of what objects they are. Any correlated proxies would serve as well. As Davidson observes, Tarski’s truth definition accounts the same sentences true under any one-one transformation of the values of the variables. This conclusion is scarcely surprising in the case of elementary particles and abstract objects. These are known to begin with only by the roles they play in our theories, not by ostension. The conclusion does seem odd in the case of ordinary bodies, which were first reified perceptually. But note that proxy functions would supplant these with proxies only in the capacity of full sophisticated reifications, across space and time. The corresponding observation sentences remain linked to the original ranges of neural intakes. The sentence ‘Gavagai’, or ‘Lo, a rabbit’, remains associated with the fluffy, hopping intrusion into the scene, and proxies to the winds. It would be gratuitous even to dislodge the full reification, either in our own language or in translating another. The point of proxy functions is just that ontological interpretation is indifferent to the evidential relation between observation and theory, and indifferent to the conformity of a translation manual to behavior. The objectivity of our knowledge of the external world remains rooted in

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our contact with the external world, hence in our neural intake and the observation sentences that respond to it. We begin with the monolithic sentence, not the terms. A lesson of proxy functions is that our ontology, like grammar itself, is part of our own conceptual contribution to our theory of the world. Man proposes; the world disposes, but only by holophrastic yesor-no verdicts on the observation sentences that embody man’s predictions.

III. Logical and Mathematical Truth My definition of logical truths as truths containing only logical expressions essentially, others vacuously, does not confer any distinctive epistemological status on logical truths. The truths of any given discipline, say chemistry, can be demarcated in the same way. Independently of that, however, I grant that the logic of truth functions, quantification, and identity is indeed analytic, in the sense of my Roots of Reference. By this I mean that the native speaker learns the basic laws of that domain in learning to use the logical words. Taking analyticity to cover everything deducible from analytic sentences by analytic steps, then, we can conclude from Gödel’s completeness theorem that all truths of logic in this narrow sense are analytic. Tension has been sensed in my attitude toward changes in logic: whether they are a change of heart or a change of subject; whether we are changing our theory or, as the analyticity of logic suggests, just changing the meaning of our signs. I disavow the tension. At this level a change of theory is itself a change of meaning, though not always conversely. If we just write ‘and’ for ‘or’ and vice versa, we change meanings but not theory. If we abandon the law of excluded middle, we change meanings and theory; the law does not survive in any rendering. Treating observation categoricals as empirical checkpoints of scientific theory, in section I above, I evidently gave logic a role separate from the rest of science. If a set of theoretical sentences is tested by testing an observation categorical that is implied by the set, then surely the logic of the implication is no part of the tested set. But how much logic? Where we demarcate logic, for purposes of the implication, is evidently an artifact of our analysis and not intrinsic to the scientific method under analysis. A neutral account, more in line with what really goes on, is perhaps as follows. We begin as before with some chunk of theory, a set S of sentences to be jointly tested. Among them is some conditional whose protasis is likewise

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in S; so we add its apodosis to S. Again there is some conditional, not in S, that is so trivial or platitudinous by our scientist’s light as to go without saying, and its protasis is in S. We add its apodosis to S. Continuing thus, we end up adding the “implied” observation categorical. This, we might say, is what it really means for the original S to imply the categorical, from our scientists’ point of view. It presupposes no demarcation between logical platitudes and others. Since it is geared to the particular scientists concerned, moreover, rather than to our own logic, it still allows for sophisticates who have suppressed their early analytic convictions to the point of suspending the law of excluded middle. I dissociate so-called higher-order logic from logic and view it as set theory, an extra-logical segment of mathematics. It is subject to Gödel’s celebrated incompleteness theorem rather than to his completeness theorem, and its basic principles are not analytic in the above sense. Thus I agree with Gödel on the analyticity of elementary logic, according to Parsons’s report on Gödel in this volume,1 but disagree on analyticity of mathematics generally, which I see as more akin to natural science. I am glad to find Gödel agreeing, however, that mathematics has content. Indeed it has ontological content. Unlike logic in my narrow sense, it has its special objects. “Talk of the existence of mathematical objects,” Putnam writes, “makes me uncomfortable.” I know the feeling. At one time I shared it, but grinned and bore it, seeing no acceptable way of hedging the ontic commitment of values of variables. The feeling has moderated in later years, thanks to the defusing of ontological issues by proxy functions and related considerations. Pondering mathematical necessity midway in his essay, Putnam reminds us of his earlier definition, in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” of what it means for a statement to be necessary relative to a body of knowledge. He now proposes the changed terminology ‘quasi-necessary relative to a conceptual scheme’. Or, since ‘conceptual scheme’ has raised some eyebrows (Davidson’s, to name two), let us say theory. Telescoping Putnam’s two-stage definition and switching to the new terminology, but otherwise preserving his words, I get this: A statement S in a theory T is quasi-necessary relative to T if and only if no possible observation would be known to disconfirm S without drawing on anything outside T. I have no quarrel with ‘possible’ in the context ‘possible observation’; I can construe it in terms of observation sentences. But what stops me, given my moderate holism, is the disconfirming of S. Unless 1. That is, Leonardi and Santambrogio, On Quine, 297–313.

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S is the conjunction of a big enough chunk of T to have “critical semantic mass”—i.e., to imply some observation categoricals outright—no observations could unequivocally refute S. Hence most of the statements in T, mathematical and otherwise, would qualify as quasi-necessary, unless he means ‘disconfirm’ in some unexplained sense.

IV. Truth: Immanent or Transcendent? In my little Philosophy of Logic I reactivated the treacherous old dichotomy of the immanent and the transcendent, and ventured to rate truth as immanent. I base this rating on three counts: sententiality, disquotation, and naturalism. By sententiality, what are true are sentences rather than propositions, that is, meanings. But sentences are tied to languages. A string of marks is true only as a sentence of some specific language L; true in L. Further, I base the immanence of truth on disquotation: To call a sentence true is just to include it in our own theory of the world. I have been guided by Tarski’s Wahrheitsbegriff ever since it first came out (in 1935, dated 1936). Finally, I base the immanence of truth on naturalism, in disavowing any higher tribunal than our best scientific theory of the time. Of course the truth predicate carries over to other language by translation. If this is transcendence, truth is indeed transcendent. But that much can be said even of reference, despite ontological relativity. It likewise carries over by translation. To call a sentence true, I said, is to include it in our science, but this is not to say that science fixes truth. It can prove wrong. We go on testing our scientific theory by prediction and experiment, and modifying it as needed, in quest of the truth. Truth thus looms as a haven that we keep steering for and correcting to. It is an ideal of pure reason, in Kant’s phrase. Very well: immanent in those other respects, transcendent in this.

V. Quotation It’s quite a trick, in listening to a paper by George Boolos, to keep our ears open for each succeeding sentence while we laugh. Fun, though, until we get to the nitty-gritty along toward the middle of the essay, where the going is rough. There is a similar blending of levity and gravity in the theme itself, a paradox of quotation. Quotation, we would suppose, unlike truth and member-

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ship and denotation, is too superficial and self-explanatory to engender paradox. Lo, however, a paradox. It sets us to thinking: Quotation is, after all, close kin to truth. Truth is disquotation. And quotation is conspicuous also, however innocently, in my sterilized version of the liar paradox itself: ‘yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation’ yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation. Reflection reveals a deeper kinship. The liar paradox arose only when the truth predicate was applied to an expression already containing it. As long as we apply it only to sentences devoid of the truth predicate and other expressions to similar effect, all is in order. Similarly now for the paradox of quotation: It turns on quoting an expression already containing quotation marks. The liar paradox is avoided by resolving the truth predicate into a hierarchy of truth predicates, each of them well behaved when applied to sentences containing only predicates lower in the hierarchy. Correspondingly, a hierarchy of distinctive quotation marks takes care of the quotation paradox. But this involves, on the face of it, an infinite alphabet of signs, as Boolos points out. So he devised a more devious solution that is not hierarchic. This was where the going got rough. But it could set one to wondering again about non-hierarchic ways around the liar paradox. Quotation can be supplanted altogether, as Boolos notes, by what Tarski called the structural-descriptive style, and what I call spelling. We include in our language a name of each of our signs, and a sign of concatenation. Greek is convenient here for its articulate names of its letters. Thus ‘α’ = αλφα, and ‘αλφα’ = αλφα * λαμβδα * φι * αλφα. And we can continue upward, since ‘*’ = αστερισκος. Classicists will please excuse my omission of accents. They would blur the example. Tarski had no paradox of quotation in mind. Spelling is wanted anyway, if we are to adhere to the syntax of logic and normal mathematics. Quotation isolates the internal syntax of the quoted expression from the syntax of the contexts; spelling cuts through all that. And spelling nicely reflects the opac-

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ity of quotation with respect to anaphora, by obliterating buried pronouns altogether.

VI. Propositional Attitudes In Word and Object (216) I idly contrasted two ways of parsing the idioms of belief and other propositional attitudes: We may parse ‘believes’ as a transitive verb whose direct object ‘that p’ is a noun phrase naming a proposition or sentence, or we may parse ‘believes that’ as an attitudinative (as I have called it) whose complement ‘p’ is a sentence. I have been shocked in later years to learn that some readers misinterpreted this second alternative as leaving ‘believes that p’ devoid of grammatical structure, regardless of the length of the sentence complement represented as ‘p’. An infinite class of expressions, unlimited in length, would thus be left unanalyzed. The idea would be absurd, abandoning the whole purpose of syntax. On the contrary, my attitudinative ‘believes that’ was simply an operator that attaches to a sentence ‘p’ to yield an intransitive verb phrase ‘believes that p’, just as a negation sign is an operator that attaches to a sentence ‘p’ to yield a sentence ‘⬃p’. I trust Higginbotham has not misinterpreted me as others have. His phrase “although syntactically structured” reassures me. There had been little point in my citing the attitudinative in the first place. I preferred the first alternative all along: ‘believes’ as transitive verb and ‘that p’ as noun phrase. What with my dim view of intensions, moreover, I have viewed this noun phrase as naming a sentence rather than a proposition. So I see the verbs of propositional attitude as relating people or other animals to sentences. The connective ‘that’ becomes a quotation mark. In view of the awful misconception regarding my attitudinatives, I must make sure that nobody entertains a similarly monolithic view of quotation. Quotation is as articulate as A, B, C; it is analyzed by spelling, as previously noted. In ascribing propositional attitudes to men and other animals by quotation I do not ascribe a command of the quoted language or of any language. A cat can believe ‘A mouse is in there’. The language is the language of the ascriber of the attitude, though he ascribes it empathetically to the creature in the attitude. The cat is purportedly in a state of mind in which the ascriber would say ‘A mouse is in there’. Along with ‘believes that’, ‘regrets that’, etc., an especially forthright idiom

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of propositional attitude is mere indirect quotation: ‘says that’. But if we now implement my quotational view of the propositional attitudes by rewriting the ‘that’ as quotation, we confound indirect quotation with direct. This presents no interesting problem. If we wanted thus actually to implement my view, rather than just noting it as tacit intent, we could resolve the ambiguity by agreeing to distinguish two verbs: ‘say’ for indirect quotation, ‘utter’ for direct. We are familiar with the failure of substitutivity of identity in belief clauses and clauses of other propositional attitudes. It fails because the ascriber of the attitude utters the clause from the purported point of view of the person in the attitude, who may be unaware of the pertinent identity. Ralph being unaware that the man in the brown hat is Ortcutt, we would be unwarranted in switching these terms when stating one of Ralph’s beliefs. This point, we recall, was a concern of Frege’s. Likewise, as I urged in 1943 and after, we must beware of quantifying into such a clause; for the values of the variable of our outlying quantifier are the things of our real world, and might not fit the attitudinist’s ontology. Such is the referential opacity of the propositional attitudes. The quotational account nicely dramatizes it, for the quotation designates a mere string of phonemes or signs, whose syntax and semantics, if any, are strictly an internal affair. When the quotation is spelled out as a concatenate of single signs, the quoted terms or variables dissolve. Spelling integrates the quondam quotation with the syntax of the containing language. When we rest with the quotational form, however, the quotation marks form an opaque interface between two ontologies, two worlds: that of the attitudinist, however benighted, and that of our responsible ascriber. The failure of substitutivity of identity in clauses of propositional attitude was accommodated by Frege, as we know, by a shift of reference: The normal designation of a singular term gives way, in attitude clauses, to what had been the sense or meaning or intension of the term. I prefer the quotational line on three counts. First, it makes no appeal to sense or intension. Second, it permits reference in the attitude clause to vary with the attitudinist, whereas Frege holds such reference to one and the same sense or intension for all comers. Third, it reflects the empathetic situation: the effort to report a person’s attitude from the person’s point of view. Surely it is a more obvious and natural line than Frege’s. Our quotation marks have sealed the ascriber’s real world off from the fancied world of the attitudinist. Human nature being what it is, however,

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objectivity will break through. At that point the ascriber is like an actor suddenly stepping out of his part and speaking for himself. Thus we catch the ascriber saying of the real people of his world that: 1. There are some whom Ralph believes to be spies. not just that 2. Ralph believes that there are spies. In 1905 Russell drew this contrast in terms of the scope of the quantifier. 1 and 2 become: 3. ∃x(Ralph believes that x is a spy). 4. Ralph believes that ∃x(x is a spy). or, rendered quotationally, 5. ∃x(Ralph believes ‘x is a spy’). 6. Ralph believes ‘∃x(x is a spy)’. But clearly 5 will not do. The quotation in it is a mere name of a string of seven letters and three spaces, so the ‘x’ in it has nothing to do with the initial ‘∃x’. Russell’s 3 is in similar trouble: It quantities into an attitude clause. In “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes” I proposed providing for such intrusions of reality by narrowing the attitude clause or quotation to a complex predicate instead of a whole believed sentence, and then representing the believer as believing that predicate of the intrusive person or object. Thus 5 becomes: 7. ∃x(Ralph believes ‘is a spy’ of x). Similarly then one may write: 8. Ralph believes ‘is a spy’ of Ortcutt to mean that Ralph suspects a man who, perhaps unbeknownst to Ralph, is in fact Ortcutt. Thus, although Ralph does not believe ‘Ortcutt is a spy’, he

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does believe ‘is a spy’ of Ortcutt, by virtue of believing ‘The man in the brown hat is a spy’. In medieval jargon, ‘Ortcutt’ occurs de re in 8 rather than de dicto. It is indeed subject to substitutivity of identity. So, if ‘Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy’ is felt to be ambiguous as between de re and de dicto, it admits of the two disambiguations: 8 and Ralph believes ‘Ortcutt is a spy’. (false) Today, however, I despair of making satisfactory sense of de re intrusions into propositional attitudes. To adapt an example of Føllesdal’s (from oral discussion), surely Ralph believes ‘is Ortcutt’ of Ortcutt; he greets him by name when he sees him at the beach. But Ortcutt is the man in the brown hat, and identity does enjoy substitutivity outside the quotations. So Ralph believes ‘is Ortcutt’ of the man in the brown hat, whatever he may say to the seeming contrary. This shakes one’s confidence. Accommodation may be sought in Føllesdal’s “genuine singular terms”, Kripke’s “rigid designators”. Or we can perhaps see our way to writing off the de re cases of propositional attitude for purposes of scientific language. Between 1 and 2 we do sense the vital difference between spotting a suspect and merely believing, like all of us, that there are spies. The de re construction thus seems indispensable. It is a matter of knowing or not knowing whom to suspect. But under scrutiny the contrast goes dim: What does it mean to know who? Knowing some uniquely distinguishing trait? Robert Sleigh’s example of the shortest spy disposes of that. We all believe that the shortest spy is a spy, but we don’t know who he is. Do we need his name? Or to be able to recognize his face? There is no general answer. It is a question of what would be useful to our security agents in a particular case. I conclude that the requirement that distinguishes de re from de dicto, namely knowing who or what, is a function of the contextual situation and not a general distinction. This classifies it with the indexicals; also with necessity and possibility, according to my view of them. The indexicals and necessity and possibility are convenient in daily discourse, to the point of virtual indispensability; and we can say the same of propositional attitudes de re, notably 1, while admitting none of these idioms to absolute or nonindexical scientific discourse. The propositional attitudes de dicto, on the other hand, construed quotationally, fit neatly into the framework of predicate logic, as referentially opaque constructions analyzable through quotation and into spelling. For

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this I am grateful, since these idioms of propositional attitude are informative and, as things stand, humanly indispensable. Thus far I have been concerned with cleaning up the logic of the propositional attitudes. But now what about their truth conditions? How can we tell what someone believes? Sometimes beliefs are objectively determinable and even measurable by wagers, but only if the believed sentence is one whose truth or falsity can afterward be settled to the satisfaction of both parties. Less dependably, we look to the believer’s assertions or other behavior special to the subject matter. Sometimes we are at a loss for any criterion. Our grammar admits ‘believes’ in application to any declarative sentence, and can freely exceed the dim limits of empirical significance. Similar remarks apply to the propositional attitudes generally. Eventual reduction of them to neurological terms is as hopeless as ever. Davidson’s anomalous monism still stands firm. The quotational account does admit them to the logic, the syntax, and even the ontology of our overall theory of reality, on their de dicto reading, but in respect of cognitive content they are danglers on the more integrated main structure of science.

VII. Sets and Classes The words ‘class’ and ‘set’ converged from various distinctive applications— sets of dishes, classes of citizens, classes as fleets—and came to be applied interchangeably to multiplicities in general.2 As the pertinent branch of mathematics developed, some writers used ‘set’ (or ‘Menge’, ‘ensemble’, ‘insieme’, ‘conjunto’, ‘mnogoçÇ’) and others used ‘class’ or its cognates. Independently of that, the theories took various divergent paths around the paradoxes. Now we find Cocchiarella maintaining that there is a traditional difference between sets and classes, as if the users of the terms had different things in mind to begin with. He associates sets with the traits by which the users of that term eventually dodged the paradoxes; classes correspondingly. The distinction is idle, applying as it does within none of those theories but only between them. Incidentally the specific dichotomy drawn by Cocchiarella holds up poorly. He classifies Russell’s theory of types and my NF (“New Foundations”) as class theories and Zermelo’s as set theory. He has me describing NF as “a first-order reconstruction of the theory of types.” On the contrary, 2. This section replies to N. B. Cocchiarella’s contribution published as “Outline of a Critique of Quine on Classes and Higher-Order Logic,” Synthese 90 (1992): 379–436.

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as Gödel pointed out in 1933 and I in 1956,3 it is Zermelo’s set theory that is a first-order reconstruction of the theory of types. NF was a drastic departure from it; hence indeed the mootness of its consistency—a problem that has exercised gifted minds for fifty-odd years and yielded rich side results. Cocchiarella also offers a philosophical distinction between sets and classes. “Whereas classes have their being in the concepts whose extensions they are, sets have their being in their members.” This is empty metaphor. Sets, sive classes, are regularly specified by their concepts, their membership conditions, when specified at all, and never enumerated except in trivial cases. Cocchiarella sets much store by a reconstructed phenomenology of classes and concepts ascribed to Frege and Russell. I am struck anew by the difference in temperament between the theoretical scientist and the historian of science. The scientist seeks the simplest, cleanest, clearest system that will meet his needs and fit his data. When he has progressed in that direction he discards his old epicycles and dim quasi-concepts with a sigh of relief. He is even at a loss later to reconstruct them at the historian’s behest. They have been gratefully repressed. The conscientious historian is then obliged to salvage, sort out, and batten on the scientist’s sorry refuse. To each his niche. Some logicians besides Cocchiarella have viewed sets as differing from classes, however vaguely. Others, such as Tarski, Gödel, and von Neumann, have not. Having dwelt on the folly of seeking such a difference, however, I must now mention a deliberate and commendable use to which the otherwise wasteful excess of terminology has been put in later years, first of all by von Neumann himself. In theories that recognize a breed of classes not eligible for membership in anything, the term ‘class’ is applied inclusively: to sets, which qualify as members as usual, and to these “ultimate” classes, which do not. I am bewildered by Cocchiarella’s worry over the individuation of ultimate classes. Like sets, they are individuated by coextensiveness: sameness of members. He has me changing my philosophy of logic over the years, first viewing logic as including set theory and later as excluding it. Actually the change was terminological. In the early years I respected the terminology of my mentors Frege, Russell, and Carnap, though pointing out already in 1940, 1941, and 1950 that philosophically important differences between elemen-

3. “Unification,” 275–77. See also Set Theory and Its Logic, sect. 38.

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tary logic and set theory spoke for a narrowing of the term.4 Eventually I took the liberty of acting on the matter.

References Campbell, D. T. “Models of Language Learning . . . ,” in Steve Fuller, ed., The Cognitive Turn: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 153–59. Cocchiarella, N. B. “Outline of a Critique of Quine on Classes and Higher-Order Logic,” Synthese 90 (1992): 379–436. Davidson, D. “Mental Events,” in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson, eds., Experience and Theory (London: Duckworth, 1970), 79–101, reprinted in Essays on Action and Events (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). ———. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of American Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 5–20, reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). Gödel, K. “The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Mathematics,” Collected Works, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Hahn, L. E., and Schilpp, P. A., eds. The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (La Salle: Open Court, (1986). Quine, W. V. “New Foundations for Mathematical Logic,” American Mathematical Monthly 44 (1937): 70–80, reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, 1961). ———. “Notes on Existence and Necessity,” Journal of Philosophy 40 (1943): 113– 27. ———. “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956): 177–87. ———. “Unification of Universes in Set Theory,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 21 (1958): 267–79. ———. Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). ———. Set Theory and Its Logic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, 1969). ———. Philosophy of Logic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 1986). ———. The Roots of Reference (La Salle: Open Court, 1974). ———. “Ontology and Ideology Revisited,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 490– 502. Russell, B. “On Denoting,” Mind 14: 479–93, reprinted in Logic and Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958). Sleigh, R. C. “On a Proposed System of Epistemic Logic,” Noûs 2 (1968): 391–98. Tarski, A. Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 156–57. 4. See Hahn and Schilpp, 645–46.

31 Responses to Essays by Smart, Orenstein, Lewis and Holdcroft, and Haack 1997

Knowing Smart, I am less surprised than pleased by his celebration of naturalism in epistemology. Scientific discoveries serve science not only additively, as something to build with, but also multiplicatively, as insights into how to build. He cites symmetry and simplicity as features that come to be recognized as favoring progress in physics. They figure less in biology, he observes, because of the opportunistic and stochastic nature of natural selection. Note, however, that at the next higher level of abstraction, where we are citing natural selection to account for this untidiness, considerations of symmetry and simplicity are still in force. Smart wondered whether my essay on moral values was an outgrowth of my one on natural kinds. He guessed that they were simply two manifestations of naturalism. On rereading them, I agree. I find the one on kinds by far the better. It is creative, whereas the morality piece says pretty much the expected thing. I remember what prompted the latter piece. Dagfinn Føllesdal had urged me to consider whether my epistemological thoughts might not have implications for ethics. Some years later I was invited to contribute to a Festschrift for three retiring friends at Ann Arbor: Richard Brandt, William Frankena, and Charles Stevenson. Any topic was acceptable, but all three honorands were ethicists, so I felt that then if ever was the time to act on Føllesdal’s suggestion. Smart’s explorations of imperative hypotheticals generated the grammatical oddity ‘if disapprove of x then disapprove of y’. Is its strangeness, I wondered, philosophically significant? Other imperative truth functions pass muster, after all: ‘Do not enter’, ‘Rise and shine’, ‘Take it or leave it’. The truth-functional conditional, then, to the rescue: define ‘If disapprove of x

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then disapprove of y’ as ‘Either do not disapprove of x or disapprove of y’. Equivalently, perhaps, ‘Approve of x or disapprove of y’. Approve of doing a thing or disapprove of getting your little brother to do it. The missing hypothetical imperative was a curious gap in our grammar, and its restitution an amusing logical triviality. Smart sees prudence as a moral value. I did not. I do favor instilling prudence in the young, but for their sake rather than society’s. But this issue is a matter of words, and not one of those matters of words on which I feel strongly. He asks whether Tarski’s disquotational account of truth should apply to statements of moral values. He suggests that it should, even while recognizing as profound a difference as you please between statements of cognitive fact and statements of moral value. I agree. Whether this is an exaltation of moral values or an abasement of truth is as may be. Smart neatly encapsulates the dialectic: in science we try to get our utterances to fit the world, while in ethics we try to get the world to fit our utterances.

Response to Orenstein Orenstein undertakes to deduce my conjecture of the indeterminacy of translation from my thesis of the indeterminacy of reference. The reasoning is that terms that mean alike must surely refer alike, if at all. Translation, then, which purports to preserve meaning, goes indeterminate if reference goes indeterminate. What this shows, at best, is that indeterminacy of reference of terms implies indeterminacy of translation of terms, not sentences. Translation of sentences is meant to preserve only the net holophrastic meanings of sentences (if I may persist in talking of meanings), and not necessarily to proceed by self-sufficient translation of the successive words. ‘He can’t walk any more’ goes into Spanish as ‘Ya no puede caminar’, as if to say ‘Already he can’t walk’.1 But there is a deeper point, and Orenstein has done well to expose it. The indeterminacy of translation that I long since conjectured, and the indeterminacy of reference that I proved, are indeterminacies in different senses. My earlier use of different words, ‘indeterminacy’ for the one and ‘inscrutability’ for the other, may have been wiser. Radical translation of terms pro1. See my Quiddities (Harvard, 1987), 92f.

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ceeds through the usual channels where available: ‘rabbit’ for ‘gavagai’ on sight. Radical translation of other terms, not ostensively accessible, would proceed as usual by projecting analytical hypotheses from our accumulated data. Proxy functions raise their ugly heads only when we take to philosophizing on the logic of scientific conjecture and experiment. It is there that we would learn that the reference of terms, in whatever language, can be varied isomorphically without prejudice to the empirical evidence for the truth of a scientific theory, albeit at the cost of deferred ostension.

Response to Lewis and Holdcroft Trouble begins in the first sentence of §l, where the authors represent §24 of Pursuit of Truth as summarizing my views on observation sentences. Actually §24 was concerned rather with how the teaching of observation sentences to infants down the ages might relate to the prehistoric origin of the idioms of propositional attitude. So the authors looked in the wrong place for my theory of evidence: namely, in Martha’s ascription to Tom of perceptions. Reflecting then with J. L. Austin that ‘perceives that p’ implies ‘knows that p’ and hence ‘p’, the authors quite rightly deemed this avenue to our knowledge of the external world too easy to be interesting. We read: Thus the observation sentence ‘It’s raining’ is learned in situations where both teacher and pupil know that it’s raining. No. It is learned where Martha thinks it is raining. Perhaps it was not, and therefore she and Tom were not really perceiving that it was (Austin again). It needed only to be enough like rain to fool Martha; Tom will still learn the sentence. What now of my actual notion of evidence for science? ‘Evidence’ is a term that I have used informally in introductory or summary formulations. I have not found it useful in more detailed inquiry. But let me now see what, more precisely, I would make of it. My stated overall problem has been the quasi-epistemological problem, within natural science, of man’s construction of natural science on a datum base of neural intake. This intake is not what we are aware of and infer from, but it does encompass our “information”, in the computer engineer’s sense, as to what is going on around us. It is perhaps a candidate for the title of evi-

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dence, but it does not meet Davidson’s dictum that only a belief can be evidence for a belief. The runner-up for the title is the observation sentence that has been conditioned to that neural intake. Evidence in this sense meets Davidson’s condition. But fallibility invests evidence in both senses, in varying degrees. Observation sentences are, however, all that the experimenter can lean on in testing his theories, and he is well advised to observe carefully and even to try again. It is the best he can do, and very good too, as attested by the overwhelming advances in science. Near the end of their paper the authors raise a question that goes to the heart of all this. It is the question of the meeting of minds: “what we need is sameness of . . . whatever has now replaced stimulus meaning” intersubjectively shared. They look to my recent references to empathy and are rightly dissatisfied. I used that term only for the daily business that I had freely appealed to all along in Word and Object and elsewhere in commonplace terms, namely one’s noticing the other’s situation and behavior and imagining oneself in his place. The psychology and neurology of the practice has not concerned me, for I was not building on it. What really supplanted my early and untenable intersubjective sharing of stimulus meanings is a preestablished harmony of our innate standards of perceptual similarity of neural intakes. The intakes are private, and the similarity relation is private: it interrelates an individual’s intakes, but not those of two individuals. Perceptual similarity is objectively testable, still, for each individual, by reinforcement and extinction of responses. The harmony is this: if two individuals witness each of two events and one of the individuals finds his intakes perceptually similar on the two occasions, the other will usually do likewise. Unlike Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, this one is causally accounted for by natural selection, as follows. Perceptual similarity implements our inductive instinct, which is the inborn tendency to expect perceptually similar neural intakes to have sequels that are perceptually similar to each other. This is the innate basis of expectation. But successful expectation has survival value, and consequently natural selection down the ages has shaped our standards of perceptual similarity to harmonize pretty well with longterm environmental trends. This accounts for the high ratio of success that induction has enjoyed. It also accounts for the intersubjective harmony of similarity standards, thanks to shared ancestry and shared environment.

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Changes in standards subsequent to birth will still tend to harmonize, because of shared circumstances.2

Response to Haack My efforts in naturalized epistemology have been concerned with man’s acquisition and handing down of concepts and theories regarding the external world and with the empirical checkpoints that lend these hypotheses their objectivity. But I have passed over an important and fascinating factor, the technology of devising hypotheses worth checking. I see this field as Susan Haack’s. Her crossword metaphor is apt, encapsulating much of the spirit of scientific conjecture. The definitions or clues that one is given for words in the puzzle correspond, she suggests, to the scientist’s “experiential evidence” for the hypotheses that he ventures. In my accounts the nearest thing to empirical evidence is the observation sentence, which is already an occasion sentence about the external world; and I have trouble fitting this to the crossword metaphor. But the intersecting of words in the puzzle does indeed depict in vivid miniature the meshing and colliding of hypotheses that makes for the coherentism of scientific method. Pursuing her metaphor, she notes the wisdom of keeping a revered hypothesis on call for a while despite adverse evidence. She notes also that this prudent practice has lured an occasional indiscriminate iconoclast into antiscientific absurdities. She is similarly judicious in applauding Polanyi as against Popper’s early absolutism of conjecture and refutation. At the end she asks me some questions. (1) How widely do I intend ‘science’? Very widely almost always—even including history. (2) Do I see epistemic standards as internal to the natural sciences? Yes, as engineering is. (3) Do I distinguish between evidence and method? Strictly speaking, yes. Narrowly conceived as in my adjoining response to Lewis and Holdcroft, evidence is what we get at the checkpoints of hypotheses by deducing and testing observation categoricals. Method, on the 2. See my From Stimulus to Science (Harvard 1995), 20–21.

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other hand, embraces the whole technology of devising fruitful hypotheses. More broadly and loosely speaking, however, evidence surely encroaches on method to include the encouragement we get from a neat meshing of hypotheses. (4) Do I “think the discovery/justification distinction robust enough to supply an easy accommodation of the twin desiderata of creativity and security?” I see only trial and error, coupled with uncalibrated intuition, as one’s fallible guide in choosing between the flight of fancy and old faithful. Haack rightly finds a “coherentist cast” in my views, and it is well depicted in her crossword metaphor. Mine is a coherentism anchored empirically at the occasional checkpoints in observation sentences. “Of late,” we read at the end of her paper, “Quine has described his position as a ‘moderated holism’, a phrase which has to my ear a faint ring of oxymoron.” I like the last clause; the point hadn’t struck me. As for the “Of late,” however, I must say “Not very.” Surely my holism was already moderate 36 years ago in Word and Object. Excessive holism surfaced only back at midcentury in my pioneer “Two Dogmas,” in a regrettably eloquent passage that readers never tire of quoting. I have not yet quite tired of responding that the passage admits only of a far-fetched and legalistic defense, and that critical mass is the proper limit of serious holism. By the way, the proverb “Nothing succeeds like success” is not of my making. Bartlett cites Dumas.

32 Response to Leemon McHenry 1997

McHenry ascribes to Whitehead a dualistic ontology of individuals and properties, and to me a monistic ontology of individuals, including classes. I protest that my ontology is as dualistic as Whitehead’s and indeed the same as his except that classes have a clean-cut principle of individuation, namely coextensiveness, whereas properties have none. The nearest I can come to a principle of individuation for properties is that they are identical when they are necessarily coextensive. This I reject because of not understanding ‘necessarily’. Hence my renunciation of properties in favor of classes; for there is no entity without identity. I cannot recall seeing anything explained in terms of properties that could not be explained equally to my satisfaction in terms of classes. No wonder, since the only difference between classes and properties is the enigma of diversity of coextensive properties. Let us not confuse the mere use of an adjective phrase with the appeal to a property. Appeal to a property, or to any thing, involves reckoning it as the object of an essential pronoun, hence as the value of a variable. Perhaps this point bears on McHenry’s puzzling puzzlement over how we can “make sense of the boundaries of the space-time regions without recognizing the existence of properties.” Perhaps he is making sense of such boundaries by means of phrases, intelligible as such, which he takes to be names of properties. It is over properties that my clear disagreement with Whitehead lies, and the only one I think of. It dates back sixty-eight years to my senior year as a mathematics student at Oberlin College, when I immersed myself in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. The authors were chary of classes, but receptive to what they called propositional functions, which were properties and relations “in intension.” Whitehead and Russell were heedless of the individuation of proposi-

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tional functions, but punctilious about justifying the extensionality of classes by contextual definition of classes in terms of propositional functions. Once these beclouded preliminaries were out of the way in favor of classes, the ensuing chapters of the three monumental volumes commanded my unbounded admiration. I recall Sir Karl Popper’s figure of a bottomless bog into which we have vertically sunk many long piles to support the structure which is our theory of the world. The swampy ground is our sensory input, instinct, and untutored common sense, and it affords a firm foundation thanks only to the depth and multitude of the piles. Could this have been Whitehead and Russell’s intuition in starting with the unindividuated properties that reflect the vagaries of our undisciplined adjective phrases? If this accounts for their procedure, it still does not justify it. For they had to quantify over properties, that is, propositional functions, in their contextual definition of classes. In so doing, they reified properties, incurring the responsibility, never discharged, of individuating them. They might better have assumed the classes outright. What was missing was a clear standard of ontic commitment. Hence my stress on essential pronouns and values of variables. But the properties stayed on in Whitehead’s later philosophy as illindividuated structural elements of science. I agree with Whitehead in drawing no basic distinction between events and bodies. He draws the commonsense distinction, a matter of degree, with which I have no quarrel. I think that all of us who envision nature in terms of modern logic must share this attitude, for logic makes no distinctive structural provision for time and the tenses of verbs. We are already shunted into four-dimensional thinking quite independently of relativity physics. McHenry asks how we individuate spatiotemporal objects. Perhaps he misses the answer because it is too close to his eyes: the objects are identical if they coincide; if they are coextensive. In individuation, for me, there is no requirement of observability. It is only a matter of an identity standard couched in terms as clear as the rest of one’s science. Nor is failure of individuation to be confused with mere vagueness. The so-called surface of what I call my desk is vague at the molecular level, and all of the myriad almost identical masses that are enveloped by that cushion of vagueness qualify equally as my desk. But I intend ‘my desk’ to designate one and only one of those masses. The vagueness is in my words and not in their ineluctable physical designatum. Meanwhile the individuation is quite in order: spatiotemporal coincidence.

33 Responses to Szubka, Lehrer, Bergström, Gibson, Miscevic, and Orenstein 1999

Response to Szubka The distal scene, shared by the field linguist and the native, is the proper focus for the linguist in his enterprise of radical translation. The distal scene shared by mother and child is likewise the proper focus for the mother in helping the child with the language. Observation sentences are mostly reports on the distal scene. It is there, and not at the neural intake, that the action is. It is where minds meet. To seek proximal rather than distal common ground is to court chaos. Darwin found that even simple insects from the same swarm have widely dissimilar nerve nets. Physiologically similar neural reactions in different observers are not to be expected. Yet similarity of verbal response to the scene, on the part of adult compatriots, is taken as a matter of course. How is this distal harmony across proximal heterogeneity to be explained? Why does it all come outright? My explanation turns on a preestablished intersubjective harmony of subjective standards of what I call perceptual similarity, which I shall now clarify and account for. Instinct and natural selection are at the bottom of it. I must begin by defining some terms. By an individual’s neural intake on a given occasion I shall mean the temporally ordered set of all of his neural receptors that were triggered on that occasion. Each of us is born with subjective standards of perceptual similarity of neural intakes. Each intake is, for him, more similar to some than to others. His scale is private and subjective, but it can be probed objectively by the behavioral psychologist through the reinforcement and extinction of responses.

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Perceptual similarity of an individual’s neural intakes deviates widely from mere degree of overlap or quantity of shared receptors, what I call receptual similarity. The various figures that a cube projects on the retina, when seen from various angles, are geometrically dissimilar and make for receptually dissimilar neural intakes, but perceptually similar ones: the subject sees, he says, a cube. Similarly a tiger, seen from various angles and in various postures, induces perceptually similar intakes despite receptual diversity. Perceptual similarity is private. Not only do we share no receptors; they are presumably not even homologous, and the nerve nets into which they lead are presumably far from homologous as well. Yet at a reasonable distance we evidently see eye to eye. Our vagrant neural intakes and our processing of them issue somehow in consonant perceptions. Such is the preestablished harmony of perceptual similarity. It applies not only to vision but to all the senses. The word “gavagai”, as spoken by the native and the linguist, sounds enough alike to both, and likewise “Mama” as spoken by mother and child. But we still have to account for the harmony, and that will take a few more steps. Patience, please. Perceptual similarity is essential, obviously, to conditioning. Hence, indeed, the use of conditioning in probing a subject’s similarity standards. Since conditioning is essential to all learning, it follows that one’s similarity standards cannot all have been learned. They are rooted in instinct, but change somewhat with experience. Another instinct, of a piece with perceptual similarity, is the instinct of induction: the instinct to expect perceptually similar stimulations to have similar sequels. This instinct meshes with that of perceptual similarity, clearly, in conditioning. Philosophers have marveled that expectation by induction, though fallible, is so much more successful than random guessing. This is explained by natural selection. Successful expectation is conducive to survival, as in eluding predators and catching prey; so natural selection down the ages has bolstered induction by warping our standards of perceptual similarity somewhat into conformity with trends in our environment. Witness my tiger example above. Now we can account for the preestablished intersubjective harmony of our subjective standards of perceptual similarity. Natural selection molded our shared ancestors’ standards into partial conformity with a shared environment.

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Response to Lehrer Lehrer cites Grayling for a duality of epistemological objectives: the meaningbasing objective, as Lehrer puts it, and the inference-basing objective. Groping for a corresponding duality of agencies, I suggest stimulus meaning on the one hand and induction on the other. Both depend on subjective standards of perceptual similarity, induced by natural selection. Sense data were the traditional epistemological proving ground for natural science. Translation of science into a language of sense data was accordingly seen as the way to justify science. Hence Carnap’s Logischer Aufbau der Welt. It provided translation up to a point and then proceeded with counsels for rational reconstruction short of translation. But the reduction of science to sense data fails if the translation cannot be completed: and one sees clearly from the Aufbau that it cannot. In asking at this point “Why not settle for psychology?” I did not mean, as Lehrer supposed, that psychology would advance the justification process, I meant “Let us just get clear on the psychology of what we are actually doing, and look elsewhere if at all for justification.” Where I do find justification of science and evidence of truth is rather in successful prediction of observations, and this evidence is conclusive only in varying degrees. Karl Popper argued that experiment can only refute hypotheses, not prove them. I hold that experiment is fallible both ways. I prefer Popper’s analogy of science to an edifice supported only by a multitude of long piles driven deep down into a bottomless swamp. So observation, however inconclusive, is in my view the locus of evidence. But coherence governs our prediction of the observations, since a substantial bundle of interlocking hypotheses is usually needed in order to predict a particular observation in particular observable circumstances. Besides evidence in this strict sense, there is a weaker sort of something like evidence that underlies our production of hypotheses worth testing. It is evidence of the promise of a hypothesis, whereas predicted observation is evidence of the truth of a hypothesis. Simplicity, symmetry, economy are taken as evidence of promise. Just why is not altogether clear, but some considerations are marshaled in my paper “On simple theories of a complex world.”1 1. Reprinted in my Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 1966 (Harvard, 1976).

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Response to Bergström Taking my naturalized epistemology as his point of departure, Lars Bergström has proposed an empiricist conception of truth. An observation sentence is true on just the occasions that would prompt the subject’s assent to it if he were to observe the occasions. An observation categorical, then, being a universal conditional joining two observation sentences, is true if and only if its consequent is true on all occasions where its antecedent is true. A theoretical sentence is true, finally, if and only if logically implied by a “tight” theory that implies all true observation categoricals and no false ones. He goes on to sketch tightness. As Bergström remarks, I have warned now and again that the authority of observation sentences is properly speaking a matter of degree. For simplicity and convenience, then, I have set this detail aside and proceeded much as if they were uniformly infallible. Bergström has followed me in this course. His paper, however, has prompted me now to focus rather on the gradations. I see a spectrum reaching from sense data to science. I shall develop this thought. I continue to use my term “observation sentence” broadly: an occasion sentence is an observation sentence for a speaker if it has become keyed to a range of global neural inputs any one of which will prompt his immediate assent to it. That range of appropriate inputs will of course be vague along the edges; the speaker may hesitate over “It’s raining” in a fine mist, and over “That’s a swan” in the startling presence of a black swan. Vagueness of boundaries infests language at every turn, and I shall continue to take it in stride. Thus far, nothing new. The gradations that are my new concern are degrees rather of susceptibility of unequivocal assent to unequivocal recantation. “It’s raining”, unhesitatingly affirmed in full view of a drenched window pane, is recanted when the water proves to have come from a hose. “It’s a rabbit”, affirmed in full view of the object in question, is recanted when the object proves to have been a toy. Such recantation reflects theoretical connections among observation sentences. The degree of susceptibility to recantation measures how theoretic the observation sentence is. It is its degree of theoreticity. An observation sentence that is perhaps minimally theoretic is “This looks blue”. I write “looks” here, rather than “is”, to allow for the possibility that reflected light or environmental contrast may be affecting the color that the object would otherwise show. For the reference of “This” is still

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to an external patch or body, or is to become so with the flowering of reification. Speakers vary in how they arrive at identical usage of an observation sentence. One speaker may have acquired the sentence in the primitive way, by direct holophrastic conditioning to global neural inputs in the appropriate range. Another speaker may have assembled the sentence rather from words learned in earlier contexts. In either case, assent to the sentence may be recanted in the light of subsequent evidence. There are sentences that are learned only through theory, and that become observational only late in the specialist’s career: thus “There was copper in it”, said by the chemist after a glance at the solution, or “There goes a hyperthyroid”, said by the physician after a glimpse of a stranger’s face. Sophisticated observation sentences such as these are apt to be reducible to more primitive ones, delineating more directly sensory evidence, and these will tend also to be less theoretic by the stated criterion, that is, less susceptible to recantation. Some sophisticated ones, however, are not thus reducible. I think of the subtle traits that the wine expert learns to detect. Such reduction, where possible, bolsters scientific theory; for the increased resistance to recantation of observation sentences increases the dependability of the corresponding observation categoricals. The categoricals implied by a theory are its checkpoints, and flabby categoricals are insensitive touchstones. Reducing theoreticity by buttressing or supplanting the more theoretic observation sentences by less theoretic ones then enhances the dependability of scientific theory. This reflection is quite in the spirit of traditional phenomenalistic epistemology. A thoroughgoing reduction project of one kind, however, is surely a forlorn hope. It is utterly alien to what goes on and went on in the development of language and science in the child and in the race. Observation sentences, already theoretic to varying degrees, are learned outright and helter-skelter by direct holophrastic conditioning. Further ones are synthesized along the way from bits of those at hand. They vie with one another in a surging equilibrium of evidential claims. Such is the web of belief. This vision of science is a step from Karl Popper toward Thomas Kuhn. The observation categoricals that are the checkpoints of a theory are built of observation sentences that are themselves irreducibly theoretic to various degrees, so an apparent counterinstance of such a categorical is strong evidence against the theory but not necessarily lethal. We are left weighing subjective probabilities, not only in confirming theories but in refuting them.

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Back now to Bergström’s paper, to which this has thus far been rather a reaction than a response. An observation sentence should be true, by his account, on just the occasions that would prompt the subject’s assent to it. An observation sentence that perhaps meets this condition is “This looks blue”. I see only such cases as fulfilling Bergström’s empiricist conception of truth. Even here there is the vagueness of boundary of blue to reckon with, but then vagueness of predicates besets ascriptions of truth under any conception. I like Bergström’s injection of empiricism into the truth concept, if only at the very nadir of theoreticity: “This looks blue”. Then man’s theoretical creativity takes the lead. But we faithfully keep paying our dues to empiricism by deducing observation categoricals from theory and checking them for falsity. Observation is our empirical and sole objective check from first to last. At the end of his paper Bergström credits his empirical conception of truth with suggesting why simplicity, generality, and other virtues of theories promote our pursuit of truth: they enhance the “tightness” of theory to the implied observation categoricals. But this reflection retains its interest without his empiricist conception of truth, since the implied categoricals are still the checkpoints. It may be felt that rejection of a full empiricist conception of truth leaves the meaning of “true” again a mystery. This feeling is odd in view of the disquotational account of truth, for this of itself determines “true” uniquely; any two predicates fulfilling it are co-extensive. Indeed it over-determines truth, engendering paradox. And surely no one can gainsay disquotation, once we block the paradox. Granted, disquotation is language-bound; but we transcend those bounds by choosing our manual of translation.

Response to Gibson True to form, Gibson has provided a masterly sketch of my epistemological position, even to my infrequently noted point about mutual containment. I shall just add some remarks on analyticity and my threadbare “Two Dogmas.” “If . . . we conclude that moderate holism is true,” Gibson writes, “. . . it is also very unlikely that there are analytic statements. . . . As Quine has argued, any statement can be held true . . . if we make drastic enough revisions to others. . . .” Here I would dissociate analyticity from incorrigibility. Even

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Carnap would give up an analytic statement. But doing so was for him a change of meaning rather than of substantive theory, and I was questioning that distinction. Nor was I denying that there are analytic statements. In questioning the distinction I was seeking a definition. My very question was based on purported samples and a sketchy idea of what I wanted to see defined. “Truth by meaning” was the rough idea, and “No bachelor is married” was the paradigm. Further specimens, according to the literature, were the logical truths. Finally there was every layman’s intuition that some truths, surely “Circles are round” and the bachelor example, are an empty matter of words. In Roots of Reference decades later I even ventured a definition of analyticity meeting these conditions, but the boundary that it draws fades and dissolves once it breaches the sentences of scientific and literary theory. This disqualifies it for the philosophical use to which Carnap was putting analyticity, and Carnap was my concern in “Two Dogmas.” My failure to set these matters forth was one of the shortcomings of that early paper. Turning to Wittgenstein, Gibson finds him rejecting three of G. E. Moore’s tenets: (1) that “I know” is used correctly in “I know there is an external world”, (2) that knowing is a mental state, and (3) that Moore’s “This is a hand” expressed a sensible proposition. For my part, I agree with Moore in accepting (1) and (3) but with Wittgenstein in rejecting (2). My objection to (2) is that knowing is a hybrid of warranted belief, which is mental, and truth, which is not. Gibson takes up the distinction between relative and absolute foundationalism that Stroll draws in reporting on Wittgenstein’s last work, On Certainty. The paragraphs that Gibson excerpts under each of these heads are of course free from the appeals to sense data that foundationalism used to connote, but I am surprised that there is no hint even of fallible occasion sentences conditioned to sensory stimulation. I see these as the links between science and reality.

Response to Miscevic When I represented mathematics as indispensable to science I was not alluding to its apodictic certainty. I meant the indispensability of mathematical entities and language to the formulations of natural science. Mathematics is indispensable equipment, whatever its epistemology. I attributed the certainty of mathematical laws partly to our practice of

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favoring them over other tenets in the event of the experimental refutation of a theory. Of course, as Sober observes, this practice exploits mathematics in the implying of observation categoricals without any enhancement of its own credibility when the categorical is confirmed. Proof is a luxury that the familiar mathematical truths enjoy, but they are not beyond empirical testing. I picture primitive man discovering by tests that an array of objects can be counted indifferently in any order. On the other hand I see the logic of truth functions as mastered in learning the words that express them. Affirming a conjunction and denying a component of it is simply misuse of a word, “and” or “not”, like calling a cat a dog. Correspondingly for modus ponens. Quantification in its various guises in various languages fares perhaps like the truth functions: it is mastered in learning the words. But when we get beyond logic in the narrow sense and into the reification of classes, hence set theory, even mathematics reflects human fallibility. It was becoming clear around 1900 that all the concepts and known laws of classical mathematics could be expressed and proved strictly within pure logic and set theory. The basic law of set theory, intrinsic indeed to the very notion of a class, was that every membership condition we can formulate determines a class. But in 1901 the structure collapsed. Russell produced his paradox. Various ways have since been devised of weakening the disastrous law so as to avert Russell’s and related paradoxes, and we proceed confidently. But we were confident before, and we have had a salutary lesson in the frailty even of human mathematics. Still Miscevic’s effort in his later pages to make mathematics share the fallibility of natural science is in my view misguided: for the failure that he cites, unlike the paradoxes, turn up only when the mathematics is applied rather than pure. I have stressed the kinship of mathematics to natural science, but there is no denying the difference. Pure mathematics has the advantage of being deducible from first principles without sensory disruption.

Response to Orenstein I can sympathize somewhat with Orenstein’s wish to narrow the gap between formalized logic and ordinary language. I have seen elaborate resort to symbolic logic in marine biology where ordinary language would have been more perspicuous and equally brief. I have heard an arch reference to

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model theory when all that was in point was a correlation. See my Quiddities, under “Mathematosis.” But values bi- or trifurcate, and can be cultivated separately. My elimination of singular terms, which Orenstein deplores, shows that old perplexities over irreferential singular terms are the product of idioms that are in principle eliminable. This is philosophical progress. Also there was aesthetic progress in the resulting simplification of logical theory, and a metamathematical gain in simplifying proof theory. But just as the reduction of classical mathematics to set theory does not enable us in practice to dispense with numerals, differential operators, and other mathematical hieroglyphs, so the elimination of singular terms does not enable us in practice to dispense with singular terms. It was never meant to, for that would have been unthinkable. Computation and research in mathematics would be paralyzed without singular terms—numerals, to begin with—to substitute for variables. All results of substitution could in principle be got via the contextual definitions, but too circuitously for practical purposes. So we have here two conflicting interests: elegant simplicity on the one hand, utility on the other. Definition is the solvent, affording us the best of both worlds. Let us not see the two as a dilemma; we can live it up in both. Even a third or fourth is not excluded. Predicate-functor logic does without singular terms even to the extent of variables; but it and the familiar quantificational logic are intertranslatable. The latter fits our intuitions better, but the other is sufficiently unlike to afford a philosophically interesting perspective, particularly on the nature and function of variables themselves. In its relation to traditional reasoning and ordinary language, moreover, modern logic must be seen as much more than a servile formalization. In its penetration of polyadic predicates it raised logic to a metamathematical level, and in its quantifiers and variables it both afforded an explicit standard of ontic commitment and revealed the utility of reification in the structuring of science. Its utility hinges on the deductive strength of the universally quantified conditional as over against the underlying truthfunctional “if-then”. Orenstein questions the quantificational criterion of reification and claims rather that something exists just in case a singular term names it. But this disqualifies the mathematics of real numbers that is so crucial to natural science. Most of the irrational reals are unnamed and indeed individually

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unspecifiable, as Cantor made clear. Yet much of science would be immobilized without them. Natural science is deeply committed to abstract objects, named and nameless, though only extensional ones. Plato’s beard is trimmed but otherwise intact. A difficulty that Orenstein finds in quantification as attesting to existence is that generalization of a quantification from an irreferential singular term or instantiation by such a term issues in paradox. He is venturing on free logic without heeding its rules: no generalization or instantiation without existence, proved or premissed. Writing of the negation “¬x is human”, Orenstein puzzlingly represents Tarski as according it existential import. Do open sentences have existential import? Of course variables do, in the sense that all their values exist, even in free logic. Then he proceeds to contrast the “LeÜniewskian” or “Terminist” view, which “accords existential commitment to atomic sentences but not to their negations.” Thus “Alex is human” implies the existence of Alex, and “¬Alex is human” implies no existence. But I see no disagreement with Tarski. Orenstein has switched in midstream from open sentences to closed. Orenstein’s ensuing contrast between two schools of thought does not speak to me.

III Popular Pieces

34 Introducing Piaget 1960

It’s a rare pleasure to have Professor Piaget with us. To be more precise about the rareness of it, in my own case, I may say that I have seen him and heard him lecture on just one previous occasion, and that was here at Harvard twenty-four years ago. That was my first year on the Harvard faculty and the three-hundredth year of Harvard’s existence. In celebration of the second of these two events, a glittering array of luminaries was gathered here from afar. Professor Piaget was prominent among them. He read a paper and received an honorary degree. I’m glad we haven’t had to await some further singular point in Harvard history, such as my last year on the Harvard faculty or the four-hundredth year of Harvard’s existence, in order to have Professor Piaget with us again. His presence here at any moment of history suffices to make the moment momentous. Professor Piaget has been professor of philosophy at Neuchâtel and professor of psychology at Lausanne. He is now professor both at the University of Paris and at the University of Geneva. He has written many books on child psychology, motivated by the distinctly philosophical purpose of tracing out the structure and mechanism of our thought processes and of our conception of the world. There is in all this the same motivating interest that motivates epistemology; but in addition there is the rich empirical source of understanding that comes of experimenting on the developing individual and exposing actual stages in the development of the thought processes and concepts in question. It is a source of which philosophers have deprived themselves who, like Husserl and others, have abjured what they call psychologism. I, on the contrary, embrace psychologism most cordially, and feel that Professor Piaget’s program of genetic epistemology, as he calls it, can be

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an important avenue to philosophical illumination. His program continues now at an accelerated rate, with many able coworkers and a steady output of interesting volumes of working studies. The current focus of interest of this group is the genetic epistemology of number. Here the philosophy of mathematics, already an intersection of two domains, is intersected in turn by psychology to produce a topic that is bound to command the aggregate professional interest of very many thinkers and to demand a combination of professional competences shared by very few. It is on this intriguing topic that we have the good fortune to be hearing from Professor Piaget this afternoon.

35 Mind/Body Problem Informal Remarks at Harvard Health Services Weekly Lunch 1963

Just finished on set theory. Possible interest for non-specialists there? Paradoxes, yes; but spent. Now I’m returning to philosophy of language. Indeterminacy of translation? Important and credible, but hard to make it appear both. Can’t in limited time. I’ll speak, more speculatively, of central philosophical issue: mind/body. How can mind and body interact? Conservation of energy? Initial easy solution: recognize mental states as states of the body, not just correlates. No change of language. No need to know mechanism (though always desirable). You can tell a man is amused, worried, winded, sunburned by looking; don’t need to know mechanism. Can tell he knows trigonometry or is allergic to ragweed by testing his observable behavior, including verbal. Then what of freedom vs. determinism? Russell (and Hume, and Locke). Then what of purposive behavior? Feedback mechanisms can simulate it. Phylogenetically, purpose was explained clearly by Darwin. Natural selection is cosmic feedback. Any mind/body problem left? Yes, enormous: There is a family of idioms distinctive to mental states and irreducible. Propositional attitudes. Oh, you can make the easy switch still—believing etc. are states of the body. But the propositional attitude idioms are troublesome after the switch too—though viewed only as saying mindish things about bodies. Difficulty of analysis. (Not mechanism problem now.) We don’t want ‘believes p’ and ‘believes q’ to be irreducible, unrelated properties, even of bodies. What is believed? A proposition, a thought? What’s that? Here is the stubborn mental realm. They are ill-behaved idioms too. Take indirect quotation (the best nocu-

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ous propositional attitude). How wide may deviate? And the others don’t even have a norm from which two styles of theory-building: 1) Elementary predictions, quantifiers, truth functions. Good science. 2) Relating people and animals to sentences, and getting the complexity of structure through those sentences. How to say, e.g. in (1), the cat hopes the mouse will come out? What are some good physicalistic categories for such physical phenomena—short of finding the mechanisms? Such is the serious residue of mind/body problem.

36 Magna Carta 1963

National Geographic Society, National Geographic Atlas of the World, 304 pp., $18.75. It is a handy volume despite its sprawling twelve by nineteen, thanks to flexible covers and sturdy paper. Maps fill facing pages to their very edges. Open the book at random and chances are nearly even that you will be confronted with more than three square feet of continuous National Geographic map, as if you had taken a scarcely folded one from your file. We who have kept files of National Geographic maps, and have persisted in using them in all their unwieldiness instead of riffling some convenient book of inferior maps, well know the magic of the confrontation: the miracle of lucid clutter, the beauty and gentle decisiveness of color contrasts, the inexhaustible store of intelligence. Now the two values are reconciled: good maps and convenient book. The three hundred pages include fifty-seven such two-page spreads. I shall keep the old loose National Geographic maps for trips. And, since the National Geographic omits counties, I shall keep my old inferior book for counties. Grudgingly. It is before me now, a 1948 Hammond of even larger format than the National Geographic Atlas, and it is open at south central South America. The polychrome two-page spread is something between a poster and an imposture. Its detail is sparse and irresponsible. Part of Brazil is elaborately misplaced within Paraguay, and part of Paraguay in Argentina, as a glance at other pages bears out; the name of the Paranà is applied by mistake to the Iguassù, as well as to the Paranà; Aconcagua is omitted, though lesser mountains are marked; and two provinces of Chile are shown in a way that conflicts with another page. The 1954 Hammond is better, but I digress. The point of my sad example is that such ineptitude is

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neither to be found nor imagined in National Geographic maps. They have an air somehow of self-evident accuracy, they are visibly as real as earth itself. The National Geographic Atlas is up to date without recourse to overprinting. Rwanda, Burundi, the C.A.R., the sovereign state of Western Samoa, and other countries of their generation are herewith legitimized. They emerge as real as Denmark and Portugal, as real as ever a National Geographic map can make them. All levels of detail bristle with novelty, seemingly engraved from scratch. Where we so lately saw “Ulan Bator (Urga)” we now see “Ulaan Batar (Ulan Bator).” At points one senses the strain of keeping obsolescence at bay. Thus in the descriptive pages we read of “the formerly Dutch western portion” of New Guinea, and of “this former British colony” of Aden, but find no present status ventured for these places. Text takes up more than half the book. There are state-by-state and countryby-country entries, each in two parts: a concise schedule of standard specifications and an informal description, often lively (“Grande-Terre . . . is smaller than Basse Terre . . . , which is mountainous”) and informative. In these entries a few lands seem to have been overlooked: Malta, Hong Kong, Macao, Timor, the Falklands. The text includes pieces on astronomy, geology, cartography, and the history of geography; also sundry tabulations of cities, land masses, lakes, mountains, climate. There is news to be gleaned from championship lists: Etah has lost its title of northernmost town to Ny Alesund in Spitzbergen, and Ushuaia has lost its title of southernmost to Puerto Williams in Chile. There is news even about the freshwater lakes: Victoria, long so nearly tied with Superior for first place according to the books, is now shown as 15 per cent behind. I regret having to add that this book, like perhaps all sources with the exception of your humble informant, overlooks the fact that far and away the largest freshwater lake is neither of those, but MichiganHuron, the legitimacy of whose hyphen is evident to all who know the Straits of Mackinac. This book is not one, after all, to boggle at hyphens. It accepts the Mississippi-Missouri. Nearly a sixth of the book is given over to the index of places. Here the editors missed a Goode bet in not simply indexing places by longitude, latitude, and page number, as was long since done in that more modest but excellent work, Goode’s School Atlas. This would avoid the inelegance of letters and numbers on the edges of maps, and it would add a modicum of further instruction and even convenience. In using Goode’s I sometimes find that

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the mere figures of longitude and latitude suffice to answer my question without the map. And lacking those figures we are sometimes, as in verifying the championship of Ny Alesund noted above, driven to fussy measurements of the maps. Evidently the National Geographic editors have little love for latitude, for they even omit the figures from the championship listings. A more serious shortcoming of the index of places is the lack of population figures. Populations of countries and big cities are discoverable on other pages; however, one needs population data more on small places, for lack of preconception—as now when I contemplate driving to Rouyn and on to Cochrane and there entraining for Moosonee. In respect of demureness the Introduction resembles the publicity for some southern Michigan product, a breakfast cereal or automobile. I try to condone this on four counts. First, the atlas is not a literary commodity and so it is perhaps subject to other conventions. Second, it is a group enterprise, so that the boasts are impersonal. Third, it is a non-profit enterprise, so that the Michigan analogy is imperfect. And fourth, the boasts are true.

37 On the Map 1964

The Atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland. Planned and directed by D. P. Bickmore and M. A. Shaw. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 222 pp., $100.00. Even in England, where it can be had for $73.50, this book will grace few homes. It is heavy equipment. Top to bottom it exceeds twenty inches, nineteen being a two-millionth of the length of Great Britain, and it opens to half a square yard. It can usefully occupy broad tables in major libraries, and also in great offices where far-reaching plans are laid. Page by far-reaching page it offers the far-reaching planner a vue d’ensemble of how the fodder roots and green crops, the department stores and bacon factories, the breweries, coke ovens, sycamores, people, and skilled people are disposed over the face of the United Kingdom. Forward looking, it maps the rates of population growth; upward, the sunshine and rain; downward, the underground water resources and all the geologic inwardness of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Out of 200 map pages, 120 are given over to 120 maps that are identical in outline, each depicting the whole country over again on a scale of a two-millionth. Each conveys without clutter its own peculiar intelligence. Even a map that shows the boundaries of all the parishes in Britain is uncluttered. What obviates clutter is a loose transparent map that can be superimposed on any of these uniform maps to name and place the towns and counties. While these maps cover a great variety of topics, there are haunting recurrences of internal pattern. Configurations that emerge in the relief map, in the geological maps, and in various botanical maps tend strikingly to coincide; for geology affects relief, and relief vegetation. The most notable of these internal features is the Highland Line, a steep

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fault diagonally dividing Scotland. The threat of arrow or musket ball that once attended the crossing of this line has subsided, but in other ways the line still figures. The map of metamorphic rocks is a burst of color above the Highland Line and nearly blank below. The maps of road traffic, rail traffic, and telephone traffic are full of facts below the line and nearly blank above. The maps of population, groundwater, vegetation, factories, and labor all show that things this side of the line are one way, that side another. Clearly this line, not the Scottish border, marks the main dichotomy of Great Britain. The loose transparent map is one of the inventions that makes this book good. Another is a curious flap pamphlet of Notes and Sources, so attached to the outer edge of the back cover that any of its pages can be exposed alongside any of the maps. I regret that a third helpful expedient, used in Beckmann’s Hand-Atlas (Leipzig, 1932), was not adopted too. If a map spans facing pages without a break, you cannot easily measure across the seam; nor can you find places in the seam, unless by straining the binding. Beckmann’s solution: print the two-page map rather on one page that folds out to double size. All those maps at a two-millionth were on separate pages, true; but we do at length come to some maps that cover the country piecemeal at a half-millionth, and six of these are two-page spreads. This is still not the scale where houses would be marked, but it is an eighth of that. These maps show altitude by tint and contour by shadow. Distinctive marking is contrived also for woodland, pasture, field, and settlement. The colors are harmonious and naturalistic. An index of places takes up 256 running feet of column. The lower limit of coverage is perhaps Godstow (Oxon.), which is not shown. The book contains vast information. It was twelve years in the making and is evidently authoritative. There was an editorial committee of five Oxford and Cambridge geographers and economists, and there are acknowledgments to some 600 persons and organizations. The cartography is elegant, the paper heavy, the binding strong. Black endpapers are etched with a delicate pattern compounded of British coastlines. One would not have paid a hundred of one’s own taxed dollars for the book, but is glad to have it.

38 Charting the World 1965

History of Cartography, Leo Bagrow. Trans. D. L. Paisey, revised R. A. Skelton. Harvard: 312 pp., 138 plates. $19.95. This handsome volume is high, wide, and two inches thick. If the text were printed continuously without lists and illustrations, it would account for only 120 of these spacious pages. The two inches are due partly to heavy paper and generous half-titles, partly to extensive lists, and mainly to the wealth of illustration. For this is primarily a book of reproductions of old maps. Each of the 138 plates is page size or double, and many are in splendid color. In addition there are seventy-six figures in the text, and many of these fill a page apiece. The most exotic things depicted are a Sumerian clay map of 3800 b.c., various Aztec, Egyptian, and Roman maps or near-maps, an intricately carved wooden chart from Greenland, and an abstract Micronesian sailing diagram of coconut fibre. Except perhaps for these latter two, the most recent map shown is a Manchurian one of 1760. The oldest map shown that has a fairly mappish sort of look is a Roman road map of 500 a.d. Maps thenceforward into the thirteenth century, Arab and European, continue to reflect the darkness of the age. Study brightens them a little, as it doubtless does the age. There is a central mass which, with study, becomes recognizable from map to map as the Mediterranean. Sometimes the clue to it is the curve of Asia Minor. Sometimes this clue is lacking but there is instead the telltale give and take of Italy and the Adriatic, or a dead giveaway at Gibraltar. Lines are stylized, there having been little geographical information to constrain the draftsman’s hand. Where information left off, what guided the line? Not only taste. There was a quest for the rational essence. A so-called T-O view of the world was

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long in vogue in Italy, representing the world as a disk divided by a transverse band into an upper or eastern part, Asia, and a lower or western part. This lower part was in turn divided by a vertical band into a right-hand quadrant, Africa, and a left-hand one, Europe. The two bands formed a T whose stem was the Mediterranean and whose bar was a fanciful rectification of the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Nile. In its pure form this diagram was of course a departure even from known details, in the interest of schematism. In this form it was still turning up as late as 1495. But it is also detectable, softened and modified, as the underlying principle of several thirteenth-century efforts in England and Germany to map the known world with some richness of factual detail. The resulting maps were very much at odds with their subject matter. But at Byzantium, in that same century, maps were suddenly forthcoming that were essentially right. One is shown of western Europe which, despite a strange promontory extending east from northern Scotland into Scandinavian waters, is recognizable at a glance. One is shown of the known world, by Agathodaemon, that is laudable in its Mediterranean portions. Its world extends from the Atlantic to the Far East, and there is a businesslike look to the projection. The Geographia of Claudius Ptolemaeus, ca. 130 a.d., was an Alexandrine work of indeterminate but considerable stature, to judge from the shadow it cast. The book was still going into revised editions as recently as 1545. Conservatism was not the trend of Ptolemy’s editors down the centuries. Thus the Strassburg edition of 1513 includes a map of Lorraine, bordered with arms of Saarbrücken, Saarwerden, and Zweibrücken. The map of the British Isles in that edition is less venturesome, but it also embroiders on Ptolemy. It names Limerick, and a hundred miles off the Limerick coast it shows the fabulous isle of Brazil. It shows it as about equal in size to Lough Neagh a lake which, however, is itself misplaced or omitted. Or again take the next Strassburg edition, 1522, with its map of Malabar, Ceylon, Java Major, Java Minor, and the like. The representation of these land masses, though naive, is post-Ptolemaic. The two sophisticated thirteenth-century Byzantine maps lately mentioned were from manuscript editions of Ptolemy. Yet a map of Germany, likewise from a thirteenth-century Byzantine edition of Ptolemy, retains all the unmaplike primitivism of the darkest ages. And we go on finding good maps and bad, sophisticated and primitive, in editions of Ptolemy for the next three centuries. It is an open question whether the precocity of

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those two thirteenth-century Byzantine maps was a latter-day breakthrough or a relic of ancient wisdom. Conversely it is perhaps an open question whether that odd excrescence on northern Scotland, shown in some of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ptolemies and not in others, was a latterday breakdown or a relic of ancient confusion. Whether such a peninsula may actually have existed in 130 a.d. is a question too, but not an open one. Whether because of new access to Alexandrine sources or because of new voyages, there is by 1490 much faithfulness in the rendering of north and west Africa and of Europe up to the Baltic. Fifteen years later we find the whole of Africa well formed, and Arabia with it. Farther Asia remained more conjectural, and America was a shambles. North America tended to turn out partly archipelago and partly Siberia. By 1527 the east coast of America achieves its definitive form, except in the far north and far south, and space begins to accrue for a Pacific Ocean. Thus the time is ripening for Mercator. In 1569 we find him on the job, turning out a world map in Mercator projection. Here suddenly all of Europe is in good shape, including Scandinavia; also all of southern Asia, including much of Malaysia. A Pacific coast of America is ventured, and from Peru to California it has visible links with reality. We are shown a 1570 map of north-eastern Asia, trimly drawn to a polar projection. It looks authoritative at first glance, but its coastlines are wildly conjectural. Something called Japan is placed about where you might look for St. Lawrence Island. Even so, there is no mistaking the Bering Strait, nor the glory of the name it bears: the Strait of Anian. After all the talk and all the groping for a Northwest Passage, the fabled Strait of Anian had turned out to be real. Why must we now call it the Bering Strait, in memory of a Dane who sailed for Peter the Great a century and a half after this map was drawn? By way of memorial for Vitus Bering the Bering Sea could have sufficed. In the sixteenth century, editions of Ptolemy sprouted modern maps to the point where they became the tail that wagged the Ptolemaic dog. The dog was sloughed off, and lo! there was an atlas. Atlases came to be produced hand over fist, largely by Mercator and other Dutchmen and by the Swiss. We admire the maps that come out of Switzerland today, unaware that the Swiss have been at it since 1528 and earlier. By that year Sebastian Münster, a German editor of Ptolemy at Basel, had conceived a taste for local geography and was doing much to develop the local end of the atlas trade. It was a taste that was mature in England fifty years later, when Chris-

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topher Saxton brought out an atlas of that country. The general map that we are shown from it is startlingly good, its proportions perfect and its detail minute. In the next century atlases became enormous, and often were custombuilt to the buyer’s specifications from maps in stock. The atlas made for Prince Eugene of Savoy by the Blaeu firm in Holland ran to forty-six volumes. The book under review is given primarily to maps, but it is given also to lists. There are a list of the fifteenth-century editions of Ptolemy, a list of fifteenth-century sheet maps, a list of sixteenth-century world maps, lists of sixteenth-century regional maps of Italy and of Germany, and a substantial bibliography. The greatest list is a biographical dictionary of cartographers to 1750, running to fifty-four pages. The narrative text states some of the facts that seemed worth noting above and much else in the same vein. Attention is paid to the effect of maps on exploration and vice versa. There is also another vein, that of the collector’s manual. In this vein various fine points of design are taken up as aids to identification. In this vein also a quantity of material comes in whose only point is fullness of coverage. Some remarks give pause. A 1528 woodcut of “Terra de Lauatore” is reproduced and said to depict Greenland; surely the reasons, if any, for not seeing it as Labrador are not too obvious to mention. Of the Matthew Paris map of Britain, 1250, we are told (p. 143) that the pilgrim road from Newcastle to Dover is the central feature: but you can see from the excellent color plate that Newcastle to Chelmsford is more to the point. There is faulty coordination. Peter Apian is introduced on page 130 but mentioned on page 127. Henricus Glareanus is introduced on page 155 but mentioned on page 151. Mount Meru is introduced on page 207 but mentioned on page 198. A sketch map by Columbus is dated on page 107 once as December 1492 and once as December 1493. Color plates are designated by letters, A to U, and black-and-white plates are designated by Roman numerals, I to CXVI, with the consequence that the references to Plates C, I, and L are ambiguous. The notes are exasperating; to look one up you have first to observe your page number, then consult the table of contents to see what chapter that page was in, and finally consult the notes in the back of the book, where they are numbered by chapters. While we are on the subject of mechanics I would protest the Continental fad of unindented paragraphs. The start of a paragraph is marked only by

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the running short of the preceding line. The plan becomes annoying when a paragraph begins a page; you have then to look back, if you care about the paragraphing. The fact that it was printed in Germany, where its English was foreign, helps account for there being more misprints than are expected in so fancy a book. I note seventeen routine misprints, one of them in the caption of a fine color plate. Further there are two misprints that obscure sense: “master” for “manner,” perhaps, and “contrast” for I don’t know what (pp. 217f). Descending a further grade, there is the following passage (p. 53), which sets a certain tone. . . . it contains works by Persians, Syrians, and men of other nationalties [sic], but, as all its cartographers wrote in Arabic, the whole complex has been called Islamic cartography in default of any other comprehensive and opposite [sic] term. In this passage, I must say, there is an intellectual limp that the two misprints do not wholly account for. And conversely, for that matter, the book contains dazzling misprints that transcend all language barriers. In the course of six lines on page 209 we find Mohammed referred to once as such, once as Mahommed, and once as Mahommmed. On page 58 a line is printed twice, and on page 197 the second half of a line is printed upside down. But the two-hundred-odd maps in this book are the main thing, and they bring the reader varied rewards. They bring him form and color to revel in, quaintness to delight in, ignorance to chuckle over, progress to applaud. They are a graphic chronicle, however enjoyable, of man’s growing knowledge of his way around.

39 Words Enough 1969

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris. American Heritage and Houghton Mifflin [1969], 1600 pp., $7.95 and up. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition. ed. Lawrence Urdang, Stuart Berg Flexner. Random House (1968), 1600 pp., $6.95 and up. We do not want dictionaries. (Want, v. tr. 1. to fail to have; be without; lack.) There are more dictionaries abroad than a body (Regional) can properly shake a stick at (Informal). The Random House Dictionary, Unabridged, came out three years ago. Meanwhile Random House continued to emend and reprint their stocky portable, the American College Edition, based on their Unabridged. And now there emerges from another quarter, all new, the medium-sprawling and imposingly underpriced American Heritage Dictionary. Nor shall we want copies of dictionaries. The demand for the fivepounder last mentioned could soar annually into the millions of copies without embarrassing the publishers, so prudent has been their contingency planning. To see this spate in its historical setting we must look away back to 1961, a year best known to lexicographical publishers as the year of the WebsterMerriam Third International. This big book sparked an unwonted if not unwanted public involvement by sparking a confusion between descriptive and prescriptive lexicography. Scientific linguistics describes and does not prescribe. But surely the pub-

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lic preoccupation with this science was not to be counted on for vast sales of a Webster Unabridged. There are a variety of things you can do with the book, like looking up the dates of James Buchanan or seeing how to pronounce Bialystok; but laymen continued to see its central role as the normative one of establishing correct usage. The Webster Unabridged in its various editions had stood for generations as proof of correctness; it was named, even, for America’s first great arbiter of tasteful English. And then there came, on the heels of this tradition, the ponderous Webster-Merriam Third International. Like earlier editions, it was just awful. (Awful, adj. 4. solemnly impressive; inspiring awe.) Unlike earlier editions, it had gone descriptive. It had shifted its allegiance from what should be to what is. But the public, less nimble in its shifts of attitude, saw the weighty volume still as laying down the law. Public response was lively in an undeserved if not unforeseen way. Familiar mistakes in English were seen to have sudden official sanction. The Webster-Merriam had abdicated its prescriptive responsibility while retaining its prescriptive power. One wonders in what measure the latter-day ugly American (agendas, publicity-wise, hopefully 2) may owe its virulence to the indiscriminate authority of this awful tome. Ain’t has long been the stock example of what schoolteachers are against. In its favor there has been not only the charm of permissiveness, moreover, but also, in the first person singular, an appeal to reason: the m of am’t I? inevitably goes to n before t by a law of assimilation that anyone can feel, and then the a lengthens in compensation for what is felt as a weakening in the consonant. Yet it seems that in this celebrated instance the schoolteachers have been more than a match for the combined forces of permissiveness and reason, and that their prescription has become descriptive fact. Today the Random House dictionaries describe ain’t, for the ordinary educated American, as self-conscious vernacular. These dictionaries retain the descriptive mood. They give us hopefully 2 and agendas straight out, dead of pan and strong of stomach. The normative void that the Third International left behind it went on aching, and this is cited as a major reason for the American Heritage Dictionary. Good usage was determined for this dictionary by a distinguished panel of a hundred writers, editors, and educators. An effective way was devised of combining the benefits of description and prescription and even being descriptive about the prescriptions. Common uses are recorded, and then, where evaluation is called for, the numerical vote of the panel is shown.

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Hopefully 2, for instance, was swallowed by 44 percent; agendas by 59 percent. Some of my best friends were on the panel, but these scores do little credit to the others on the panel. The system, however, is excellent. To use this dictionary as a guide to good usage simply avoid all the usages, perhaps 300 in number, that were brought to a vote at all; for to put a usage to a vote is to question it, and to question it is to prove it questionable. So used, the dictionary becomes in its prescriptive or proscriptive role a direct reflection of the editor’s own good taste in the good old-fashioned way. Some 800 notes on usage are conspicuously inserted at the appropriate dictionary entries. About 500 of them are categorical, with no question of a vote. They convey incontestable and often subtle observations such as that “able to” can govern an active infinitive and not a passive one, or that “amenable to” governs a gerund and not an infinitive. The other 300, the voted ones, I advised taking as categorical proscriptions; but they have also their descriptive value, as sources of interesting if disturbing statistics on the literary tastes of a hundred respected Americans. Altogether, I find the usage notes an unusual and commendable enrichment. But the most startling innovation in this dictionary lies rather in a scientific direction, independent of norms of usage. It is a long list of the IndoEuropean roots and the English words that embody them. If the columns comprising this list were laid end to end they would run to 114 feet. This appendix is a contribution not only to education but to scholarship; linguists of my acquaintance are finding it a more useful source than what had been available. Moreover the etymologies in the body of the dictionary are full and ubiquitous, a fitting outgrowth of the 114 feet of roots. It is to the publishers’ eternal credit to have catered so generously to an abstractly scientific interest on the part of a small fraction of the many expected buyers. That fraction will have every encouragement to grow. Etymology has power to fascinate, and many buyers will get happily hooked by it as they thumb the book. Etymology has the appeal of an experimental science with none of the fuss. You get to pursuing it in reverie while reading your newspaper or driving your car. Uniformities of derivation have been borne in on you, and you keep trying them on new cases. A hypothesis strikes you, and when you get back to the dictionary you check. If you were right you are pleased with yourself, and if you were wrong you are pleased with the surprise etymology. Or, if you are simply at a loss to imagine an etymology for some word, you look it up out of curiosity. The better you get,

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up to a point, the odder and more rewarding these unimagined answers tend to be; for you have learned to see through the ordinary cases. Eventually, I suppose, you get so good that the cases you still have to look up all say “etymology obscure”; but it will have been a great game while it lasted. The front matter of the Random House Unabridged included essays on phonetics, dialects, usage, and history of the English language by Kemp Malone, Raven McDavid, and Arthur J. Bronstein. These are preserved in the College Edition, except that Malone’s historical survey gave way to an anonymous one. The American Heritage Dictionary includes a sheaf of essays on these and further topics by Morris Bishop, Morton Bloomfield, Richard Ohmann, Henry Lee Smith, Jr., Wayne O’Neil, Harry Kucera, and Calvert Watkins. Watkins is the authority behind the 114-foot tabulation of IndoEuropean roots and fruits, and he has written an instructive piece on IndoEuropean research and prehistory to go with it. Bloomfield, an eminent Anglo-Saxonist, was just the man to pick up the thread at the dawn of history and carry on from there. Ohmann sketches the plan of structural linguistics. Kucera says what computers can do for language study. O’Neil and Smith relate phonetics to traditional English spelling on the one hand and to dialects on the other. Mostly these scholars brief the layman on the scholarly consensus. But at a point in Smith’s essay I sensed that I was getting this scholar’s new slant. He treats the sound h as a glide, on a par with y and w. The glide y is the y that we hear between be and off. The glide w is the w that we hear in the middle of phooey. This much is standard phonetic classification. But it is startling to see h treated as a glide, and reported after stressed vowels such as the a in dare. We do not think of h after a vowel, and when we try to enact Smith’s account we sound breathy because we overdo it. I am now persuaded, however, and in my mild way I am enjoying the new outlook. Another flashback now to Random House. Their College Edition omits the colored atlas section and the dictionaries of translation that brightened up the back of the Unabridged. But it retains some useful tabulations at that point, notably a list of symbols and a publishers’ style sheet. I suppose this last must be accounted a concession to the prescriptive, but it runs closer to typography than to belles lettres. In the main body of the Random House Unabridged, each new letter was heralded by an ornamental display of about a dozen phases of that letter in the history of the alphabet. These displays carry over into the College Edition. The American Heritage Dictionary has followed suit, departing only in detail. The dictionaries are essentially alike also in their charts of the Indo-

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European family tree, and in their inclusion, at the appropriate entries, of tables such as that of the chemical elements. The American Heritage Dictionary outdoes the Random House College Edition in these useful tables. It adds the Morse code, a table of calendars, a table of geologic periods, and a table listing and illustrating the taxonomic categories. This last is apt to confuse; it does not show which taxa are exhaustive and which are illustrative, and it does not suggest which of the illustrative lower taxa are contained in which of the higher ones. But I recognize that it is hard to convey much of this without excessive tabulation. The Random House College Edition is illustrated with a profusion of little black line cuts, set into the text. These are inherited selectively from the Unabridged. They are strikingly close also to those in the American College Dictionary; many are merely redrawn with the creature facing another way. Where the entry is geographical, the illustrative cut is a little sketch map showing the location. This helpful device has carried over into the American Heritage Dictionary. But in its illustrations the American Heritage Dictionary has made a bold departure. Its 4,000 little pictures are strewn at irregular intervals down the broad and otherwise blank outer margins of the pages. They are largely halftones, and they draw largely upon great paintings and tastefully illustrated source books. It is a pleasure simply to scan these margins. A list of 4,000 acknowledgments in an appendix gives the pedigree of every picture. The American Heritage Dictionary is said to have 155,000 entries. The Random House College Edition is its equal in thickness, but smaller in format; and I estimate its entries at 100,000. One of its 55,000 misses is shegetz. But there are extras on both sides. The Random House College Edition lists the two Valdemars, and in both spellings; the American Heritage has none of that. The principle of individuation of entries in the American Heritage Dictionary is puzzling. The article on get runs to eleven column inches and includes some seventy subordinate headings such as get about, get across, get ahead, get along, get at, get away with, and so on to get with. Farther down the page, then, as independent entries not subordinated to get, there appear get away, get out, get together, and get up. These verb phrases prove to be interspersed with the corresponding nouns, again as independent entries: getaway, get-out, get-together, and get-up. I see no more substantial reason for the double standard. Christian names are listed in the main body of the American Heritage Dictionary; separately in the Random House. Both books give the etymolo-

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gies; indeed, the etymological brilliance of the American Heritage Dictionary must not be allowed to blind us to the commendable treatment of that side of things in the Random House Edition. But I was surprised to see Norma explained in the latter as feminine of Norman; I expected the Latin account, as in the American Heritage. The American Heritage surprised me in listing Sheila and not Karen; these names seem to me to have reached our shores on the same wave. Both dictionaries run their encyclopedic listings of places and persons into the main word list. In both books these listings are limited to little more than what suffices for identification; but that little more is not immune to error. Both books muff Macao, in their different ways. The American Heritage Dictionary calls it an island. This may have come of reading the World Almanac, or perhaps some eighteenth-century source. The Random House College Edition redundantly calls the water at Macao the Chu-Kiang River, as if to say the Pearl River River. The latter dictionary also evidently muffs San Marino, giving it 38 square miles; the American Heritage and other sources agree on 23. Not that such agreement is conclusive. Forty to sixty years ago the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the World Almanac, Scott’s stamp albums, and the American atlases and dictionaries were in general agreement on eight square miles for Monaco, but this figure was fourteen times too big. The Britannica, eleventh edition, elaborated: “8 sq. m., the length being 2 1 4 m. and the width varying from 165 to 1100 yds.” An editor of the fourteenth edition spotted the arithmetical absurdity and deleted the correct length and width. Perhaps, to do him justice, he checked the area in some book that had copied it from the Britannica. The American Heritage Dictionary is out of date on the Polish Corridor. The Random House College Edition has it right. Both books describe Perm as “formerly Molotov,” neglecting us pre-Molotovians to whom it was always Perm. Both books are fallible on foreign names. Random House goes doubly wrong on the Turkish name for Scutari. American Heritage skips that word but fumbles the somewhat similar Turkish name for Skoplje. American Heritage misplaces the stress in Bialystok, Otranto, and Lourenço Marques. American Heritage does somewhat better than Random House on the pronunciation of Lódz. Both are good books. You would expect each to cost much more than it does. Between them I would choose the American Heritage Dictionary, paying the extra dollar.

40 Skinner Retirement Party 1974

Fred and I are the Edgar Pierce twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology and I am the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. I have it on Lewis Carroll’s authority that Tweedledee was the logician. I quote: “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” That makes Fred Tweedledum. However, the comparison holds only up to a point. We never agreed to have a battle. Contrariwise. As a matter of fact, this Edgar Pierce two-seater of ours is only a late connection. Our joint incumbency of it dates back less than 20 years. In our youth we were paired under other auspices: the Harvard Society of Fellows. The Society began operations 41 years ago, in 1933. Fred and I were there, as original junior fellows. The Harvard Gazette came out last week with a contrary story, but we must not believe everything we read in the papers. That joint incumbency of 1933 was less exclusive than our Edgar Pierce sofa. We original junior fellows were not two, but six. There were Fred and I and there was Garrett Birkhoff to name the three who are now professors at Harvard. But even in that class of six Fred and I were a very special subclass of two: we were the only ones who already had Ph.D.s. The Society of Fellows was founded partly in order to counteract an over-emphasis of the Ph.D.; so Fred and I were living testimonials to the forbearance of the founding fathers. It was then and there that Fred and I met, but we had already been preconditioned to see eye to eye on most of what mattered. Back in the 20s I had imbibed behaviorism at Oberlin from Raymond Stetson, who had wisely required us to study John B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. In Czechoslovakia a few years later I had been confirmed in my behaviorism by Rudolf Carnap’s physicalism, his Psychologie in physika-

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lischer Sprache. So Fred and I met on common ground in our scorn of mental entities. Mind shmind; on that proposition we were agreed. The things of the mind were strictly for the birds. To say nothing of freedom and dignity. By coincidence we had also another substantial preconditioning in common; a predilection for language. I was already an etymology buff of some years’ standing, but it was Fred who brought me abreast of the enlightened new linguistics; Otto Jespersen and Leonard Bloomfield. It seems to me that we were sitting on a grassy upper slope of Belmont Hill, which in those days was rural New England, and Fred told me about Jespersen’s new scientific approach to English grammar. Fred was keen on linguistics old and new, for it was in those days also that he put me on to John Horne Tooke. He gave me the earliest American edition of Epea Pteroenta, Or, the Diversions of Purley, a two volume essay in philosophical grammar dating from 1775. So you see that Fred’s book on verbal behavior was no latter-day afterthought by way of applying behavioral psychology. It was brewing in the early days. In fact, language and literature came first; for I seem to have known that Fred was an English major at Hamilton College. And I think of two minor publications of his, back in the salad days of the Society of Fellows, in which he applied his behavioral psychology not just to verbal behavior in the raw but to belles lettres themselves. One of these was a behavioral analysis of some sonnets of Shakespeare, and the other was an etiology of the verbal misbehavior of Gertrude Stein. All in all he was not one to make short shrift of his finer sensibilities. He even got himself a clavichord. But already in those days Fred was a scientist at heart. He was already building ingenious individual automat cafeterias for his albino rats. I remember the delight he took in a gadgety new overcoat that had all sorts of unexpected new tabs and pockets and reversibilia insuspecta. He was not only a scientist, he was an engineer. They were good years, 1933–6, when the Society of Fellows was new and the world was young. In 1934 Harry Levin moved in to brighten the Society further, and Benedict Einarson, and George Homans. Eve Blue came too, embellishing the scene; soon she was Eve Skinner. And then in 1936 Fred and Eve fared forth again from our midst, to wander eleven years in the wilderness. By 1947 they were back; Fred was William James Lecturer, and Verbal Behavior was verbally in hand. The happy ending was at hand, and we have all lived happily ever after. Let us drink to many more years of the same.

41 A Letter to Mr. Ostermann1 1975

Dear Mr. Ostermann: You have asked me about the philosopher’s responsibility. I can perhaps best begin by contrasting it with the doctor’s responsibility. The licensed physician, whatever his specialty, has had a basic training that renders him abler than most laymen in medical emergencies generally. Hence if he is present at an accident it is his responsibility to step forward and help. The medical professional recognizes this responsibility, and this is much to their credit. Is there a somehow analogous responsibility for philosophers? No, the case is utterly different. Philosophy is not a unified profession with a great core of shaped competence, as medicine is. ‘Philosophy’ is one 1. Editorial Note: Professor Quine’s remarks concerning philosophy constitute his responses to the following questions addressed to him by Robert Ostermann in the course of Mr. Ostermann’s preparation of his article on American philosophers for The National Observer. (See “How Today’s Thinkers Serve Society,” The National Observer, July 20, 1964, p. 18.) The questions are: 1. What do you consider to be the business of philosophy and the responsibility of the philosopher? 2. To what matters, what kind of questions, do you find your attention most compellingly drawn? Why? 3. What about such questions as how a man orients himself to the world of his experience, what meanings he finds in events, what values he aspires to, what standards guide his choices in all he does? If the philosopher does not examine them, as well as other questions of broad human concern, who shall? Or is speculation on them without value? 4. How do you identify the problems you approach as properly yours? 5. How big a part does the examination and criticism of the work and methods of others play in your work? 6. Why did you choose philosophy for a career?

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of a number of blanket terms used by deans and librarians in their necessary task of grouping the myriad topics and problems of science and scholarship under a manageable number of headings. The fact that one man’s topic and another’s are grouped under ‘philosophy’ makes neither man responsible for the other’s topic, nor for any substantial intervening topic. I am not alluding to the fragmentation of specialties; I speak of the insignificance of a certain verbal grouping. The individuals who are engaged in disparate pursuits called philosophy can be as broad as you like in their concerns, but the spread of their concerns need be neither coextensive nor concentric with the spread of the administrative and bibliothecary term ‘philosophy’. Take my case. Part of what I treat in my books and classes is reckoned as philosophy. Part of it is reckoned as mathematics. In fact I give a graduate course in the mathematics department. But I recognize no responsibility for nine-tenths of what else may be grouped by deans and librarians under the head of ‘mathematics’—or philosophy. A professor’s professional responsibility pertains to the topics that he professes: that he writes of, lectures on, advises on. Whether these happen to be listed under the broad heading of philosophy or under that of mathematics has no bearing on whether he is also responsible for other topics that happen to be listed under philosophy or mathematics. The terms ‘mathematics’ and ‘philosophy’ are something like ‘Middle Atlantic’ and ‘Northwest Central’, where ‘medicine’ has more the organic connotation of ‘Texas’. The fact that medicine is organized around a common core of competence is to be explained in part by the fact that such competence can be markedly effective and vital to human welfare. If some philosopher were to arrive at results of comparable decisiveness on “such questions as how a man orients himself to the world of his experience, what meanings he finds in events, what values he aspires to, what standards guide his choice” (I quote you), and if these findings proved as vital as medicine to human welfare, then philosophy might indeed come to organize itself like medicine around a common core. But even this eventuality need not obligate any philosophers hitherto so called to cultivate that core; it could as well cause their topics to be relisted under another name than ‘philosophy’. Actually I should have thought psy-

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chology an equally likely region for the topics you mention; but no matter. Any of us of course might have engaged in topics more beneficial to humanity than those we actually are in. You and I might have been more useful as medical men or spiritual leaders than as editor and logician. If you and I were today to find a way of allaying a major political or social evil—a way as real as what Enders and Salk found for polio— then I think we would be duty-bound even now to quit our respective posts and join in the good new cause. But this responsibility would hinge no more on the nature of my present work than on that of yours. Nor, I venture to say, does the nature of my present work make me any likelier to discover that social remedy than the nature of your present work makes you. The fact that mine is partly allocated under a corner of that blanket word ‘philosophy’ is neither here nor there. It crossed my mind at one time of a national crisis that I could increase my usefulness by shelving my theoretical interests and serving in the navy. I did so, but this was a point of private conscience unrelated to any special obligation as philosopher. Why, you ask, did I choose philosophy as a career? It was a matter of intellectual curiosity about the basis of mathematics and natural science. I majored in mathematics and did my graduate study in a philosophy department; but my focus stayed much the same, not shifting to social ills and values. That would have been a good interest too, but the chance association under the word ‘philosophy’ is immaterial. You ask how I identify the problems I approach as properly mine. Any critical thinker has enough sense of method and evidence to know roughly where his competence leaves off. I know my competence in parts of logic and my lack of competence in chemistry and sociology. If I am concerned with some problem and it turns out to depend on solving another problem, then I might tackle the latter if competent, and otherwise I might try to develop competence for it or leave it to someone else. Whether the problem is called philosophical is, again, neither here nor there. Shifting now from the main line of argument for the space of a final remark, I should like on general principles to enter a plea for respect for theoretical creativity. Philosophical and scientific literature is abundant; substantial theoretical contributions are not. Each substantial

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theoretical contribution is a near miracle. Nobody is under any obligation to bring off anything of the kind. Anyone who somehow contrives to do so simply deserves acclaim, and does not thereby incur some added obligation. Sincerely yours, W. V. Quine Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy

42 Farewell Thanks at Villa Serbelloni, Italy 1975

My time has come to testify. In a few days I’ll be back on earth, teaching logic. (We grieve, Marge and I, and also we gloat; we gloat over the five and a half weeks that we enjoyed on this celestial sphere.) Barber . . . I finished my project and started my next. It’s a good place to work, but that’s the least of it. Freedom from interruption could be arranged also in dismal surroundings—even at home. I see this residence rather as a prize for purported past achievement. The prize is meant for dedicated intellectuals, and a dedicated intellectual can’t long enjoy even the most luxurious vacation unless he is also getting on with his work. So the combination of amenities and facilities is ideal. The social side serves both purposes inseparably; pleasure and learning. The residencies overlap in such a way as to cement a good number of good friendships. Bill and Betsy [Olson] have accreted six hundred in this way. We are grateful to Francis and Angelo and Amilcare and the rest of this able staff for doing so much to keep us happy, and to Miss Hall for sparing us so many troublesome operations. As for you, Betsy, and you, Bill, I can’t begin to express my admiration for the resourcefulness, wisdom, and easy charm with which you are running this glorious affair. We thank you very much.

43 Introducing Church 1975

We are to hear the annual lecture in memory of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was Harvard’s great philosopher forty years ago. In my logically oriented eyes he was the great logician, standing for half of Principia Mathematica. By the time he came to Harvard he had turned away from logic. But he graciously turned back long enough to sponsor my doctoral thesis, 1931– 1932. Whitehead had been a great pioneer in modern logic, but it was rather on the continent of Europe that the exciting later developments had taken place. It was only the year after my doctorate that I went there and caught up. Unknown to me, an offshoot of the flourishing European logic was already taking root in America. It was taking root at Princeton, under the green thumb of Alonzo Church. He had got his doctorate there in mathematics in 1927, and taken his year in Europe, and had been teaching at Princeton since 1929. By 1934 the tree was healthy with fruit. Important papers were appearing by Church and his pupils Kleene and Rosser. Bernays went to Princeton as visiting professor about then, and so did Gödel. Church developed the lambda calculus, which was, among other things, a cornerstone of the theory of recursive functions. Also he proved the impossibility of a decision procedure for quantification theory. And he founded the Journal of Symbolic Logic. He was its prime mover, and for forty years he has been its main sustaining force. Of the two thousand reviews, roughly speaking, that have appeared in the Journal, he wrote about seven hundred and delegated and edited the rest. Logic has become a major branch of mathematics, and this ever-thickening journal is very largely responsible for that fact. It is largely due to Church’s Journal, also, that America is now where logic mainly flourishes.

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I could go on and praise Church’s exhaustive and indisposable bibliography of logic, and his compendious Introduction to Mathematical Logic, and I could talk of his philosophically influential work on semantics and intensional logic. But we would all rather hear from him. Professor Church!

44 Introducing Dummett 1976

The William James Lectures take place every second year, normally, and normally there is an alternation between philosophy and psychology. The first William James Lecturer was Dewey, 1930. Others have been Lovejoy, Köhler, Gibson, B. F. Skinner. There have been a notable succession of William James Lecturers from England: Russell, Popper, Austin, Grice, Ayer, and now, happily, Michael Dummett. Twenty-two years ago I was visiting professor for a year at Oxford. Among my auditors there were three who were particularly assiduous. They came regularly, listened hard, and met between times to compare notes. From time to time they made an appointment with me to raise questions and objections they had been hatching. One was a visiting young Privatdozent of Innsbruck: Wolfgang Stegmüller. One was a scholar newly arrived from New Zealand: Jonathan Bennett. One was a young prize fellow of All Souls: Michael Dummett. I don’t know whether Michael’s interest in Frege began then or earlier. But he wanted access to Frege’s Nachlass, which was being guarded pretty jealously at Münster by Heinrich Scholz and his younger colleagues Hermes and Hasenjaeger. We thought it might help Michael’s chances if we went to Münster together, for I had corresponded with Scholz for many years. It worked, and now we have the abundant fruit of Michael Dummett’s twenty years on Frege [hold up book]. [It is] our good fortune now to have him with us as William James Lecturer. He is scheduled for eight lectures on “The Logical Roots of Metaphysics,” on successive Wednesdays at this hour, except spring recess. I have a close connection after this lecture, so if I skip out before quite the end, it wouldn’t be meant as a comment. Michael Dummett!

45 Introducing Campbell 1977

The William James Lectures take place every second year, normally, and normally there is an alternation between philosophy and psychology. The first William James Lecturer was Dewey, 1930. Others: Russell, Lovejoy, Köhler, Popper, Skinner, Austin. This year it was the psychologists’ turn to choose, but in doing so they were generous to the philosophers; for Donald Campbell’s ideas are every bit as significant for philosophy as for psychology. There is increasing awareness of the crucial philosophical importance of psychological facts. There was once a tendency for philosophers to seclude themselves from empirical science in an ivory tower; but there are chinks in the ivory, and they are widening. Then a practical problem arises: the philosopher’s hold on the psychological facts is apt to be tenuous; and if he does apply himself to the psychological literature, he is apt to find that the actual experiments are largely tangential to his philosophical concerns. What is wanted is someone equally active and equally gifted in both domains. William James was one such, 70 years ago. Professor Campbell is another. He has shed much light on central philosophical issues, and is about to shed more. Donald Campbell was born in 1916 at Grass Lake, Michigan. Grass Lake is in [the] same county as Wolf Lake, where I vacationed with my parents that same summer. I didn’t know him at that time. But with the passing of the years he attained high distinction. He won the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution award. He belongs to the National Academy of Science and was president of American Psychological Association and of Midwestern Psychological Association. He was professor at University of Chicago and is now Morrison Professor of Psychology at Northwestern. He has published many articles and at least four books:

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Unobtrusive Measures, Influence of Culture on Visual Perception, Ethnocentrism, and Social Experimentation. His lectures are scheduled for the six successive Wednesdays at this hour. They are on “Descriptive Epistemology: Psychological, Sociological, and Evolutionary.” The topic for today’s: “The Field and Its Philosophical Setting.” Professor Campbell!

46 Knights and Knaves 1978

What Is the Name of This Book? The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles. By Raymond M. Smullyan. 241 pp. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. $8.95. Raymond M. Smullyan is a gifted magician. Even when crowded about by friends and being watched from every angle, he has invariably baffled us all. He is also an accomplished logician. A sudden deft turn and surprising conclusion in his logical writings sometimes remind one of his legerdemain. The present book looks and reads like a bedside omnibus of jokes and riddles, long concealing its ulterior purpose of deep instruction. It includes one genre of riddles that embodies the very principle of legerdemain: diversion of attention. An example: “Those who know anything about Catholicism, do you happen to know if the Catholic Church allows a man to marry his widow’s sister?” Another: “If an airplane crashes right on the border of the United States and Canada, in which country would you bury the survivors?” We become wary of these traps, but only to fall into cunningly inserted traps of other genres. There are jokes about mathematicians, musicians, computers, absentminded professors. Most readers will already have been familiar with many of them, and many readers with most of them. Also we are taken the round of the familiar paradoxes. But it is the riddles and not the jokes or paradoxes that preponderate, and the riddles evolve into puzzles. They run increasingly to type: puzzles about knights who always speak truly and knaves who always lie. “Suppose A says, ‘Either I am a knave or B is a knight.’ What are A and B?” This is a genre to which most of us have been exposed, but never in such quantity. A little logic makes all the difference; anyone who has tinkered with elementary modern logic will solve this last example in short or-

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der: “Knights.” Professor Smullyan is unstinting in his answers, improving the opportunity to impart a bit of logic along the way. He also propounds puzzles outside the knight-and-knave cycle, notably a mighty puzzle about Dracula and some themes from “Alice in Wonderland.” But knight and knave predominate, and the puzzles about them grow more complex and contrived. Readers familiar with Gödel’s great theorem of 1931 sense the trend: it is thither. Celebration of Kurt Gödel’s work is always in order, and in this case it is fortuitously timed: Gödel died while this book was at press. Whatever valid and usable rules of proof one may devise for mathematics, some truths of mathematics are bound to escape the net; such is the gist of Gödel’s theorem. Even some elementary truths about whole numbers will be unprovable. Given any proof procedure, Gödel shows how to construct a sentence purely in the language of elementary number theory that cannot be proved unless it is false. But it cannot be false and provable, if they were valid rules of proof; so it is true but unprovable. Professor Smullyan states Gödel’s theorem only in his last pages, but meanwhile develops it in allegory. True sentences are disguised as knights, false ones as knaves. Provable and refutable sentences are “established” knights and knaves. Definable sets of sentences are clubs to which the knights and knaves belong. Several conditions are stipulated; one of them, G, says that for every club there is someone who professes to belong to it. The allegorical version of Gödel’s conclusion, then, is that there are unestablished knights; and it is quickly derived. One is pleased at how quickly, because proofs of Gödel’s theorem are heavy going. Translating the allegory into plain text, however, one sees what happened. The sticky part of Gödel’s proof comes in constructing a sentence that is true just in case it is unprovable; and in the allegory, this part was in effect largely granted by the stipulation G. Tarski proved that the set of true sentences of a language is normally not definable in that language. In the allegory, this means that the set of all knights is not a club, and the proof goes through in short order on modest assumptions. What is then surprising is that the stipulation G now follows quickly and easily. Have we here a royal road to Gödel’s theorem after all? No; use is made of a tacit assumption that any knight will announce his affiliations instead of holding his peace. If we translate from allegory to plain text, this assumption ceases to be true. In the end Professor Smullyan settles matters by reverting to plain text

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and deriving G from a new stipulation, H, which I shall pass over. H is complex and can only be grasped after some study. Professor Smullyan says, and rightly, that the proof of H is not hard; but he does not give it. Proofs of two supporting assumptions are also passed over; they would have been long and fussy, as Professor Smullyan notes. What is the name of this book? “Gödel Without Tears” it is not. The ascent through puzzles of knights and knaves turns wearisome when the Gödel goal begins to be envisaged. Any continuing interest depends on peering through the ponderous allegory to Gödel’s theorem itself, in anticipation to Professor Smullyan’s deferred unveiling of it. Once unveiled, the proof is neither full nor notably perspicuous. The value of the book lies in the wealth of ingenious puzzles. They afford amusement, vigorous exercise and instruction. Imaginative teachers can mine them to enliven their logic classes.

47 Introduction to Gail Caldwell Stine Memorial Lecture* 1980

Gail’s untimely death was a sad loss, the loss of a valued colleague, a promising philosopher, and a brave young woman. In establishing this lectureship her parents have created a memorial for Gail of the most appropriate kind. Gail was my student, and I am proud and grateful to have been chosen as the first Gail Caldwell Stine Lecturer.

*Editors’ note: This is the introduction to Quine’s invited lecture, “What Is It All About?” (see credits).

48 What I Believe 1984

The pre-eminent philosopher of our time, W. V. Quine pushes forward the frontiers of scepticism. His colourful and witty treatises on logic persistently and successfully attack assumptions made by sceptics before him. His various innovations are now emerging as a coherent and systematic world-view comparable to Wittgenstein’s in the magnitude of its intellectual achievement. Works include: ‘Methods of Logic’, ‘From a Logical Point of View’, ‘The Ways of Paradox’ and ‘Word and Object’.

The world is a multitude of minute twitches in the void. They are microphysical events, related one to another by any of three or four forces. It is convenient to say that what do the twitching are particles, but the stricter line is to rest with the twitches and let the particles go. A particle is subject to identity crises; it can pass so close to another, for instance, that it makes no sense to say, from there on, which was which. The particle may be regarded as just a conceptually convenient serial grouping of microphysical events, in much the way that a crowd or a race is a conceptually convenient grouping of persons. Like a crowd or a race, it need not be assured of precise identification at all points. Still it enjoys a more stubborn integrity than the crowd or the race, and this makes the particle concept so convenient as to be practically indispensable. In declaring for microphysical events, or indeed particles, I am not denying the robust reality of our ordinary objects, our sticks and stones. Just as a forest is seen from afar as a mass in which no tree stands forth, so the stick or stone is seen as a mass in which no particle stands forth, but the stick or

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stone, like the forest, is none the less real for that. Eyesight sharper than ours could show these familiar solids to be swarms of vibrating molecules. Discrimination of still smaller particles does ultimately exceed all optical possibilities, because of the coarseness of light itself; but physicists have their more devious resources. How something looks is a relation of the object to the eye of the beholder. An ink blot is continuous to the naked eye and diffuse when magnified. We can imagine extra-terrestrials who are sensitive to radiation outside our visual range, and they might see vaporous clouds, unimaginably coloured, where we see only emptiness. But everything in the world comes down to elementary particles or microphysical events, whatever the point of view. Everything in the world. The qualification is significant, for it sets aside the question of abstract objects such as properties and numbers. These are not in the world, for they are not anywhere; but it may still be held that there are such objects, out of space, out of time. We should be happy to repudiate them, but wishful thinking is not the way of science or true philosophy. Numbers, surely, are appealed to in theoretical physics at every turn. I am not thinking of the mere uses of specific numerals; words used need not always be presumed to name anything. The point is rather that numbers are invoked collectively, not just by name but as values of variables. On any reasonable criterion for assessing the ontological commitments of a theory, our natural science is as firmly committed to numbers as it is to anything. Accepting science as I do, subject of course to subsequent scientific correction, I am constrained to acknowledge the reality of numbers. The same applies to functions, and to classes. Actually, we know from set theory that the classes are enough; they can serve also as numbers and functions. But I draw the line at other abstract objects, notably properties. These are beset with problems of identity and other logical difficulties, and anyway they serve no really clear purposes that are not served by classes. I said that everything in the world resolves into elementary particles or microphysical events, and then I noted that this does not apply to abstract objects. It applies emphatically to man, however, and to the mind of man. Mind is part of the activity of a physical object, the human animal. Selfawareness is just one of the various perspectives upon a physical object. Here the object is oneself, observed from within. Some pow’r did us the giftie grant To see oursels as others can’t.

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One’s acts and decisions are activities of a physical object, and are subject to outside causes as are the movements of any physical objects. If nature is deterministic, so that its state at any time is causally determined by its previous states, then determinism applies in particular to human behaviour. This point has been resisted by some philosophers, who see it as precluding freedom of the will. It must be said that determinism has also been challenged from a very different quarter. The quantum physics of microphysical events has engendered quandaries regarding the very notion of cause and effect as traditionally conceived. However, that is an unlikely quarter in which to seek loopholes for freedom of the will. I hold rather, as have many before me, that determinism has no bearing on freedom of the will. One’s behaviour is free when it is caused by one’s internal drives, be they ideals or appetites; and it is no curb to freedom that these drives are caused in turn. Given then that one’s acts are determined ultimately by outside causes, is there any warrant for praise or blame? There is indeed. Good men, like good paintings and good machines, are justly admired and commended, and bad ones disparaged; and there need be no suspension of causality. On the contrary, praise and reward help to cause good behaviour as well as good art and good technology; and censure and punishment can help to discourage the bad. Praise and blame in the moral sphere raise the problem, still, of how our standards of good and evil are justified. The hypothesis of the existence of God has offered an objective basis for moral values, in God’s decrees. Is this hypothesis not comparable to scientific hypotheses, which are supported by the explanations that they offer of known states of affairs? It is not. What this hypothesis explains is not a known state of affairs, but only a desired one: the objectivity of moral values. The God hypothesis is, insofar a case of wishful thinking, equal and opposite to the case noted earlier of the wishful repudiation of numbers and kindred abstract objects. Theism is rich in comforts. It is associated with the dream of life after death and of reward for virtue unrewarded on earth. On the latter point, and the correlative threat of hellfire, religion has been a boon to society, promoting charity and curbing crime. These social benefits, unlike mere wishful thinking, are a sound reason for propounding religious doctrine. Whether they are a sufficient reason, I hesitate to say; but they afford no evidence of truth.

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Arguments for the truth of theism there have indeed been, but they fall short. The intricacies of organic nature have been said to bear witness to God as designer; but then God’s modus operandi is fully as hard to explain as the intricacies of organic nature. Another argument begins by defining God as a being that necessarily exists. I am spared trying to do justice to this elusive argument, for it is swept aside if we reject as gratuitous, as I do, the very notion of metaphysical necessity. Necessity makes sense to me only relative to passing contexts: something holds necessarily, relative to a going dialogue, if it follows from the beliefs or assumptions shared by the participants of the dialogue at the time. Absolutely there are just the true and the false, without benefit of adverb. Metaphysical necessity is one of the mainstays of theology that hark back to Aristotle. Another of them is a startling restriction on contingent statements about the future: that they are now neither true nor false, and become true only when the event is clinched. The theological bearing of the doctrine is as follows. If the sentences were true all along, then God in his omniscience would already know they were true, and thus the future would be determined in advance by God’s knowledge; and determinism is thought, however wrongly, to preclude free will. In my philosophy this hedging of futures gets short shrift, as did metaphysical necessity. I view statements about the future as true or false and forever, though in most cases we shall never know which; and determinism is as may be. Notions and distinctions have been devised with a view to theism, we see, that are better cleared away. But, we may still ask, do we know that theism is false? ‘Know’ is a pernicious verb. Science is refined common sense, and is fallible at various points in various degrees. It is open always to correction by further scientific advances, but there are no alternative avenues of discovery. Barring one or another inordinate reinterpretation of terms, it can be affirmed with all the confidence of sound scientific judgment that there is no God or afterlife. What then is the ground of moral values? Utterly human. Partly they are imposed by legislation, child-rearing, and religion, and partly they are presumably inherited through natural selection. Their point, broadly, is the fostering of society by reconciling the conflicting desires of its members. Moral issues can arise, therefore, over the relative weighting of benefits. One moralist may espouse charity for the retarded; another may interpose reservations on eugenic grounds. One may oppose torture categorically; another may condone it for punishment or for extorting information beneficial to

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society. One who favours torture for its own sake, however, represents no moral position, and indeed conflict usually reflects rather an aloofness from moral values than disagreement over them. Directed as it is to the welfare of a society, morality hinges on demarcation of the pertinent society. An isolated tribe could rest with a crystalline moral law, seemingly absolute and eternal, recognized by all and obeyed by most. Conflict between societies is outside of society and is thus morally neutral, until we widen our horizons and fuse many societies as one. For most of us the demarcation of society is manifold, marking tighter societies that variously overlap within looser ones; thus family, clan, nation, culture, species, phylum, posterity. Besides the moral issues over the weighting of benefits, therefore, there arise moral issues over the weighting of beneficiaries. Moral dilemma is rife. I might gracefully conclude this brief sheaf of beliefs with some cheerful ones about the future of man. My practice down the years of withstanding the lures of wishful thinking has steeled me, but I will say what I can. Man’s abuse of the earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, chthonosphere, and biosphere has aroused at last a laudable host of nature lovers and conservationists, for whose success my hopes are only moderately high but immoderately fervent. The appalling population explosion has become the concern of increasingly vigorous campaigns worldwide for family planning, and I gather that in recent statistics there is some cheer for sanguine hearts. The soaring of violence in recent decades threatens to trim the figures in harsher ways. Meanwhile man’s understanding of the cosmos and its fine texture has advanced at an unprecedented rate and is accelerating. Young people athirst for knowledge have prospects of unimaginable gratification, if the fabric holds.

49 Sticks and Stones; or, The Ins and Outs of Existence 1984

The brain is often compared to a computer. Philosophers disagree on how far the analogy can be carried, but a limited analogy is obvious and useful. It is useful to talk of cognition in terms of input and output. We are organisms in the physical world, and are bombarded with waves and particles. This is input. In the fullness of time we emit descriptions of faraway things and theories of the inner workings of nature. This is output. We, in between, are the information processor, the black box. Our way of processing current input is influenced by earlier input, by theories that we have devised in consequence of earlier input, and by other people’s testimony. That testimony likewise reached us in sound waves, or in rays from pages, and our ability to understand it was acquired through earlier instruction that consisted again in our reacting to sound waves and other sensory input. In short, our objective information about the world passes through our sensory receptors and is transmuted into science according to our subjective way of processing the information—a complex way, in which the processing of later input depends on intermediate effects of processing earlier input. That our objective information about the world comes solely through the sensory receptors was the insight of the old empiricists, except that they talked of sense data, not nerve endings. Talk of nerve endings would have trapped them in a vicious circle, for they were trying to justify our talk of nerve endings and other physical objects. I am not. I am accepting the external world as we know it, and then proceeding to examine the relation of one part—the triggering of our nerve endings—to our knowledge of the whole. The principle of empiricism—nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu—is itself properly seen as a discovery of natural science. Science affirms the

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slenderness of its own data, finding any channel of information other than the sensory to be physically inexplicable. There is no plausible physical mechanism for telepathy, much less for clairvoyance. Clairvoyance would contravene basic physical principles of time and causality. Natural science is fallible, I grant, and subject to revision. The ban against action at a distance gave way under Newton’s theory of gravitation, and the absoluteness of time and the law of conservation of mass gave way under Einstein. But the ban against nonsensory channels of information is where science now stands and has stood for a long time. If the principle of empiricism has been the bulwark of science, science is equally the bulwark of empiricism. The traditional epistemological problem of our knowledge of the external world emerges now, or something like it, as a problem within natural science. It becomes the question how we manage to project our elaborate and powerful theory of the world on the strength of this slender input in the way of triggering of nerve endings. How much is our subjective contribution? How much is revisable, and how far, without violating the data? Science raises the problem by the limitations upon data that science itself imposes, and we can pursue the question by means of science, within the limits that science imposes. Cartesian doubt is not involved. Our question concerns relations between events in the external world: between input, the impacts on our nerve endings, and output, our discourse about the world. For traditional epistemology the empirical content of science consisted of sense data. They give way now to the triggering of nerve endings. We were aware of our sense data, according to the old epistemology, and we somehow reasoned from them to the external world. We are not aware of the triggering; it is rather what makes us aware of our surroundings. The relation of stimulatory input to scientific output mediates all the empirical content of science, and all the evidence there can ever be for scientific pronouncements. But it is a bafflingly complex relation, and no mere matter of the direct conditioning of scientific sentences to stimuli. How are we to untangle it? Certainly the right strategy is investigation of how the descriptive use of language is learned and progressively modified; for language acquires its empirical meaning only as we acquire the language. We learn some expressions derivatively through other expressions, but there has to be a beginning. Some expressions are learned by direct association with nonverbal stimulations. The child is conditioned to utter them in response to those stimulations, or to utter them as a means of inducing

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those stimulations—he may say “Milk” to get milk. At an early stage children learn to assent and dissent—to say “Yes” and “No.” They learn to assent to a queried expression when stimulated in a way that would have inclined them to volunteer the expression themselves, and to dissent when stimulated in a way that would have inhibited such an utterance. When children have learned assent and dissent, they can acquire new expressions by leaps and bounds. What expressions can be learned by direct association with nonverbal stimulations? “Milk” was our example. Others are “It’s raining,” “Dog,” “Fido,” “Red.” They are best thought of to begin with not as terms but as sentences, even when they are single words; for terms connote reference to objects, and that belongs to a more sophisticated stage of language, to be considered later. These early expressions are best thought of holophrastically, moreover, as indissoluble little sentences even when they contain several words. Each is simply an expression learned intact by association with a stimulation and, derivatively, with similar stimulations. The similarity involved here is subjective similarity. It is central to the subject’s programming. It is the avenue of so-called stimulus generalization, and hence of habit formation. The similarity of two stimulations for a given subject is measured by the likelihood of his responding to the one in the way in which he has been conditioned to respond to the other. Similarity, so defined, will change as the subject continues to learn things, but there have to be some unlearned standards of similarity to begin with, if learning is to get started. They are somehow in the genes. Sentences that can be learned thus are what I call observation sentences. They do not need to be learned in that way. One person may acquire a given observation sentence in that way and another person may acquire it through other sentences by explanation or context. A sentence still counts as observational for a subject if nonverbal stimulations that are subjectively very similar always agree with each other in prompting one’s assent to the sentence, or in prompting one’s dissent, or in prompting neither. The point is that the present stimulation can be depended on to settle the verdict independently of what may have been going on in the subject’s mind or in the vicinity at the time. The subject could have acquired these habits by associating the sentence directly with a nonverbal stimulation, whether he happens to have done so or not. Observation sentences are not sentences about observations, nor sense

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data, nor stimulations, nor nerve endings. I gave examples: “Milk,” “It’s raining,” “Dog.” It is inappropriate initially to regard them as about anything. Retrospectively we construe them as about milk, rain, dogs, anything. I have explained that an observation sentence for an individual is one on which his verdict is uniform under subjectively similar nonverbal stimulation. Granted now that verbal behavior conforms to that of the community in which it is learned, and granted further a substantial intersubjective conformity of similar standards, it follows that witnesses will generally agree in their verdicts on observation sentences. Thus it is that observation sentences serve in arbitrating scientific disagreements. Our concern was with the relation of input, the stimulation, to output, scientific discourse. We have now considered the relation of stimulation to observation sentences. We have still to deal with the logical connections between observation sentences and scientific theory. Now observation sentences are occasion sentences, whereas science is couched in standing sentences. What this means is that an observation sentence may be true on one occasion and false on another; “It’s raining” is true at some times and places and false at others. Scientific pronouncements, on the other hand, purport to be true once for all. How can one forge a connection? A plausible first step from occasion sentences to standing sentences is the whenever or wherever construction: “When it rains it pours”; “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”; “When it thunders there is lightning.” It joins observation sentences in pairs to form standing sentences which I call observation categoricals. They express conditional expectation. Children master the component observation sentences and at length come to appreciate that on assenting to the first they are regularly prepared to assent to the second. In the observation categorical we already encounter rudimentary science, at an extremely empirical level. Prediction, the test of natural science, already figures here. Children may, in the case of smoke and fire, be caught short; they may quite properly assent to the query “Smoke?” and then find themselves constrained to dissent from the query “Fire?”, seeing no fire. They thereupon learn, we hope, to dissent from the observation categorical “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” It has been refuted. The conditioning has been extinguished. Find yourself so stimulated as to be prompted to assent to the first component of an observation categorical and to dissent from the second, and you have refuted the categorical. Even here, where science is in the bud, there is no talk of past or future,

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nor is there any call to impute references to objects of any sort. The key idiom that clinches reference to objects is still in the offing. We have now connected observation sentences with some standing sentences, namely, the observation categoricals that contain them. It remains to relate the observation categoricals to more serious science. I suggest that scientific theory is related to observation categoricals by implying some of them and the negations of others. This is surely an oversimplified schema, but it provides the right sort of connection. When a theory is said to be refuted by a failed prediction, what has happened is that an observation categorical implied by the theory has been refuted. Refutation or an observation categorical consists, we saw, in our being so stimulated as to assent to its first part and to dissent from its second part. The observation categorical represents a prediction paired with its initial condition, but with no lapse of time between them. This is as it should be. If there is a lapse of time, what has to be set over against the predicted observation is not the remote initial condition, but the present observable record or other evidence that the condition had been met; and the relation of this evidence to the initial condition is the business of the scientific theory that is being tested. Time and talk of past events belong to the web of scientific theory along with forces, electrons, numbers, and the rest. When I represent the empirical content of a theory as comprising the implied observation categoricals and negations of observation categoricals, I leave two loose ends conspicuously dangling: implication and negation. How do we learn these? Let us begin with negation. I represented the child as somehow learning at an early stage how to assent to or dissent from a queried sentence. Thereupon negation is an easy second-order acquisition. The child comes to appreciate that people are prepared to assent to the negation of a sentence when and only when they are prepared to dissent from the sentence itself, and to dissent from the one when and only when prepared to assent to the other. The learning of the and of logical conjunction can be accounted for similarly. Children learn to assent to the conjunction “p and q” in all and only those circumstances in which they are prepared to assent to “p” and also to “q,” and they learn to dissent from “p and q” in all those circumstances, at least, in which they are prepared to dissent from “p” or to dissent from “q.” This affords them some cases of implication. They have learned that a con-

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junction implies each of its clauses and that the negation of each clause implies the negation of the conjunction. The learning of the or of alternation is parallel to that of and. The child learns that the alternation is implied by each of its clauses and that the negation of the alternation implies the negation of each clause. Let us turn now to objective reference. Some expressions are said to name objects, one apiece. Some expressions, general terms, are said to denote many objects apiece. Some expressions are said to purport to name or denote, but to fail; thus “Pegasus” and “unicorn.” Some expressions, such as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, are said not even to purport to name or denote. Questions abound. Does our use of the term “dog” commit us to admitting to our universe an object which this term names, perhaps the property of being a dog or perhaps the class of dogs, or may we merely regard the term as denoting each dog? Does our use of the term “sake”—“for my sake,” “for God’s sake”—commit us to recognizing various objects for the term to denote, various sakes, and what would they be like? One soon appreciates that merely looking to one’s terms is not the way to settle one’s ontology: what objects one wants or needs to admit. Looking to the words “everything” and “something” is more to the point. If we affirm a sentence governed by “something,” there had better be an object in our universe that meets the condition that the sentence imposes. If we affirm a sentence governed by “everything,” there had better not be among the objects of our universe any that violate the condition that the sentence imposes. In the notation of modern logic the work of “everything” and “something” is accomplished in familiar fashion by means of bound variables and quantifiers: “∀x” and “∃x” mean “everything x is such that” and “something x is such that.” The objects that we reckon to our universe, then, are the objects that we admit as values of the variables. Matters of reference stand forth vividly, we see, in the notation of bound variables. Not so in ordinary language, for those matters are not an everyday concern. However, the illumination gained from the logical notation can be reflected back into ordinary language, revealing a prototype of the bound variable. It is the relative pronoun, and any auxiliary pronouns that refer back to the relative pronoun. So let us look into relative clauses. Here, to begin with, is a sentence about someone named Alex:

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(1) I visited Alex at his country home. We can think of it as “Fa,” where a is Alex. But what is F? Now the business of the relative clause is abstraction of the F: (2) (one) whom I visited at his country home. If we predicate (2) of Alex, thus: Alex is one whom I visited at his country home, we recover (1). Here is a more awkward example: (3) If I see Bobby, I’ll phone his mother. What does this say Bobby is? (4) one whom, if I see, I’ll phone his mother. Awkward cases involve us in contortions. Mathematicians, who spend their days among awkward cases, cut the Gordian knot by switching to the “such that” idiom: (5) one such that, if I see him, I’ll phone his mother. For (2) we get: (6) one such that I visited him at his country home. The grammar thus becomes simple: we just prefix “one such that” to the original sentence, (1) or (3), and put a pronoun in place of the name, “Alex” or “Bobby,” from which we are abstracting. But what about bound variables? They come next. Try this example: (7) I bought Fido from one who found him. This says that Fido is (8) one such that I bought him from one who found him.

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Putting the part “one who found him” likewise into the “such that” idiom, we get: (9) one such that I bought him from one such that he found him. Yes, but who found whom? The latter the former. The mathematician handles the matter of former and latter, or more complex cases such as first, second, and third, by using distinctive letters instead of the pronouns. (9) becomes: (10) x such that I bought x from y such that y found x. So (5) and (6) become: (5) x such that if I see x I’ll phone x’s mother. (6) x such that I visited x at x’s country home. Here, logically if not historically, is the root of the bound variable in all its uses. Its work is combinatorial. It accomplishes what would otherwise be accomplished by focusing on some singular term of particular interest in a sentence, nailing it with a “whom,” and contorting the rest of the sentence to give the “whom” initial position, incidentally relabeling cross-references to avoid ambiguity. Quantification is not logically at the root of the bound variable; it is independent. In saying that there are wombats, ∃F, or that all human beings are mortal, ∀(F→G), there is no call for bound variables. The familiar quantification, with its bound variable, amounts simply to “∃” or “∀” followed by a general term that happens to be an “x such that” clause. I pointed out some cases of implication, at the level of conjunction and alternation. Now that the full power of quantification is at hand in one form or another, there is the whole predicate calculus to draw upon. Simple implications would be learned, here as before, in the process of learning to use the logical words. More complex implications would be learned by chain reasoning from the simple ones. My speculations on language learning have brought us to the point where the learner can be said to be referring to objects. To posit an object, to recognize it as existing, is to admit it as a value of bound variables—or, where ordinary language is concerned, to admit it as the reference of a relative pro-

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noun. When we abstract the relative clause (2) from the sentence (1), we thereby recognize Alex as an element of our ontology. I lately asked whether the term “dog,” which denotes each separate dog, should in addition be taken to name a single abstract object, the property of being a dog or perhaps the class of dogs. We now see that it is a question whether to admit the term in the position of a bound variable, as warranting inference by existential generalization—for example, Dog is a species, ∴ ∃x(x is a species). The step is indeed commonly made; properties or classes are posited. It comes of a confusion, perhaps, between general and singular terms, but this does not condemn it. Science has profited from happy accidents. If we look merely to the relative clauses of every day, or if we translate everyday discourse as literally as we can into quantifier notation, we are apt to find lavish positing of gratuitous and dubious entities. This is all very well; ontology is not the everyday game. Scientists and philosophers are interested in a more explicit accounting of what there may be said to be, and they put a premium also on economy. They put their theories over into ontologically clearer form, perhaps using bound variables, and in such a way as not to admit any values of variables without reason. At that point, what about classes and properties? Both are abstract objects, and there is only this difference between them: classes are identical when they have the same members, whereas properties are sometimes distinguished even when they are properties of all the same things. What conditions do suffice for identity of properties is never made clear. The services that properties offer are offered equally by classes, so in a considered scientific ontology we do well to take the classes and let the properties go, even though the everyday idiom leans decidedly to properties. Quantification over classes is a powerful and versatile tool. A familiar illustration of its utility is Gottlob Frege’s definition of ancestor in terms of parent. My ancestors are the members shared by all classes that contain me and contain also all parents of their own members. A more conspicuous case where abstract objects figure as values of bound variables is the case of numbers. Quantitative laws are central to serious science, for they embody what John Stuart Mill called the method of concomitant variation, which is far and away the most powerful method of induction.

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The glories of number, in the service of science, are further to the glory of classes; for it is known that numbers of all kinds—integers, ratios, reals, imaginaries—can be reconstructed as classes within set theory, where the ontology comprises just individuals of some sort, and classes of them, and classes of those classes, and so on up. Other objects of classical mathematics—functions, relations—can be reconstructed there as well. This hierarchy of classes, with concrete individuals of appropriate sorts at the bottom, evidently suffices for all of science. It is all there need be said to be. The rub is at the bottom: the individuals. The present point is just that no abstract objects need be posited except the hierarchy of classes rising from the chosen domain of individuals. What then of that domain? Bodies, animate and inanimate, abound as values of variables as a matter of course. Unobservable individuals come to be posited too when it is found that our system of statements about the world can thereby be tightened and simplified without detriment to its empirical content, that is, the observation categoricals that the theory implies. I see no difference in kind between these artful posits and the common sense posits of sticks and stones, the macroscopic ontology that stems, one would say, from the dawn of humankind. Many philosophers view the two sorts of objects as fundamentally unlike, these being observed and those being invented or conjectured. I have been urging rather that observation sentences, unformed in respect of reference to objects of any sort, are the best we can muster in the way of direct linguistic response to sensory stimulation. The positing of objects of any sort, from sticks and stones on up or down, is a sophisticated move that makes sense only after the mastery of the relative clause. I speak in the parochial confines of our own language, for it is not clear what sense it would make to speak of reference on the part of a radically alien language. We think of our stone-age forebears as referring at least to sticks and stones, but this is a projection of our own linguistic habits. True, they reacted to sticks and stones; so do cats and dogs; but what does it mean to say that sticks and stones rather than qualities, or temporal stages of sticks and stones, or anything at all, are assumed as objects of reference in their language? I see how to make parochial sense of reference in our language, and in other languages relative to proposed translations into our language, and no more. Nothing, one would have thought, could be more fundamental and objective than the fact of the matter of what there is, what exists, what is real. I

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seem now to derogate from its solidity and objectivity by making no sense of the question outside our own and related languages. I propose now to go farther and raise related doubts within the limits of our own language. Imagine an aggregate scientific theory, an overall system of the world. Or you may just as well imagine a more limited theory, if in isolation from supplementary theories. The imagined theory has its ontology, the objects over which its variables range. Now choose a one-to-one mapping, any one you like, that carries each of these objects into another. It may simply permute the objects among themselves, or it may map them into a new domain. The mapping is what I call a proxy function. Now let us reconstrue every term in the theory to accommodate the proxy function. If a term meant “dog,” or “prime number,” we reinterpret it to mean “f of a dog” or “f of a prime number,” where f is the proxy function. If we transform the old ontology by the proxy function and then reconstrue the terms in this compensatory way, all true statements remain true and all false ones false. Furthermore, all the old empirical evidence for the theory continues to support the theory when the ontology and terms are reinterpreted in this way. For all evidence stems from sensory stimulation and enters language through observation sentences. These are the final arbiter, and are neutral in point of objective reference. They are associated with stimulation as unanalyzed strings of phonemes. The proxy function has changed no word of them, nor any word elsewhere. It has changed only our eventual choice of what objects to think of as values of the variables when they emerge, and as named and denoted by the singular and general terms with which the variables consort. The network of logical implication that connects the sentences of the scientific theory ultimately with observation sentences, through the mediation of observation categoricals or whatever, is independent of these interpretations and hinges only on the logical structure of the sentences concerned. The logical links are thus undisturbed, and the sensory links as well. The whole cosmic upheaval, the reshuffling or transformation of ontology and exhaustive reinterpretation of terms, has disturbed nothing. What matters to science and all discourse is structure rather than ontology. The objects serve as mere nodes in the structure, and this is true of the sticks and stones no less than the electrons, quarks, numbers, and classes. What can it mean, then, to hold one ontology rather than another onto which it can be mapped? I say that it makes sense only relative to proposed translations. We translate pierre as “stone” and nombre as “number,” and we

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mean no more than this in saying that we interpret the French as treating of stones and numbers. Domestically it is simply true and trivial to say that “stone” denotes the stones and “number” denotes the numbers. We are at the point where some of my readers sense a certain tension in my views, which is their charitable word for self-contradiction. I have professed a robust realism, ascribing full reality to sticks, stones, electrons, and the rest pending advice from natural science itself to the contrary. How can I then hold that evidence is indifferent to what there is said to be? My answer, in a word, is naturalism. The question about what there is, what objects there are, is for me a question to be answered within our total empirical, scientific system of the world and not outside it in some first philosophy prior to science. We say in so many words, in the name of science, that there are sticks, stones, electrons, and classes, and that there are no unicorns. The sentences thus uttered are part of a network that enjoys good logical relations with observation sentences that are sustained by sensory stimulation. We cannot ask better than that. Science is fallible, but scientific evidence is all we have to go on. My point about proxy functions, then, is not to be seen as casting doubt on sticks, stones, and the rest, but as having to do with the theory of evidence. It belongs not to ontology but to the epistemology of ontology. It tells us that the evidence on which we base our theory of sticks, stones, electrons, and the rest would equally well sustain a theory whose objects were other things altogether. But the evidence is none the worse for that. In retreating thus from ontology into its epistemology, am I retreating into a first philosophy prior to science after all? Not so. My epistemology is likewise naturalistic and of a piece with natural science. It is concerned with the relation between the triggering of our nerve endings and our eventual discourse about the world. It is as integral to science as is the scientist’s discourse about sticks, stones, and electrons. These are merely different topics. Even so, there is a carry-over that gives one pause. Consider what happens if we apply a proxy function to our ontology and actually rewrite all our terms accordingly, instead of just reinterpreting them. Suppose we rewrite them everywhere, even back in the observation sentences where they initially played no referential role. All the sentences, thus rewritten, still retain their old logical relations to one another, and all the empirical evidence remains in force. Yet many of these sentences will contradict sentences of our original theory, not just in interpretation but verbally and explicitly. We must declare them false, for we have only our science to go by; our natural-

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ism allows us no prior philosophy. At the same time we could appreciate, thanks to our naturalistic epistemology, that the deviant theory is empirically equivalent to our own and hence that in declaring it false we are betraying our empiricism. We can escape this fanciful dilemma by treating the deviant theory, despite appearances, as couched in a foreign language. We can then proceed to translate it into our language by applying the converse of the proxy function that we had used in devising it. The apparent conflict of the two theories, we can thus conclude, was merely verbal. However, save the surface as we will, I see a lasting lesson here: look to the stimulatory input and the structure of scientific theory, and let the objects, the values of the variables, fall where they may.

50 Introducing Kripke 1984

Saul Kripke needs no introduction to this audience [Kaplan Festival, Stanford University], but he is going to get one. Saul was born in 1940 on the Guyland,* but grew up in Omaha. He was a precocious admirer of David Hume, and was still at a tender age when he fell in with Haskell Curry and mathematical logic. He proceeded to write a paper on modal logic that brought unaccustomed light into that dim domain. It was in the hands of the editors of the Journal of Symbolic Logic before Saul graduated from high school. As an undergraduate at Harvard he enlivened my logic seminar, and he went down to Yale once a week to conduct a seminar of his own. A postgraduate year at Oxford was followed by three in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, interspersed with teaching at Princeton. After that he had a year on the Harvard faculty and nine at Rockefeller University. Since then he has been a professor at Princeton. Grants and fellowships have enriched his years—a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, N.S.F., the Ewing Scholarship at Indiana, and Oxford fellowships at All Souls’ and Wolfson. He gave the John Locke Lectures. Saul’s early paper was the first of five or more on the semantics and proof theory of modal logic. He succeeded Leibniz, for better or worse, as the champion of possible worlds. Other papers dealt in an austerely mathematical vein with intuitionistic logic and with Boolean algebras of high cardinality. One paper was especially important for introducing and developing the concept of admissible ordinals and admissible sets. Later, following a familiar pattern, he has moved to more broadly philo*Editors’ note: “the Guyland” is slang for “Long Island.”

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sophical themes. His proposed alternative to Tarski’s theory of truth was a midpoint; his discussions of identity and necessity were farther over. Articles have given way to books: first Naming and Necessity, and now more recently Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Now he will talk to us about . . .* *Editors’ note: Quine’s manuscript does not contain a title for Kripke’s paper. The paper is not included in the proceedings of the conference: Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Apparently Quine ended his introduction here and turned to Kripke to continue.

51 Jean van Heijenoort Memorial 1986

Man of mystery. Utterly Parisian, but with extravagantly Flemish name. Gifted at languages, if we abstract from his ubiquitous French accent. German and Russian, as witness his great source book Frege to Gödel. Spanish from his many years in Mexico. Yet presumably no Flemish. Stickler for niceties in French, as came abundantly clear when he vetted first two of my French lectures. Colorful career of revolutionary in his youth. Secretary to Trotsky in Turkey and Mexico. Edited Trotsky’s diary. Wrote fascinating memoirs. Selfless; nothing of his own politics. We know him rather as historian of modern logic. In his Frege to Gödel, he made a contribution to mathematical logic that is second only, as editorial contributions go, to what Church contributed in moulding the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Just having the historic papers available, even untranslated, was a great boon; but van Heijenoort gave us translation as well, and commentaries, in large part his own. A few weeks ago the fruits of a second great service appeared: Gödel I [Kurt Gödel, Collected Works Volume I: Publications 1929–1936, edited by S. Feferman, J. W. Dawson, S. C. Kleene, G. H. Moore, R. M. Solovay, and J. V. Heijenoort (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)]. He lived his last years in a great triangular orbit. One vertex was a wing of Paul Doty’s house, formerly that of C. S. Peirce in Kirkland Place, with a satellite station in Pusey Library. A second vertex was his home town, Paris. A third was his house in the mountainous little state of Morelos in central Mexico. There it was that his life, so adventurous in its early phase and so placid later, came to its violent end. In his quiet way he was a familiar figure at logic and philosophy meetings here and in Boston. He will be sorely missed by his many collaborators and friends.

52 Books That Mattered to Me 1986

Willard Quine has retired from his teaching career at Harvard University, where he is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. His distinguished work as a mathematical logician and philosopher of language continues. Retirement allows him to produce such forthcoming works as Bits and Pieces* (Harvard University Press). He is the subject of a volume in the “Library of Living Philosophers” series. Best known for writing Mathematical Logic and Word and Object, his autobiography, The Time of My Life, was published in 1985. Bertrand Russell. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. (Pb)

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy was my introduction to the rigors of mathematical logic and the mysteries of infinite numbers. It brought clarity to familiar old mathematical concepts as well, by reducing them to pure logic and set theory. The charms of the subject matter and of Russell’s writing combined to launch me on a career of mathematical philosophy.

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica (1910–12). 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. (Pb)

Written mostly in mathematical symbols, these volumes provided the solid fare for which Russell’s book above had whetted my appetite. Here the derivation of classical mathematics from logic and set theory is carried through in strict formal detail.

*Editors’ note: Published as Quiddities in 1987.

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Sir Arthur S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World (1928). Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1935.

This was perhaps the most memorable of several books of popular science that both fired and helped to gratify my curiosity about the basis, bounds and inner workings of physical reality.

Bertrand Russell. Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). 2d ed. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1972.

The two philosophical interests noted above—the logico-mathematical and the physical—are here brought into contact. A program is sketched for deriving our knowledge of nature from our sensory evidence with the help of modern logical techniques.

Rudolf Carnap. Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). Hamburg: Meiner, 1974.

The program that Russell had thus sketched is here undertaken in earnest and explicit technical detail, bristling with logical symbols. It is a work of admirable vision and ingenuity.

Rudolf Carnap. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna: J. Springer, 1934.

This work, the writing of which I was privileged to witness for a while, brought logical positivism to full flower. It develops the philosophy of science as the logic and syntax of the language of science. Carnap and I diverged from it in opposite directions after a few years, but the book has influenced me deeply.

Walter W. Skeat, ed. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1879). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924.

The foregoing six books sparked and nourished interrelated interests that took on professional proportions. But this book has been the faithful support for fifty-seven years of another and independent interest that I somehow acquired in my late teens: a consuming interest in the origins of words.

53 To a Graduate Student in Philosophy 1988

Some look to an academic career as a way of indulging their intellectual curiosity and contributing to their subject. Teaching for them is primarily a means of supporting that pursuit. It does also contribute to the pursuit in other ways. It imposes a standard of clarity, it turns up points that could have escaped notice, and through feedback it helps to sustain one’s sense that one’s domain of research is worth cultivating. Others look to an academic career primarily for teaching: for the cultivation of inquiring young minds and the savoring and sharing of books and thoughts. They envisage a professorship on a small and congenial campus at a modest but adequate salary and the authorship of a few unpretentious pieces attesting to respectable scholarship. It could be a satisfying life and a useful one. Not but that the research buff may also occasionally find satisfaction in the honing of fine minds. I shall limit my scope by directing my thoughts to him.* Graduate school will impose requirements on you in the way of specific courses or topical examinations: logic, I hope, and some classical philosophers. These may intrude on the sort of inquiry that attracted you to a career in philosophy. You are apt to give them grudgingly the minimum attention required for good grades, while garnering what time you can for your chosen pursuit. Not bad, but I think you can do better. Being stuck with the intrusions, take them up in an inquiring and imaginative spirit. If it is a classical philosopher, try to empathize and sense what could have made him take the line he took. The effort may pay off in an unpredictable way in your work years later. Meanwhile there will be a margin of your time for your current enthusi*Editors’ note: The editor of the original publication changed “him” to “such a person.”

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asm even so, and by all means use it. Nurture the idea as it evolves, so that when your course requirements are fulfilled you can luxuriate in it. There is joy in the labor of creating a good PhD thesis out of one’s bright ideas. And again a word of caution. Impatient for the satisfaction of a typed thesis and bound, you may wishfully overlook or repress some consideration that could have warned of a debacle or that could have shunted you toward an even better result than what you had envisaged. The intellectual curiosity that lured you into philosophy must retain priority, even over a proud bound volume. Those immature philosophical thoughts of high school or college days may, however, devolve to the vanishing point. If so, I hope sturdier ones supervene that are no less attractive. In changing course, however, beware of prudential considerations. There being better job prospects in one philosophical line than another is a bad reason for choosing a line. Your best judgement of what is philosophically right and important is your best bet for a productive career, and it will bring better jobs in its train. Or heed prudence to the full and switch to a business career. But it may happen not only that your earlier eager philosophical thoughts have gone hopelessly awry, but that your financial situation compels you to go promptly for your PhD. So you may have to settle for some ad hoc thesis topic, and just hope for a more inspired research career in your future years as a professor. So you cast about for an unused topic, however dismal. A likely recourse is to the writings of some philosopher sufficiently recent and minor not to have received much treatment. Very well, it was an emergency. But I still have a plea to enter: that the sympathetic understanding you strove for in your study of the classical philosopher, in your required course, be extended to your latter-day thesis philosopher as well. The unsympathetic line is easier, because of the conjectural and free-floating character of philosophy. Our tentative formulations and figures of speech lend themselves to stalwart reading and nitpicking, which can pack a thesis. Don’t do it. It is an evil that is not limited to PhD theses. It floods current philosophical literature. It is promoted by the real or fancied policy of publish or perish. It is inimical to the collaboration and mutual understanding that have expedited the sciences. There is perhaps a policy of publish or perish in science too, but carping and quibbling are less productive of a bibliography there, thanks to the precise and generally shared technical terminology. We must accept the fact that such a regimented medium is unsuited to

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philosophy, but we must recognize that the resulting drag on progress can be lessened by sympathetic reading. The familiar opening sentence “Some/ many/most philosophers maintain . . .” is symptomatic and unproductive. Start out with your own maintaining. Despite its being perhaps the most polemic of disciplines, philosophy seems to me to have made marked progress within my memory. But the change of heart would expedite it further. Intellectual curiosity, a thirst for understanding, is what made you choose philosophy, and your contentment with the choice hinges on continuing to give that drive the right of way. Similar counsel applies also vicariously, in discussion with a colleague or student. If you can see that he is not seeking truth or understanding, give him short shrift. His bind may be recognizable as political or religious conviction, or some vested interest, or just a vain desire to have been right, as opposed to the rational desire to be right. Leave such debates to the politician, preacher, or psychotherapist, unless you choose to double in one of those capacities.

54 Life Is Agid 1988

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

55 Words Are All We Have to Go On (On Philosophers’ Concern with Language) 1992

The philosophy of language has language as its object of study and philosophy as its method. But its motivating interest need not be language as such, interesting though language is. Central concerns of ontology, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics can be pursued through analysis of the language in which those disciplines, if I may venture the term, are couched. Philosophy of language simply as such emerged in the Cratylus, where Plato debated the relation between names and what they name or mean. Philosophy of language of the ulterior sort, or better perhaps linguistic philosophy, surfaced in the nominalism of William of Ockham and other medievals: the deflationary doctrine that properties, numbers, and other abstract objects are mere flatus vocis, vocal breeze. In 1786, John Horne Tooke propounded a linguistic methodology for philosophical studies. I only desire you to read [Locke’s] essay over again with attention to see whether all that its immortal author has justly concluded hold equally true and clear, if you substitute the composition, etc. of terms whenever he supposed a composition of ideas. The purpose of words, people used to say, is to communicate ideas. But if we know what ideas people mean by their words, we know it only by observing how they and others use the words. Oh, we can ask them, but then we just get more words. Words are what we have to go on; ideas are as may be. Verbum sapienti satis est. Tooke pioneered what Richard Rorty has called the “linguistic turn” in philosophy.

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Analysis of concepts and foggy ideas into clear and simple components had been a philosophical enterprise more honoured in the precept than in the example. What was needed in order to get on with it was the switch from ideas to words. Words we can get our teeth into, and we can see what we are doing when we read and write them. Tooke’s younger contemporary Jeremy Bentham furthered the cause by his so-called theory of fictions. It brought out a vital point, though one that is obvious once it is stated: in order to define a word we do not need to produce a phrase equivalent to the word itself; it is sufficient that we show how to translate all the contexts in which we propose to embed the word. Here we have the inception of contextual definition. Its liberating effect was soon felt in mathematics—first in an access of streamlined and suggestive notations called operators, and later in a philosophically gratifying analysis of the traditional and familiar mathematical notations into a mere handful of basic ones. This reduction went hand in hand with the development of mathematical logic during the second half of the nineteenth century. The ultimate grinding economy was achieved in 1931 by the mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski, who put the final reductive touches on Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s formidable Principia Mathematica. The minimal notations, into which all of classical mathematics turns out to be translatable (however cumbersomely), simmer down to just three. First, there is “neither nor”, as a connective of sentences: “neither p nor q”. Second, there is an apparatus of generalization, comprising a prefix meaning “everything x is such that” together with letters x, y, etc, to keep the crossreferences straight. Third, there is a copula, epsilon, of class membership: “is a member of ”. Here is the kind of thing that can inspire a philosopher. Russell brought contextual definition and other resources of mathematical logic to bear also on ordinary concepts outside of mathematics. He thus resumed, at a more sophisticated level, Bentham’s line of a hundred years before. Inspired by Russell, Rudolf Carnap in Vienna sketched in 1928 a brilliant construction of a language of sensory phenomena, building it on minimal initial terms by ingenious logical manoeuvres. On this sensory basis he hoped to reconstruct in turn, in outline, our knowledge of the external world. By 1930 he had given up the project. He perhaps sensed the perversity of basing science on a prior and self-sufficient language of raw sense data.

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Reification of bodies and other objects is itself the main instrument by which we organize experience in the first place. Memory of pure sense data is a frail reed. Back when he was still fashioning a foundation for science in phenomena, Carnap had to keep science out of the foundations, on pain of circular reasoning. So he observed a scrupulous demarcation between philosophy and science. With his abandonment of the phenomenalist project, the threat of circularity subsided. He nevertheless preserved the demarcation, but it became a demarcation of language from its subject-matter. Legitimate philosophy was philosophy of language, and science was science of the world. The concern of his new philosophy was the language of science. Philosophy, he wrote, is the syntax of the language of science. Later he widened it from syntax to semantics. Carnap became the main spokesman of the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists. He saw philosophy as linguistic, science as paramount, science and philosophy as separate, mathematical logic as invaluable, and metaphysics as nonsense. Carnap was a Westphalian and Wittgenstein a Viennese, but in the 1920s both were in Vienna, both had been inspired by Russell, and both were adept in the new logic. In 1929, Wittgenstein moved to his career in Cambridge, and in the ensuing years his philosophy became increasingly linguistic and increasingly negative. The proper business of philosophy was therapeutic: the resolution of puzzles that arose only from pressing ordinary language into extraordinary applications, alien to the uses for which it had evolved. The influence of the Vienna Circle and that of Cambridge’s Wittgenstein converged on Oxford. A. J. Ayer brought back the views of the Vienna Circle from his 1933 visit to Vienna, while his recent tutor Gilbert Ryle developed views congenial to Wittgenstein. For the next two decades the Oxford trend was more in the spirit of Wittgenstein: what came to be known as the philosophy of ordinary language, starring J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson. In their devotion to ordinary language these philosophers were of necessity unsympathetic toward symbolic logic. In this and in their indifference to natural science they were unlike the Vienna Circle. But they retained a major plank of the Vienna Circle, the scorn for metaphysics, and they were as linguistic as anyone could wish. The philosophy of ordinary language acquired a following among Americans, who looked to Oxford and to Wittgenstein severally and jointly. Con-

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currently there was an infusion into America from the Vienna Circle. I had been in Vienna at the time of Ayer’s visit, and had followed Carnap to Prague. Soon Carnap emigrated to America, in consequence of the disruption of Europe by Hitler. Other philosophers came too, notably Carl G. Hempel, Philipp Frank, and Hans Reichenbach; also the great logicians Gödel and Tarski. Karl Popper settled in England. The sharp demarcation of philosophy from science, respected by both the logical empiricists and the philosophers of ordinary language, wavered as the 1950s wore on. Philosophers of science looked more to the practice of scientists, and scientists took to reflecting on their own efforts in an increasingly philosophical spirit. Something analogous to the old epistemologists’ dream of a phenomenalistic foundation for science can still be entertained, however, with free access to scientific findings. After all, the empiricists’ insistence on exclusively sensory evidence is itself scientific; it is a fact of nature that our ongoing information about the world around us is limited to impacts on our sensory surfaces, plus a bit of kinesthetic input. How, we may ask, do we manage on such meagre data to spin out our elaborate scientific theory of the world, and indeed a theory that leads persistently to successful prediction of observations? This is itself a question within science, a scientific question about science as an activity of physical beings in the physical world. It is a question of naturalized epistemology, as we may say. Naturalized epistemology is not calculated to yield a proof of the validity of scientific method, on pain of circularity, but it is calculated to improve our understanding and control of the scientific edifice. It can tell us why, up to now, our predictions have been so much better than random. The answer, at the level of natural science itself, is that evolution by natural selection has rendered us attentive to certain features of our perceptions that tend to mesh with the regularities of nature. Basing our expectations on concomitances of those features, we predict relatively well; and this conduces to survival. Is this philosophy, or is it animal ethology? Who cares, if the fence is down? Certainly the curiosity that prompted the question is philosophical. Between philosophy and science, or the rest of science, there remain differences of emphasis. Logical analysis looms larger in naturalized epistemology than in other branches of science. Such epistemologists might trace logical chains from bundles of scientific laws or hypotheses to the observations by which they would be tested. Ordinarily in science the connections are left

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vague and largely tacit, and quite properly so; the scientists are after results, and let there be no impediment. But logical analysis by a specialist in logical connections might bring rewarding illumination. Maybe it will reveal that some respected little law is just a tautology following from arbitrary choices that have been made elsewhere in the theory; what Eddington called a putup job. Maybe it will reveal that some hypothesis, moot and worrisome, makes no logical difference and can be dropped. These are dreams in turn, granted—dreams of the new epistemologist. But one accomplished fact can be pointed to in this domain, and it strikes a metaphysical chord as well as an epistemological one. It has to do with the relation that the objects assumed by a theory bear to the observations—to the sensory evidence, or neural intake—by which the theory is supported. It turns out that the objects figure only as neutral nodes in the logical structure of the theory. Any objects correlated with them one to one would fit the evidence as well. This applies to sticks and stones as well as to numbers and neutrinos. The linguistic orientation of philosophy has endured through all this, and long may it. Logical analysis is powerless except as analysis of language. Here the language is apt to be an essentially mathematical language designed for the purpose: symbolic logic. But analysis of ordinary language is called for as well, and speculation on its prehistory. Before there was language, there were the cries by which our simian forebears alerted their kin to a threatening foreign body. Our own observation sentences, which in one form or another are at once the child’s port of entry to language and the empirical checkpoints of experimental science, may be seen as the hypertrophic descendants of those animal cries. Their primary objects, for the child as for the apes, are gross bodies; and these are the prototype of all reification. Bodymindedness is innate, in us and other animals, thanks to salience of form and contrast that has been favoured in us by natural selection. At this point, more explicit study and speculation take over regarding the development of language. Reification of bodies by small children and dumb animals is rudimentary; full reification of them comes only when we have our full framework of space and time and can presume to identify or distinguish recurrent bodies that look alike. Reification of objects other than gross bodies—particles, say, or air, or abstract objects such as numbers and properties—begins to make sense only after language has evolved relative clauses and pronouns, or idioms to similar effect.

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The philosophical position that I have ended up by sketching here cannot be represented as the philosophical orthodoxy of the day. My topic was specifically linguistic philosophy. Adherents of the position grade off as differences mount. I have left off mentioning names, but I might just mention two of the best and best known: Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, from among a host, I like to think, of sympathizers. As always there are counter-currents, from unregenerate metaphysics to unbridled antirationalism. Meanwhile I find bright hope in the increased tendency of young philosophers to come to grips with hard science. But allowance should perhaps be made for my sunny disposition.

56 Hobbling the Hawkers 1992

In my cynical youth I heard and believed that a cheap way was known of making long-lasting razor blades, but that in our greed-guided economy there was no hope of its adoption. It seemed clear on the same grounds that there was no hope of a ban on the blight of roadside billboards. But a happy disillusionment set in when the Merritt Parkway was opened. I drove from New York through Westchester and Connecticut with woods and meadows on either side and never a billboard. And now I find disposable razors staying sharp for weeks on end. Environmentalists, even, are achieving successes along with their frustrations. Dogmatic cynicism gives way to a mellower realism, tinged with hope. Such is my mood, then, as I contemplate junk mail. Its virtues are as may be, not to put too fine a point on it. Its evils are incontestable. Its production and distribution devastate forests and consume manpower disproportionate to its contribution to joy and welfare. Mostly unread, it makes its way to a smoky incinerator. I hear it suggested in ineffectual circles that relief could be gained by raising the postal rates on junk mail, while sparing the rates for nonprofit organizations. In more effectual circles the suggestion would still face a greedguided lobby. But I recall the razors and billboards and today’s embattled environmentalists, and hope flickers. Junk mail is not the only curse of advertising. There is also the excessive bulk of our newspapers and magazines, to the detriment again of our air and our forests. But I think of a second simple measure that could both supplement the effect of raised postal rates on junk mail and diminish advertising elsewhere. Just let the I.R.S. disallow deduction of advertising expenses. Surely this also has been thought of before. Enlightened modern merchandising, the Madison Avenue way, might

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then cease to typify the American way of life. Advertising personnel would disperse in droves, some to productive employment, some to the welfare rolls. And I doubt that merchants would suffer. They would meet the risen cost of advertising by being less prodigal of it, to the benefit of taste and the environment. Their competitors would cut back likewise, and business should proceed much as usual. The advertising industry represents itself as a service to the consumer. So it is, up to a point; but also it seduces him into wasteful consumption and debt. My tax measure might lessen these evils somewhat, by damping the blare. As for serving the consumer’s wants, I would foresee increased activity in the classified ads. Newspapers and magazines would dwindle to mere shadows of their present selves, to the benefit again of the environment. Despite the dwindling, they would cost more. In order to retard the rise in price, the publishers would shrink them still further by being more selective of content, to our general benefit. Commercial television would mercifully dwindle as well, leaving the field increasingly to public channels. All this, if I am right, from two simple moves—simple but politically forbidding.

57 Introducing Shepard 1994

For more than two thousand years, from first philosophers of ancient Greece to seventeenth-century Italy and England, the word ‘philosophy’ or filosofÉa covered all knowledge and fancied knowledge, from mathematics and physics at one extreme to theology at the other. Science had not evolved to where a name would be wanted to mark it off from the unleavened residue of philosophy. From Newton on, sciences gained distinctive identity and names, and the word ‘philosophy’ shrank to the unleavened residue, except for its traditional application to the American Philosophical Society and the Cambridge one. This fission was costly for both sides: somewhat costly in vision for the scientists and very costly in substance for the philosophers. Happily the fission was never total. Biology achieved a cardinal philosophical breakthrough in 1859: the reduction of Aristotle’s two causes, efficient and final, to one cause, efficient cause. It was Darwin’s work. Over the past half century we’ve seen a heartening further trend toward reintegration of science and philosophy. Philosophy, or a vigorous part of it, has gained in mathematical rigor. Further, by exploiting psychology and ethology it is bringing light and substance to the theory of knowledge. Scientists have reacted to the trend with tolerance in some cases and with active participation in others. The partition between science and philosophy is crumbling. Enter then Professor Roger Shepard from Stanford, six Wednesdays ago, to show us how illuminating this fusion can be. His first three lectures gave us a vivid glimpse of philosophically crucial moments in the history of science. They pointed the moral that thought experiments can spare us a lot of lab work if we are clever enough. Aid and comfort, this, from a lab scientist to us armchair philosophers. But in his fourth lecture, not to overdue the aid and comfort, he brought

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us up short with visual illusions that show how misleading unimplemented thought can sometimes be. This phrase brought out another facet of this Renaissance man: his talent as a draftsman. I’m still baffled by a couple of his optical illusions. In the next two lectures we witnessed Shepard the meticulous and statistically sophisticated laboratory psychologist. But still here his subject matter was epistemological, philosophical; namely, generalization and transformation. Now we look forward to the final synthesis. I’ll no longer delay it.

58 In Memory of John Finley 1995

John’s years as Master [at Eliot House] began at an unfortunate time, 1942, and ended at a fortunate time, 1968. They began just when World War II was depleting the student body and the Navy was sharing the facilities of the house. The ample era of single occupancy of rooms and table service and printed menus in hall had met its abrupt end. It was bad timing also from my own point of view, for I was just then being sworn in as a naval officer and sent to Washington. I had been tutor in Eliot for six years under Merriman’s genial mastership, but I didn’t get to John Finley till 1946. On the other hand John’s retirement as Master in 1968 was nicely timed, for he just missed the grim uprising of 1969, in the course of which even the necktie went the way of the earlier amenities. John took a fatherly interest in every student. When the student was graduating and needed a recommendation, an insightful and usually persuasive letter was forthcoming. [He] held an all-time record, I gathered, in successful recommendations to Harvard Medical School. John was sensitive to the wishes of his flock. In a letter to the Crimson a student protested the lunchtime segregation of the faculty at the tutors’ table. He and his friends wanted the stimulation and edification of our company. So John disbanded the tutors’ table. Later another student wrote to the Crimson that the students wanted, for the pitifully brief space of the noon hour, to be able to relax with their young peers. So the tutors’ table was restored. Classicists have testified to John’s preëminence in his profession. His erudition was evident to the rest of us as well. I proudly shared one of his many honors; he succeeded me as George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford. He and Magdalena met Marjorie and me as they were disembarking and we

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were embarking at Southampton in 1954. Archibald MacLeish became Master here for the year. John’s talks before the assembled students or tutors here were delicately laced with imaginative allusions and gentle wit, leavening its substantial base of wisdom and good nature. His conversations were more of the same. He leaves us with rich memories.

59 Quine /zkwain/, Willard Van Orman (b. 1908) 1996

American philosopher. During sojourns in Europe in the early 1930s Quine’s philosophical development was influenced by his contacts with Polish logicians and with members of the Vienna Circle. Professor of philosophy at Harvard University from 1948. The main aim of his philosophical work has been to develop a theory that would be congenial to a naturalistic and empiricist world-view. Earlier attempts had their problems. An important step in Quine’s attempt to overcome them came with the article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” 1951, where he rejected the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and the reduction of all meaningful statements to statements about immediate experiences. A comprehensive statement came with Word and Object 1960, a remarkably influential work. Among other works may be mentioned The Ways of Paradox 1966, The Roots of Reference 1974, Quiddities 1987.* ed. For this dictionary, Professor Quine has kindly offered this outline of his philosophical outlook: Our intake of information about the world consists only of the triggering of our nerve endings by light rays and molecules from our environment, plus perhaps some kinaesthetic clues to the ups and downs in our path. This neural intake on each occasion is related to that on other occasions by perceptual similarity in varying degrees. Psychologists can test this subjective relation, in humans and others, by the conditioning and extinction of responses. We and other animals expect perceptually similar intakes to be followed *Editors’ note: The dictionary editor’s original introductory paragraph is reprinted here as it was coordinated with Quine; it was revised in later editions of the dictionary.

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by intakes that are likewise perceptually similar to one another. Expecting this is induction, and is the basis of all learning. Thanks to natural selection, which has moulded our innate standards of perceptual similarity in favour of survival, these expectations commonly come true. Various animals have vocal signals that they associate with distinctive ranges of neural intakes grouped by perceptual similarity. People have them in abundance, and I call them observation sentences. Examples are “It’s cold”, “It’s snowing”; also such terms as “Dog”, “Mama”, “Milk”, “Red”, which at first are to be seen as sentences on a par with the others. We learn to combine observation sentences into observation categoricals, which are generalized expressions of conditional expectation: thus “When it’s snowing, it’s cold”. Here is the germ of natural science, and indeed of the experimental method. The categorical is the law or hypothesis to be tested, the snowy scene is the experimental condition of the test, and cold is the predicted observation. Words that we first learn as observation sentences or as parts thereof, and carry over into observation categoricals, eventually get recombined along with new ones to form the theoretical sentences of natural science. Thanks to this sharing of vocabulary, various familiar and unfamiliar observation categoricals come to be logically implied by various blocks of theory. Herein lies the empirical test of theory by experiment. If an observation that fulfils the first clause of the implied observation categorical fails to fulfil the other, then the block of theory that implied the categorical is refuted. One or another of its sentences must be revoked. Usually one of them is suspect at the start, motivating the test. Mathematics, in so far as applied, is of a piece with natural science; for the applied mathematical sentences are in the block of sentences that jointly imply the categorical. Mathematics thus imbibes empirical content in so far as applied. The proverbial necessity of mathematical truth resides merely in our exempting the mathematical sentences when choosing which one of a refuted block of sentences to revoke. We exempt them because changing them would reverberate excessively through science. With omission of much detail, then, the chain from theory to its subjectmatter in the world is this: sets of theoretical sentences logically imply observation categoricals, which are built of observation sentences, which are conditioned to ranges of neural intake. It is sentences first and last, irrespective of what objects may be denoted by terms and variables inside the sentences. Logical implication relates sentences purely by logical structure, after

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all, without regard to what objects their terms denote; and observation sentences are associated simply as wholes with neural intake, again without regard to what objects they may eventually be thought of as referring to. Hence our evidence for our theory of the world is independent of what things our theory says there are. Our knowledge of the world hinges only on our neural intake, on our association of observation sentences with it, and on the logical structure of our overall theory. Objects figure only as neutral nodes in that logical structure. Conceptualization is human, and of a piece with language. Our reification even of sticks and stones is part of it. To ask what they really are, apart from our conceptualization, is to ask for truth without language. It is up to science itself in the broadest sense to tell us what there is, in its own best terms and subject to correction in the light of scientific progress. Elementary particles, sticks, stones, numbers, classes—such are the denotata of the terms of science and the values of its variables. There is no deeper sense of “reality” than the sense in which it is the business of science itself, by its selfcorrective hypothetico-deductive method of conceptualization and experiment, to seek the essence of reality. WQ

60 Acceptance Speech for Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences 1996

Your Imperial Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen: This great honor comes to me in my 89th year. It culminates a long career. I am grateful to President Inamori for endowing scholarly and scientific pursuits with the munificent Kyoto Prize, and grateful to him and his colleagues for selecting me as a beneficiary. The thought of exotic, faraway lands—notably Japan—fascinated me from childhood. It still did so in my thirtieth year, when one of my students was a visiting Japanese. I have forgotten his name, but part of his Tokyo address remains graven in my memory to this day, simply because I had found it so exotic. It was Suginamiku, Kamiogikibo. It was only after another twenty years that I came to know Nobushige Sawada and Shozo Ohmori, who visited Harvard for a term. Just a few years after that, I was lecturing at University of Tokyo. I lectured for a month in philosophy and two weeks in mathematical logic. Ohmori and Hiromichi Takeda were my translators. Other bright friends included Natuhiko Yosida, Akira Oide, Makoto Yamamoto, and the mathematician [Takashi] Ono of Nagoya. Later, Yosida and Oide returned the compliment by visiting Harvard and attending my lectures on set theory. Both men contributed improvements to my book on set theory that I was revising. Seven of my books have reappeared in Japanese, and Tomida San here in Kyoto has published a book on my philosophy. My sense of the alien and exotic thus gave way, over these thirty years, to active partnership in the pursuit of truth. This is the goal of global cooperation and understanding that I see the Inamori Foundation as pursuing in its worldwide support of science and the arts.

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My wife and I responded deeply to the beauty of Japanese landscapes, shrines, homes, and gardens and to the grace and delicacy of Japanese costumes and customs. We were pleased and proud when our city, Boston, became Kyoto’s sister city. We never dreamed of revisiting Kyoto on such a mission as this. Thank you.

61 Tidy Parsimony 1996

We happy honorands were encouraged, in these commemorative lectures, to talk about ourselves. I remember myself as a small child sprawled on the floor and poring over my mother’s old geography book. I aimlessly pondered North and South America, Europe, Africa. I neglected Asia, for the name was unfamiliar. Then one day I did happen to take a proper look at Asia, and the scales fell from my eyes. There were all those romantic names—Arabia, Jerusalem, Bagdad, Persia, India, China, Japan. Somehow I hadn’t noticed their absence from the maps I had studied. They evidently had occupied the fairy-tale half of my brain. Now suddenly my world was one, and a rich one. It was a purposeless pondering of boundaries, place names, and relative positions. It foreshadowed a taste for decisive distinctions and structure, as well as an almost but not quite insatiable wanderlust. In those early days I was given also to compiling lists, geographical and otherwise, to no better purpose than indulgence of a taste for tidy orderliness. It was a taste that was to favor mathematics and analytical philosophy over less disciplined disciplines. It was a taste that took to algebra and geometry in school, and to the diagramming of English sentences, and to Latin. My responsiveness to languages had been whetted by stamp collecting, a hobby traceable to my interest in geography. German was still unavailable until college because of World War I, but I studied French. Religion was not oppressive in my home, but it was there, and by the age of ten my doubts had prevailed over it. This is surely how many modern philosophers started up or down the philosophical path. Also I had, at about that age, a more specifically philosophical thought. Unfriendly remarks about Jews were not uncommon in my neighborhood, and two of my

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friends were Jews, which I regretted. Then it dawned on me that we should judge a class by its members. My philosophical bent remained inarticulate, however, until college. I was just vaguely curious. I became actively interested rather in word origins and the history of language. I borrowed a book from the library on the subject and devoured it eagerly. I have been speculating and checking on etymologies ever since. At Oberlin College, consequently, I had to choose among three competing fields for my major subject: philosophy, philology, and mathematics. A friend told me that Bertrand Russell had something called mathematical philosophy, and that settled it. I majored in mathematics and arranged for honors reading in mathematical philosophy. Philology was outnumbered, two to one. Mathematical philosophy turned out to be mathematical logic. It was not taught at Oberlin nor much elsewhere in America, but my professor got to me a reading list. Practical mathematicians scoffed at mathematical logic as pedantic formalism. Mathematical logicians scoffed back fifteen years later, when their discipline had spawned general computer theory and become indispensable in programming. Meanwhile, in 1931, mathematical logic had enabled Kurt Gödel in Vienna to prove a theorem that revolutionized the philosophy of mathematics. By applying mathematical logic to itself, he proved that no explicit set of rules of proof can cover all mathematical truths, or cover even so limited a part of mathematics as the theory of whole numbers. A proof procedure can always be strengthened but never enough, without getting some falsehoods. Before Gödel’s discovery, we all thought each truth of mathematics could be proved, and proved by methods already at hand, though the proof might elude us. This, we thought, was what was distinctive about mathematics: truth is demonstrability. But not so. It was two years before Gödel’s theorem that I was at Oberlin reading Whitehead and Russell’s great Principia Mathematica, where they show in three volumes that all of classical mathematics can be translated into a few symbols of mathematical logic. The objects that made up the universe of Principia were predominantly class. A class, for mathematics, is just any lot, finite or infinite, of objects of any sort, however unlike or remote from one another. In subsequent improvements on Whitehead and Russell’s work, all the objects dealt with in pure classical mathematics end up as classes. The numbers 0, 1, 2, etc. are an example. Each can be construed, however

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arbitrarily, as the class of all earlier ones. This makes 0 the empty class, 1 the class whose sole member is 0, 2 the class with the two members 0 and 1, and so on up. 0 has no members, 1 has one, 2 has two, and so on. The three volumes of Principia were mostly in logical symbols. I reveled in the clarity, rigor, and elegance of the formulas and proofs and above all in the spectacular economy of the ideas that proved to suffice for the whole bewildering realm of classical mathematics. It was an achievement in tidy parsimony. A subsequent refinement by Gödel, and independently by Alfred Tarski in Poland, further enhanced the economy. They reduced the basic vocabulary to just the following. There are the adverb ‘not’ for negating a sentence and the conjunction ‘and’ for joining sentences. There is a generality prefix, with auxiliary variables, for saying that everything is thus and so. And finally, fourth, there is a verb ‘is a member of ’ relating members to classes. I reduced these four basic devices to two equally simple ones. One is class inclusion, as in ‘Dogs are animals.’ The other is an abstraction prefix with auxiliary variables: ‘the class of all objects such that.’ Whitehead and Russell took on the task in Principia not only of defining the various notions of classical mathematics, but also of framing axioms from which, along with the definitions, classical mathematics could be derived. At this point classes presented a deep problem: the paradoxes, the simplest of which is known as Russell’s Paradox. It proceeds from the principle, which had long gone without saying, that every membership condition you can formulate determines a class, the class of all objects fulfilling the condition. Very well, says Russell, try this condition: ‘x is not a member of x.’ This does not determine a class. There can be no such thing as the class of all non-self-members. It would belong to itself if and only if it were a non-selfmember. So we must rescind that obvious old rule. There are membership conditions that do not determine classes. This is one, and there are others. But Russell did not rescind the old rule. He rejected the very words ‘x is not a member of x’ from the language, along with other paradoxical membership conditions, by complicating the grammar. Such was his theory of types, which governed Principia Mathematica. Individuals comprised his lowest type, classes of individuals his second type, classes of such classes his third, and so on. Formulas were meaningless that affirmed membership otherwise than between objects of consecutive types. A drawback of this expedient was that it saddled us with an infinite reduplication of arithmetic and the rest of mathematics, and of the logical class algebra itself, up the hierarchy of types. Each succeeding type had its uni-

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verse class, its empty class, its numbers, all its mathematical ontology. With my predilection for tidy parsimony I deplored all this and sought less extravagant measures. I found that we could enjoy the protection conferred by Russell’s high-handed restraints on grammar, and by his infinite reduplication of the mathematical world, while paying neither of these prices. Instead I gave up what Russell was preserving, namely the law that every membership condition determines a class. Then I noted what membership conditions had been rendered meaningless by Russell’s restrictions on grammar, and just declared those sentences ineligible as membership conditions. Along with its gains in simplicity, my system turned out to be stronger than Russell’s in its production of classes. This raised suspicions of some lingering paradox in my system. I have since been busy with other things, but a number of bright mathematicians in Belgium, Switzerland, England, and America have sought paradox in it without success, while turning up various surprises along the way. Ernst Zermelo in Germany had long since had his own way around the paradoxes, devised independently of Russell’s and in the same year, 1908. Like me at my later date, he took the straightforward line of dropping the law that every membership condition determines a class. The laws that he then provided for existence of classes showed no kinship, as mine did, to Russell’s theory of types. Zermelo’s system, subsequently improved, is today’s standard. The search down the years for a contradiction in my system has been coupled with counter-effort to establish its consistency by constructing a model of it within Zermelo’s presumably consistent system. But this again has not succeeded. A word now about the philosophical significance of the reduction of mathematics to logic, or to what has been called logic. It is a startling claim, for mathematics is proverbially mind-boggling whereas logic is proverbially obvious and trivial. The source of the confusion is the existence of classes, as is brought out by Russell’s Paradox and the others. The paradoxes reveal class theory as by no means trivial, and rather as a desperate challenge; and mathematics depends on the existence of classes at almost every turn, with or without Principia Mathematica. The gulf between little old traditional logic and the theory of classes, known as set theory, is borne out also by Gödel’s theorem, for that theorem applies to set theory along with number theory and higher branches. The place to draw the boundary between logic and the rest of mathematics is at classes. What lies below that boundary is indeed as easy and trivial as

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the name suggests. What classical mathematics is reducible to is set theory, a formidable branch of mathematics in its own right. The reduction of mathematics to set theory is illuminating and exciting for the tidy parsimony that it yields, but there is no trivialization. There are and have long been philosophers, called nominalists, who balk at the very existence of classes. There are sticks, stones, and all the other concrete objects, but nominalists draw the line at abstract objects, and classes are indeed abstract objects. Our abstract words contribute to the sentences in which they occur, the nominalists say, but are not names of abstract objects. Another philosophical view of the matter is that once we get beyond words for concrete objects there is no real difference between viewing the world as naming and as not naming. I hold that both views come of looking in the wrong place. Where existence makes a difference is ordinarily not where we refer to a specific purported object, but where we are speaking of an unspecified object of a specified sort—some rabbit or another, some prime number—or every rabbit, every prime number. It is these repeated references to an identical but unspecified instance that introduce texture into our discourse and structure into our scientific theory. I go into detail in my workshop lecture. Mathematics leans heavily on existence when existence is thus identified, and the existence leaned on is existence of numbers and other abstract objects, ultimately classes. Natural science in turn leans heavily on mathematics. Some philosophers profess nominalism by not heeding the commitments of their own day-to-day or scientific discourse: not considering what constitutes reference to abstract objects. My recognition of abstract objects was a bit melancholy at first, but I have been fully reconciled to them on gaining a clearer view of the nature of the assuming of objects and the service they perform in the structure of scientific theory. However, my abstract objects are classes and only classes. They work wonders, providing, as I said, for numbers and everything else in mathematics. I do not concede existence to properties or meanings, for these are in trouble over identity and difference. Two properties, it seems, can be properties of all and only the same things and yet be called different properties. Nor is there a clear account of what it takes in general for two expressions to count as having the same meaning. Tidy parsimony makes short shrift of all that. There is an obvious confusion, carelessness basically, that has plagued

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thinkers even of the stature of Whitehead and Russell. It is confusion of the written word or sign with the object referred to. It happens only when the object is abstract. In expository parts of Principia Mathematica it muddies the thought of the authors and engenders needless complexities and obscurities. It is an evil—the confusion of use and mention—against which I have crusaded down the decades, with some success. I suspect that traces of it linger in the acquiescence of philosophers and laymen in the notion of properties and meanings despite their infirmities in connection with identity. The philosopher who is out to clarify reality is ill advised to use notions as obscure as those he is trying to clarify. With classes, on the other hand, despite their abstractness, all is in order. They are as clearly identified as their members, for they are identical if they have the same members. My own work in and about mathematical logic occupied most of my next twenty years after college and a few more recent ones. From mathematics at Oberlin I had proceeded to graduate work in philosophy at Harvard because of my admiration of Whitehead, who had been brought there as professor of philosophy after his retirement from mathematics in London. I found that the Harvard philosophers back then were happier than I with properties, meanings, propositions, necessity. It was rather in Prague, on a postdoctoral fellowship two years later, that I first worked with an eminent philosopher who saw those matters as I did. He was Rudolf Carnap. I was similarly gratified on proceeding to Poland. I think it significant that both Carnap and the Poles were deep in mathematical logic. Sharpness of criteria and economy of assumptions—tidy parsimony—had guided them, as me. This is perhaps a basic contribution of mathematical logic to the philosophy of science, along with its direct and conspicuous contribution to the philosophy of mathematics. Whitehead and Russell, ironically, were perhaps too early to gain the full benefit of their own contribution. My first five books, along with three later ones, were devoted to logic and set theory. I kept striving for shortcuts, for streamlining, for clearer formulations, with a view to making modern logic a routine acquisition of the general student. One minor venture to that purpose did prove useful to computer theory and has brought my name into computer manuals, though oddly enough I have never been lured to computers myself, even to the word processor. Around age forty-five I began to feel that I had done what I wanted to do in logic and set theory, though three of those eight books and three revised

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editions were still to come. I had been teaching a course in philosophy of science, inspired largely by Carnap, for fourteen years along with my teaching of logic and set theory. So my mind for the past forty years has been primarily on the philosophy of science. I am concerned with our knowledge of the external world. Our intake from the world, in the way of information about what is going on around us, is just the triggering of our sensory receptors by the impact of light rays and molecules, plus some negligible kinaesthetic data. It is not much to go on. But we come out in the fullness of time with a torrential account of the world around us, out to the farthest nebula and down to the humblest quark. Much of the intervening process was already prepared for by elaborate instincts, which are themselves accountable to natural selection down the generations. Instinctive standards of similarity implement the learning process. There is the development of language to account for, and the framing of hypotheses, and the testing of them by experiment. This is the domain of my workshop lecture. The canons of neat precision and economy of assumptions—tidy parsimony—are as much to the point here in the philosophy of science as in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and indeed they apply equally within natural science itself. What is so striking about the foundations of mathematics is just that it is there that those canons find the least impediment.

62 Advice to the Next Generation 2002

Cultivate the inquiring mind. Don’t suppress a question, however trivial, that sparks your curiosity. Track it down or look it up as soon as you can. Enjoy what you are doing, what you are seeing, as fully as you can find anything in it to enjoy. Savor the moment, the scene, the sound, the word. Carpe diem, horam, minutam. Try for a career where you can take pleasure or satisfaction in your work rather than just in the leisure after work. Earning less but enjoying your work, you are getting good returns for the sacrificed difference in income. You must face dull chores and discipline too, for a rewarding expertise takes a dull deal of training. What is wanted is shrewd cost accounting and a prudent but not excessive investment in futures. Above all, cultivate easy and sincere friendships with kindred spirits and enter into them with generous sympathy. Sharing is the sovereign lubricant against the harshness of life.

63 Farewell to Me 1978

Came straight from college 48 years ago. Been attached to Harvard in some official way ever since: 2 as graduate student, 4 postdoctorate, 42 on faculty. In fullness . . . attached sentimentally as well. Haven’t taught 42. There were more than 3 when Marjorie and I were in Navy fighting the Germans at our desks in Washington Dick [DC], and there were sabbaticals and other years away. But taught at Harvard 33 of the 42. I’ve taught Philosophy 140, or Philosophy 1 as it were, 33 times. When I came as graduate student, ferry boats were plying Boston Harbor; there weren’t the tunnels. There were passenger ships to New York. Schooners brought lumber from Bangor. Eliot House and others were under construction. George Herbert Palmer, who first brought William James to Harvard, was 90 and tottering. Lived in Dana-Palmer House, not yet moved across Quincy Street. Whitehead supervised thesis. I was already teaching before Division of Philosophy and Philosophy dissolved. Colleagues: Alfred North Whitehead, Ralph Barton Perry, William Ernest Hocking, Clarence Irving Lewis, Henry Maurice Sheffer, David Wright Prall, Raphael Demos and for a term Bertrand Russell. Younger: Donald Carey Williams, John Daniel Wild.* In those days I read Nelson Goodman’s thesis and saw him pass his oral. Came from war to changed scene: Henry Aiken. Later Morty White and Rod Firth. Burt Dreben was my tutee right after war, as sophomore. Soon participated in my best logic seminar ever, with John Myhill, Hao Wang, H. Hiz, Hughes Leblanc, et al. Gave me Hilbert and Bernays. Good old days? In some ways later even better. Teaching loads were heavier. Had to do writing at night and weekends and type it. Typing meant *Editors’ note: On Quine’s cards, some surnames are written out and others (“Wms” for “Williams”) are abbreviated. We have spelled out all names in full.

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double loss of time: I’d compulsively revise where nothing gained except illusion of continued intellectual activity. For many years now load light and my typing has stopped. I scrawl my articles and letters, to be prettily typed by pretty secretaries. La dolce vita. George Berry attended my first class, September 1936; Philosophy 1. Also my last, day before yesterday. Gratifying symmetry. And another symmetry: that first year, my advanced logic Math 19 had, second term, two enrolled students. One, George Brown, undergraduate in math, got A+. Other, graduate student in philosophy, E. (Not George Berry.) My last course has been again an advanced logic course, again two enrolled students. However, B and A−. On the whole, therefore, things have improved. Well, I’ve been lucky to have such a congenial lot of colleagues, as you all have been. I’m grateful to you for being so, despite the fact that it makes me sad about stepping down. Here’s to you all.

Credits

Chapter 1: “The Ideas of Quine” was first published in Bryan Magee, ed., Men of Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 168–179; the interview by Bryan Magee was conducted as part of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television series on philosophy. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 2: “The Interview: Willard Van Orman Quine” by D. C. Denison was first published in the Boston Globe Magazine, July 14, 1985, 2. Reprinted with the kind permission of D. C. Denison. Chapter 3: “Quine Speaks His Mind: Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine” by Edo Pivcevic was first published in Cogito (Bristol) 2, no. 2 (1988): 1–5. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 4: “Philosophy,” an interview with Quine by Steven Vita, was first published in Veery (the first journazine) 3 (1993): 19–27. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 5: “W. V. Quine: Perspectives on Logic, Science, and Philosophy,” an interview by Bradley Edmister and Michael O’Shea, was first published in Harvard Review of Philosophy 4, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 47–57; reprinted in S. Phineas Upham, ed., Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–63. Chapter 6: “Twentieth-Century Logic” was first published in Giovanna Borradori, ed., The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 27–39. Copyright © 1994 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 7: “Interview with Willard Van Orman Quine” by Lars Bergström and Dagfinn Føllesdal was a video interview conducted in Stockholm on November 11, 1993, in connection with Quine’s receiving the Schock Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It was first published in Theoria 60 (November 1994): 193–206. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 8: “There Is Always a Further Step” is the transcript of an Englishlanguage, tape-recorded interview that was conducted and translated into Ger-

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man by Olaf Brill and published as “Es gibt immer einen weiteren Schritt” in Dagmar Borchers, Olaf Brill, and Uwe Czaniera, eds., Einladung zum Denken: Ein kleiner Streifzug durch die analytische Philosophie (Invitation to Thinking: A Small Foray Through Analytic Philosophy) (Vienna: Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1998), 30–45. We are grateful to Borchers, Brill, and Czaniera for providing us with the original English version of the interview, which is published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 9: “Logical Correspondence with Russell (1937–1967)” was first published in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives 8, no. 1–2, n.s. (Summer–Winter 1988): 225–231, and reprinted as a monograph by McMaster University Library Press (Hamilton, ON, 1989); reprinted in Ian Winchester and Kenneth Blackwell, eds., Antinomies and Paradoxes: Studies in Russell’s Early Philosophy (Hamilton, ON: McMaster University Library Press, 1989), 225–231. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 10: “Thoughts on Reading Father Owens” was first published in Proceedings VII Inter-American Congress of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1967), 60–63. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 11: “Carnap’s Positivistic Travail” was first published in Fundamenta Scientiae 5 (1984): 325–333. Copyright © 1985 by Pergamon Press Ltd. Chapter 12: “Events and Reification” was first published in Ernest Lepore and Brian McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 162–171. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 13: “Carnap” was first published in Yale Review 76, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 226–230. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 14: “Charles Sanders Peirce: A Tribute from the National Academy of Sciences” was presented at the memorial meeting of the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on September 10, 1989; it was first published ten years later in Peirce Studies 6: Charles Sanders Peirce Memorial Appreciation (Elsah, IL.: The Press of Arisbe Associates, 1999), 15–22. Chapter 15: “Let Me Accentuate the Positive” was first published in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 117– 119. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 16: “Exchange Between Donald Davidson and W. V. Quine Following Davidson’s Lecture” was first published in Theoria 60, no. 3 (1994): 226–231. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 17: “Foreword to Kurt Gödel, Unpublished Philosophical Essays,” was first published as the “prologo” to the Spanish-language edition, Ensayos ineditos

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(Barcelona: Mondadori, 1994), 9–10; the following year it was published in the original English as the foreword to Kurt Gödel, Unpublished Philosophical Essays (Basel-Boston-Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1995), 7–8. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 18: “Where Do We Disagree?” (originally “Where Do We Differ”; retitled by the editor) was first published in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., Philosophy of Donald Davidson, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 27 (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 73–79. Reprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Peru, IL. Copyright © 1999 by The Library of Living Philosophers. Chapter 19: “Review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache” was first published in Philosophical Review 44, no. 4 (July 1935): 394–397. Copyright © 1935, used by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press, on behalf of the Sage School of Philosophy of Cornell University. Chapter 20: “Probability. Review of Harold Jeffreys’s Scientific Inference” was first published in Science 86 (December 24, 1937): 590. Reprinted with permission from AAAS. Chapter 21: “Review of Nelson Goodman’s Structure of Appearance” was first published in The Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951): 556–563. Copyright © 1951 by The Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted with the permission of The Journal of Philosophy. Chapter 22: “Review of Peter Thomas Geach’s Reference and Generality” was first published in Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 100–104. Copyright © 1964. Used by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press, on behalf of the Sage School of Philosophy of Cornell University. Chapter 23: “Review of Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations” was first published in British Journal for Philosophy of Science 28 (1977): 81–95. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 24: “Review of Derek Bickerton’s Roots of Language” was first published in Quaderni di Semantica 4 (1983): 404. Chapter 25: “Review of Charles Parsons’s Mathematics in Philosophy” was first published in The Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 783–794. Copyright © 1984 by The Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted with the permission of The Journal of Philosophy. Chapter 26: “Four Hot Questions in Philosophy: P. F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties” (Woodbridge Lectures, 1983) was first published in New York Review of Books (February 14, 1985): 32. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 27: “Replies to Professor Riska’s Eight Questions” was first published in Filozofia 47, no. 8 (1992): 500–503 [even-numbered pages in Slovak, oddnumbered pages in English]. Reprinted with permission.

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Chapter 28: “Comment on Neil Tennant’s ‘Carnap and Quine’” was first published in Wesley Salmon and Gereon Wolters, eds., Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21–24 May 1991 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), 345–351. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Chapter 29: “Responses to Articles by Abel, Bergström, Davidson, Dreben, Gibson, Hookway, and Prawitz” was first published in Dagfinn Føllesdal and Alastair Hannay, eds., “Symposium on Quine’s Philosophy,” Inquiry (special issue) 37, no. 4 (December 1994): 495–505. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 30: “Reactions” was first published in Paolo Leonardi and Marco Santambrogio, eds., On Quine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 347–361. Copyright © 1995 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Chapter 31: “Responses to Essays by Smart, Orenstein, Lewis and Holdcroft, and Haack” was first published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 51, no. 4 [202] (December 1997): 567–582. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 32: “Response to Leemon McHenry” was first published in Process Studies: The Forum 26 (1997): 13–14, in response to Leemon McHenry, “Quine and Whitehead: Ontology and Methodology,” Process Studies: The Forum 26 (1997): 2–12; reprinted in George Shields, ed., Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 171–173. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 33: “Quine’s Responses to Szubka, Lehrer, Bergström, Gibson, Miscevic, and Orenstein” was presented in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, in 1999 and first published in Alex Orenstein and Petr Kotatko, eds., Knowledge, Language, and Logic: Questions for Quine, Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 407–430. Copyright © 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted with the kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media. Chapter 34: “Introducing Piaget” was presented at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on April 27, 1960. The 8 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 35: “Mind/Body Problem” was presented at the informal Harvard University Health Services weekly lunch, Cambridge, MA, on January 9, 1963. The 4 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 36: “Magna Carta” was first published in New York Review of Books 1, no. 3 (September 26, 1963): 8. Reprinted with permission.

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Chapter 37: “On the Map” was first published in New York Review of Books 2, no. 2 (March 5, 1964): 17. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 38: “Charting the World” was first published in New York Review of Books 5, no. 4 (September 30, 1965): 18. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 39: “Words Enough” was first published in New York Review of Books 13, no. 10 (December 4, 1969): 3. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 40: “Skinner Retirement Party” was presented in Cambridge, MA, on October 17, 1974. The 11 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Douglas Quine. They have been posted at the Willard Van Orman Quine website (www.wvquine.org) since 2003 and are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 41: “A Letter to Mr. Ostermann” was first published in Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell, eds., The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 227–230. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 42: “Farewell Thanks at Villa Serbelloni [Bellagio, Lake Como], Italy” was given on September 17, 1975. The handwritten 5×8 note was transcribed by Alexander Quine. It is published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 43: “Introducing Church” was presented at the annual Alfred North Whitehead Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on March 18, 1975. The 4 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 44: “Introducing Dummett” was presented at the William James Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on February 25, 1976. The 3 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 45: “Introducing Campbell” was presented at the William James Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on April 13, 1977. The 4 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 46: “Knights and Knaves” was first published in New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1978, 6, 17. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 47: “Introduction to Gail Caldwell Stine Memorial Lecture.” Quine’s brief remarks, presented at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, in April 1980, preceded the invited talk “What Is It All About?” The lecture was also given soon afterward at Oakland University in Michigan, Uppsala University in Sweden, and the University of Iceland. The lecture itself was published in American Scholar 50, no. 1 (Winter 1980–81): 43–54. It was revised and expanded as “Things and Their Place in Theories,” in W. V. Quine’s Theories and Things. The handwritten 4×7 airmail letter flap was transcribed by Alexander Quine. It is published for the first time in this volume.

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Chapter 48: “What I Believe” was first published in Mark Booth, ed., What I Believe (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1984), 70–75. Chapter 49: “Sticks and Stones; or, The Ins and Outs of Existence” was first published in LeRoy S. Rouner, ed., On Nature: Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol. 6 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 13–26. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 50: “Introducing Kripke” was presented at the Kaplan Festival at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, on March 19, 1984. The 6 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 51: “Jean van Heijenoort Memorial” was presented at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on April 28, 1986. The 5 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 52: “Books That Mattered to Me” was first published in C. M. Devine et al., eds., Harvard Guide to Influential Books (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986), 204–205. Chapter 53: “To a Graduate Student in Philosophy” was first published in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 62, no. 1 (supp.) (September 1988): 258–259. Chapter 54: “Life Is Agid” was written in Quine’s journal in November 1946. Much later it was sent to the editor as “Lines on Life for Mr. Moorhead.” He renamed it “Methods of Logic” when it was first published in Hugh S. Moorhead, ed., The Meaning of Life: According to Our Century’s Greatest Writers and Thinkers (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1988), 154–155. Chapter 55: “Words Are All We Have to Go On” (originally “On Philosophers’ Concern with Language”; retitled by the editor) was first published in Times Literary Supplement 4657 (July 3, 1992): 8. Chapter 56: “Hobbling the Hawkers” was first published in Common Knowledge 1, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 17–18. Copyright © 1992 by Duke University Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 57: “Introducing Shepard” was presented at the William James Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on November 16, 1994. The 9 handwritten 4×6 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume. Chapter 58: “In Memory of John Finley” was presented at Eliot House, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on October 26, 1995. The 9 handwritten 4×6 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume.

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Chapter 59: “Quine /zkwain/, Willard Van Orman (b. 1908)” was first published in Thomas Mautner, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Reprinted with permission. Chapter 60: “Acceptance Speech for Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences” was presented at the Kyoto Prize ceremony in Kyoto, Japan, on November 10, 1996; it was first published in Kyoto Prizes and Inamori Foundation Grants 1996 (Kyoto: Inamori Foundation, 1997), 50–51 [even-numbered pages in Japanese; odd-numbered pages in English]. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 61: “Tidy Parsimony” was the commemorative lecture presented by Quine at the Kyoto Prize ceremony in Kyoto, Japan, on November 11, 1996; it was first published in Kyoto Prizes and Inamori Foundation Grants 1996 (Kyoto: Inamori Foundation, 1997), 140–153 [even-numbered pages in Japanese; oddnumbered pages in English]. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 62: “Advice to the Next Generation” was written April 8, 1989, and first published in James L. Harmon, ed., Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 122. Chapter 63: “Farewell to Me” was presented at the Harvard Philosophy Department farewell dinner, Cambridge, MA, on May 4, 1978. The 3 handwritten 3×5 cards were transcribed by Alexander Quine. They are published for the first time in this volume.

Index

a posteriori, 58 a priori, 21, 197–198 Abel, Günter, 223, 226, 231 abstraction, 12, 90, 218, 219, 251, 318, 353 accident, 12, 108, 198, 293, 320 Aconcagua (Argentina), 275 Aden, 276 Aegean Sea, 281 aesthetics, 72, 73, 78–80, 267, 334 Africa, 281, 282, 351 Agathodaemon (cartographer), 281 agid, 333, 366 Aiken, Henry, 359 Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz, 130 Akron (OH), 57 algebra, 178, 185, 191, 325, 351, 353 altruism, 80 American Heritage Dictionary, 285–290 American Philosophical Society, 342 anaphora, 140, 244 Anaximander, 67 Anaximenes, 67 ancestral, 180, 181 Ancient Mariner (reading Coleridge), 39 Andorra, 235 Anian (Strait of), 282 Ann Arbor (MI), 251 Apian, Peter (typo example), 231 Arabia, 282, 351 Arabic language, 162, 284 Arabic numeral, 234 Argentina, 275 Aristotle, 104, 310, 342 arithmetic, 52, 53, 65, 110, 120, 171, 195, 197, 198, 218, 219, 353 “Arithmetik ist ins Schwanken geraten” (Frege), 110, 219 Asia, 280–282, 351 assent, 115, 126, 138, 156, 225, 237, 262–264, 314–316

assert(ion)/unasserted 15, 51, 58, 169, 172, 187, 198, 217, 248 Atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland, 278–284 attributes, 7, 118, 162, 186, 198, 201, 202, 205, 213, 265 Austin, John L., 66, 253, 300, 301, 336 Austria/Austrian, 59, 63, 66, 143 axiom(s)/axiomatic, 45, 46, 52, 87, 88, 105, 109, 134, 182, 196, 198, 203, 353 Ayer, Alfred Jules (Freddie), 300, 336, 337 Aztec map, 280 bachelor, 51, 58, 75, 76, 94, 209, 265 Baghdad, 351 Baltic, 282 Baltimore, 142, 145 Bangor, 359 Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 256 Basse Terre, 276 beauty, 275, 350 Beckmann’s Hand Atlas, 279 behaviorism, 10, 11, 13, 14, 46, 47, 57, 59, 64, 65, 93, 94, 154, 217, 291 being: “to be is to be the object of an essential pronoun”, 90; “to be is to be the reference of a pronoun”, 90; “to be is to be the value of a variable”, 90 Bellagio (Villa Serbelloni, Lake Como), 297 Bell’s inequality, 28 Bennett, Jonathan, 300 Bentham, Jeremy, 69, 335 Bergström, Lars, 69–81, 223–226, 232, 262– 264 Bering, Vitus (Sea and Strait), 282 Bernays, Paul, 106, 201, 298, 359 Berry, George, 360 Beth, Evert W., 197 Bickerton, Derek, 192–193 bilingual, 92 Birkhoff, Garrett, 291

370 Bishop, Morris, 288 Black Sea, 281 Bloomfield, Leonard, 292 Bloomfield, Morton, 288 Blue, Eve (Skinner), 292 Bonomi, Andrea, 235 Boole, George/Boolean algebra, 60, 178, 185, 325 Boolos, George Stephen, 235, 242, 243 Boorse, Christopher, 150 Booth, Mark, 367 Borradori, Giovanna, 57–68 Bose-Einstein, 12, 151 Boston, 146, 165, 327, 350, 359 Brandt, Richard, 251 Brazil, 275, 281 Brill, Olaf, 82 Britain, 278, 279, 283 British, 29, 62, 66, 86, 276, 279, 281 Bronstein, Arthur J., 288 Brown, George, 360 Brown University, 106, 136 Burge, Tyler, 203 Burundi, 276 Byzantine/Byzantium, 281, 282 C.A.R. (Central African Republic), 276 California, 235, 282 Cambridge (MA), 61, 144, 152 Cambridge (UK), 191, 279, 336, 342 Campbell, Donald, 218, 238, 301–302 Canada, 303 Cantor, Georg, 96, 197, 198, 203, 268 Carnap, Ina, 25, 61, 85, 142–145 Carnap, Rudolf (Peterli), 23–26, 33, 36, 43, 44, 51, 57–59, 61–63, 65–67, 69, 75, 85–86, 89, 95, 106, 119–128, 142–145, 153–154, 157, 169–172, 174, 213, 216–221, 249, 265, 329, 335–337, 356, 357; Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 85, 119, 120, 125, 126, 144, 152, 176, 180, 183, 214, 216, 218, 261, 329; Logische Syntax der Sprache, 25, 85, 121, 142, 169– 171, 214, 329; Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, 142; Psychologie in physikalischer Sprache, 121; Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie, 120, 121, 125 Carroll, Lewis, 291 Cartesian, 313 Cauchy, Augustin Louis, 191 causality, 309, 313 cause, 6–9, 28, 64, 71, 82, 94, 117, 134, 135, 139, 153, 175, 193, 207, 233, 237, 294, 295, 309, 335, 342

Index certainty, 32, 46, 72, 213, 265 Chamberlain, Neville, 62 Chicago, 24, 63, 144, 145, 301 Chile, 275, 276 China/Chinese, 20, 351 Chomsky, Noam/Chomskian, 5, 150, 193 Chu-Kiang (River), 290 Church, Alonzo, 59, 60, 106, 298–299, 327 Chwistek, Leon, 169 City College of New York, 63, 107 Coast and Geodetic Survey, 146 Cocchiarella, Nino B., 236, 248, 249 Cochrane (Canada), 277 cogito ergo sum, 90 Coleridge, Samuel Tyler, 39 Columbia University, 206 Columbus, Christopher (map typo), 283 concatenate/concatenation, 130, 221, 243, 245 conceptual scheme, 16, 48, 49, 241 concomitant variation, 320 concrete, 12, 33, 90, 139, 180, 192, 195, 196, 199, 321, 355 Connecticut, 340 conscious(ness), 28, 63, 236, 286 construct, 87, 136, 171, 175, 218 contradiction, 74, 95, 164, 171, 173, 174, 228, 323, 354 Cooley, John, 85 cosmological conjectures, 67 Cratylus. See Plato/Platonist creole, 192–193 Curry, Haskell, 325 Czechoslovakia/Czech, 143, 214, 291 Dana-Palmer House, 359 Danzig, 235 Darwin, Charles, 161, 259, 273, 342 Davidson, Donald, 29, 55, 66, 129–133, 135, 138–139, 152–156, 159–163, 165, 208, 221, 227, 229–231, 235, 239, 241, 248, 254, 339 de dicto, 220–221, 247–248; de re, 131, 221, 232, 247, 249, 349 deduction, 73, 92, 182, 234, 340 definition, inductive, 162, 228 demonstrative, 221 Demos, Raphael, 359 Denison, D. C., 18–20 Dennett, Daniel, 41, 47, 49, 50, 80, 339 denotation, 91, 122, 163, 164, 169, 227, 228, 243 denote, 137, 159, 163, 164, 169, 209, 227, 317, 320, 322, 323, 347 Derrida, Jacques, 55

Index Descartes, René, 70, 154 description(s), 44, 48, 80, 104, 108, 111, 123, 129, 171, 187, 208, 217, 234, 276, 286, 312 determinism, 10, 20, 175, 273, 309–310 Dewey, John, 60, 70, 165, 213, 300, 301 dictionaries, 159, 162, 283, 285–290, 329, 346 disposition(s), 59, 119, 124, 156, 221, 225, 339 Donne, John, 40 Doty, Paul, 327 Dover (map error), 283 Dracula (riddle), 303, 304 Dreben, Burton, 136, 161, 165, 229–230, 359 Duhem, Pierre/Duhemian, 65, 125–126, 144 Dumas, Alexandre, 256 Dummett, Michael, 220, 300 Dutch, 29, 276, 282 Eastman, George. See George Eastman Visiting Professor Eco, Umberto, 235 economics/economist, 34, 65, 73, 89, 119, 208, 213, 225, 237, 279 Eddington, Sir Arthur S., 35, 329, 338 Edmister, Bradley, 43–56 Edwin’s rabbit, 227 Egyptian map, 280 Einarson, Benedict, 292 Einstein, Albert, 12, 23, 62, 66, 77, 81, 95, 118, 151, 157, 313 Elementarerlebnisse (Carnap), 216, 217 Eliot, Thomas S., 40 Eliot House (Harvard), 344, 359 embody, 240, 287, 303, 320 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 142 emotion, 8, 9, 10 empathy and perception, 235–236, 238, 254; and propositional attitudes, 221 Emperor’s New Mind (Penrose), 49 empiricism, 46, 47, 61, 71, 111, 120, 264, 312, 313, 324 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 290 Enders, John, 295 England, 67, 108, 278, 281, 282, 300, 337, 342, 354 entail, 225 Epea Pteroenta, Or the Diversions of Purley (Tooke), 292 epistemological, 72, 76, 120–121, 127, 151, 160, 199, 213, 230, 234, 240, 251, 253, 261, 264, 313, 338, 343 epistemology, 7, 24, 25, 27, 45, 47, 56, 78, 95, 140, 216, 218, 230, 232, 237, 251, 255, 262, 263, 265, 271, 272, 302, 313, 313, 323, 324, 334, 337

371 Esperanto, 145 essence, 33, 129, 163, 280, 348; essential, 53, 59, 70, 90, 199, 238, 257, 258, 260; essentialism, 150, 226 Essler, Wilhelm, 41 Etah (Greenland), 276 ethics, 34, 78, 79, 213, 251, 252, 334 Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Skeat), 329 Euclidean, 175 Eugene of Savoy, Prince, 283 Euler’s law, 189, 190, 191 Eureka (Poe), 21, 34, 39, 67 Evening Star, 122 evil, 38, 62, 78, 295, 309, 331, 340, 341, 356 existence. See being explanation, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 46, 48, 49, 64, 71, 80, 93, 94, 150, 161, 177, 225, 259, 309, 314 extension, 44, 137, 163, 177, 201, 204, 205, 249 extensionality, 93, 122, 134, 174, 258 Faeroes, 29 faith, 63 Falklands, 29, 276 Feferman, Solomon, 96, 203, 215, 327 Feigl, Herbert/Feigls, 24, 85, 143, 144, 221 Fermat, Pierre de/Fermat’s last theorem, 87, 94, 95 fiction(al), 38, 40, 73, 118, 137, 335 Finley, John, 344–345 Finley, Magdalena, 344 Firth, Roderick, 89, 359 Flemish, 327 Flew, Antony, 108 Føllesdal, Dagfinn, 69–76, 79, 161, 236, 238, 247, 251, 361, 364 formalism, 86–88, 215, 352 formalist(ic), 87, 189, 191 Formulario Matematico (Peano), 60 Frank, Philipp, 23, 24, 62, 66, 119, 337 Frankena, William, 251 Frederic paradox, 88 free will, 9, 20, 310 Frege, Gottlob/Fregean, 25, 51, 52, 89, 110, 119, 129, 143, 147, 180, 188, 194, 197–198, 200, 215, 219, 224, 245, 249, 300, 320, 327; Nachlass, 300 French, 32, 60, 159, 323, 327, 351 fusion, 342 gavagai, 234, 236, 239, 253, 260 Geach, Peter Thomas, 90, 184–188 gene(s), 20, 37, 70, 232, 314 genetic, 70, 193, 203, 271, 272, 273

372 Gentzen, Gerhard, 197, 234 Geographia (Ptolemaeus), 281 geometry, 174, 189, 351 George Eastman Visiting Professor, 344 Germany, 29, 59, 62, 66, 119, 143–144, 281, 283, 284, 354 Gibraltar, 219, 280 Gibson, Roger F., Jr., 66, 230–231, 236, 264– 265, 300 Glareanus, Henricus (typo), 283 God, 7, 8, 27, 143, 309–310, 317 Gödel, Kurt 23, 59, 62, 86–87, 106, 157–158, 170, 195, 214–215, 249–250, 298, 304–305, 327, 335, 337, 352–353; completeness, 240– 241; incompleteness 46, 86–89, 196, 218– 219, 224, 241, 304–305, 335, 352, 354; Nachlass, 157 Godstow (UK), 279 Goebbels, Joseph, 23 Goheen, John, 144 Goode’s School Atlas, 276 Goodman, Nelson, 54, 66, 144, 176–183, 229, 232, 359 Goodstein, R. L., 108 Gordian knot, 318 grammar/grammatical, 90, 129, 130, 133, 149, 150, 187, 188, 193, 199, 230, 240, 244, 248, 251, 252, 292, 318, 353, 354 Grande-Terre, 276 Grass Lake, 301 Grayling, Anthony C., 261 Greek(s), 8, 54, 68, 204, 243 Greenland, 276, 280, 283 Grelling’s paradox, 197, 228 Gresham’s law, 208 Grice, Paul, 300 Gupta, Anil, 203 Guyland (Long Island), 325 Haack, Susan, 255–256 Hall, Miss, 297 Hamilton College, 292 Hammond Atlas, 275 Hampshire, Stuart, 5 Harvard Crimson, 344 Harvard Gazette, 291 Harvard University, 15, 19, 22–24, 36, 38, 57– 64, 67, 84, 89, 103–106, 110, 142, 144, 146, 152, 271, 291, 298, 325, 344, 346, 349, 356, 359; Health Services, 273; Press, 60 Hasenjaeger, Gisbert, 300 Hegel, Georg, 26 Heidegger, Martin, 54, 55, 64, 142

Index Hempel, Carl G. (Peter), 24, 69, 119, 144, 337 Hempel, Eva, 144 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 187 Hermes, Hans, 300 Herzberger, Hans G., 203 Hesperus (example), 163 Higginbotham, James, 235, 244 Highland Line, 278–279 Hilbert, David, 359 Hintikka, Jaakko, 197 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 337 Hiz, Henry, 359 Hocking, William Ernest, 106, 107, 359 Holdcroft, David, 253, 255 holism/holist, 26–27, 52, 58, 65–66, 73, 125– 127, 150, 217, 233, 241, 256, 264 holophrastic, 159–160, 220, 240, 252, 263, 314 Holton, Gerald, 24 Homans, George, 292 Hong Kong, 235, 276 Hookway, Christopher, 231–233 Hoosac Tunnel (Peirce test location), 147 Hubel, David, 50, 218 Hume, David, 13, 33, 40, 61, 69, 206, 213, 273, 325 Husserl, Edmund, 47, 61, 63–64, 214, 271. See also phenomenology hypothetico-deductive, 14, 127, 219, 348 idealism/idealist, 7, 120 Iguassù (map error), 275 illusion, 106, 150, 225, 343, 360 impressionists, 32–33 Inamori, Kazuo, 349 Inamori Foundation, 349, 365 incommensurability, 105, 208 indecision, 22, 126 indeterminacy of translation, 21, 44, 47–48, 59, 91–93, 150, 159–160, 162, 195, 223, 226, 230, 252, 273; indeterminacy, 12, 49, 204, 224, 227; indeterminate, 150, 218, 252 indexical, 198, 221, 247 India, 351 Indian (drawing), 33 Indo-European (language roots), 143, 287–288 induction, 123, 127, 145, 147, 197, 198, 231, 232, 254, 260, 261, 320, 347 inductive definition. See definition, inductive infinity, 46, 76, 96, 131, 159, 196, 197, 202, 243, 244, 287, 328, 352, 353, 354 innate, 70, 71, 78, 80, 161, 193, 217, 218, 231, 238, 254, 338, 347

Index inscrutability, 252. See also ontological relativity Institute for Advanced Study, 145 intension(al), 119, 122, 123, 202, 205, 208, 209, 214, 220, 221, 226, 229, 244, 245, 257, 299 intention(al), 151, 186 intersubjective/intersubjectivity, 10, 15, 47, 48, 93, 115, 161, 214, 254, 259, 260, 315 intuition(ism), 70, 77, 187, 197, 256, 258, 265, 267, 325 intuitive, 45, 49, 51, 87, 88, 89, 95, 96, 196, 203 Ipswich (MA), 144 Ireland, Northern. See Northern Ireland Isis, 60 Islamic cartography, 284 Isle of Man, 29 Italy, 59, 61, 280, 281, 283, 297, 342 James, William, 60, 70, 83, 84, 106, 208, 213, 292, 300, 301, 359 Japan/Japanese (people), 282, 349–350, 351 Japanese language, 20, 349 Java, 281 Jeans, Sir James, 35 Jeffreys, Harold, 173–175, 232 Jerusalem, 351 Jespersen, Otto, 292 Jewish/Jews, 23, 62, 105, 143, 144, 351–352 Johns Hopkins University, 148 Jungle language, 28, 155 Justice, David, 25 Kant, Immanuel/Kantian, 33, 51, 70, 92, 164, 197, 206, 213, 242 Kaplan, David Benjamin/Kaplan festival, 325– 326 Karen (not in American Heritage Dictionary), 290 Karls-Universität (Prague), 85, 143 Kelley, John L., 201 Kennedy, John F., 109 Kepler’s star polyhedron, 190 Key West (Peirce test location), 147 Keynes, J. N., 175, 185 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 109 Kim, Jaegwon, 136 kinesthetic, 236, 237, 337, 346, 357 kind, natural, 251 King of France (example), 18, 91 Kirkland Place, 327 Kirkland Street, 110 Kleene, Stephen Cole, 106, 215, 298, 327 Köhler, Wolfgang, 300, 301 Kripke, Saul, 203, 325–326

373 Kubla Khan (reading Coleridge), 39 Kucera, Harry, 288 Kuhn, Thomas, 44, 263 Kurt Lewin Memorial Award, 301 Kyoto Prize, 349, 350 Labrador, 283 Lakatos, Imre, 189–191 Lake Michigan-Huron, 296 Lake Superior, 296 Lake Victoria, 296 Land, Edwin, 50 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 174 Latin, 52, 54, 290, 351 Leblanc, Hughes, 359 Lehrer, Keith, 261 Leibniz, Gottfried, 191, 254, 325 Leonard, Henry S., 178, Leonardi, Paolo, 235 LeÜniewski, Stanis¿aw/LeÜniewskian, 178, 187, 268 Levin, Harry, 292 Lewis, Clarence Irving, 60, 61, 213, 359 Lewis, Harry, 253, 255 Library of Living Philosophers, 21, 103, 143, 159, 194, 328 Liechtenstein, 235 Limerick, 281 Locke, John, 61, 69, 273, 325, 334 Lódz (Poland), 290 logical particles, 75, 76; logical structure, 59, 93, 132, 233, 239, 322, 338, 347, 348; logical truth, 21, 44, 76, 198, 199, 240, 265; logical validity, 218; logical words, 75, 240, 319 logicism, 88, 89 Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Carnap), 85, 119, 120, 125, 126, 144, 152, 176, 180, 183, 214, 216, 218, 261, 329 Logische Syntax der Sprache (Carnap), 25, 85, 121, 142, 169–171, 214, 329 London, 84, 145, 356 Lorraine (France), 281 Lough Neagh (map error), 281 Lourenço Marques (error), 290 Lovejoy, Arthur Onken, 142, 300, 301 Luxemburg, 235 Macao, 276, 290 Mach, Ernst, 119 Mackinac, Straits of, 276 MacLeish, Archibald, 345 Madison Avenue, 340 Magee, Bryan, 5–17

Index

374 Malaysia, 282 Malone, Kemp, 288 Man, Isle of. See Isle of Man Manchurian (map), 280 Manx, 29 Marcel’s lapin, 227 Marge/Marjorie. See Quine, Marjorie B. Marsh, Robert, 108 Martin, Donald A., 200 Martin, Richard, 136 Masterpiece Theatre, 34 materialism/materialist, 7, 10, 11, 118 “Mathematosis,” 267 Matisse, Henri, 33 McDavid, Raven, 288 McHenry, Leemon, 257–258 McMaster University, 110 meaningful, 7, 18, 25, 26, 53, 65, 120, 123, 124, 186, 220, 346 meaningless, 6, 18, 25, 120, 121, 169, 177, 186, 227, 353, 354 Mediterranean Sea, 280, 281 Meinong, Alexius, 104 Melville, Herman, 68 memory, 23, 28, 231, 282, 298, 332, 336, 344, 349 Menger, Karl, 119 mental, 8–11, 64, 68, 72, 208, 217, 265, 273; mental entities, 7, 11, 292 Mercator, Gerardus, 282 Merriman, Roger Bigelow, 344 Merritt Parkway, 340 metaphor, 54, 55, 203, 249, 255, 256 metaphysical/metaphysics, 24, 25, 49, 53, 54, 64, 70, 80, 84, 119–121, 123, 142, 144, 172, 205, 209, 213, 214, 221, 300, 310, 336, 338–339 Mexico, 33, 143, 327 Michigan, 277, 301 Micronesian sailing diagram, 280 Milhaud, Gaston, 65 Mill, John Stuart, 53, 120, 127, 320 Milton, John, 40 Miscevic, Nenad, 265, 266 Mississippi-Missouri, 276 modal logic, 25, 122, 123, 144, 145, 204, 325 modal operators, 123, 195, 205 modality, 195, 199, 204, 205 Modigliani, Amedeo, 33 molecule/molecular, 12, 136, 187, 207, 220, 258, 308, 346, 357 Molotov (Russia), 290 Monaco, 235, 290 monism/monistic, 221, 248, 257 Monte Titano (Monaco), 235

Montreal (Peirce test location), 147 Moore, G. E., 265 Moosonee (Canada), 277 morality, 78, 206, 207, 208, 251, 311 Moravia, 214 Morelos (Mexico), 327 Morganti, Signora Fausta, 235 Morning Star, 122 Morris, Charles, 105 Morse, Anthony P., 201 Morse code, 289 Mount Meru (map error), 283 Münster, Sebastian, 282 Münster (Germany), 300 Myhill, John, 359 Nagel, Ernest, 105 National Academy of Sciences, 146, 147 National Geographic Atlas, 275, 276 National Geographic Magazine, 235 natural kinds, 251 natural selection, 71, 78, 80, 161, 207, 231, 232, 238, 251, 254, 259, 260, 261, 273, 310, 337, 338, 347, 357 Nazi(s)/Nazism, 23–24, 62–63, 105, 143 necessarily, 13, 25, 48, 58, 76 nerve(s), 10, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 217, 259, 260, 312, 313, 315, 323, 346; neuroceptors, 161; stimuli, 156, 313; triggered neural receptors, 259 Neumann. See von Neumann, John Neurath, Otto, 69, 119, 120, 123, 165, 216 New England, 29, 292 New Foundations (NF), 58, 200, 201, 204, 248, 249 New Guinea, 276 New Mexico, 145 New Orleans (Peirce test location), 147 Newcastle (map error), 283 Newton, Sir Isaac/Newtonian, 6, 56, 77, 175, 234, 313, 342 Nile River, 281 nominalism, 179, 229, 334, 355 nominalistic, 179, 180, 195, 199, 209 Norma, Norman, 290 Northern Ireland, 278 Northwest Passage, 282 numeral(s), 170, 205, 209, 234, 267, 283, 308 numerous, 16, 89 Nunnink, Louise, 235 Ny Alesund, 276, 277 Oberlin College, 21, 22, 83, 84, 103, 257, 291, 352, 356

Index objectivity, 10, 207, 239, 246, 255, 309, 322 observational, 56, 65, 124, 127, 138, 156, 207, 225, 226, 263, 314 Ohio, 29, 57 Ohmann, Richard, 288 Ohmori, Shozo, 349 Oide, Akira, 349 Oldenburg University, 82 Olson, Betsy and Bill, 297 O’Neil, Wayne, 288 Ono, Takashi, 349 ontological relativity, 21, 159, 195, 235, 238, 242. See also inscrutability opacity/opaque, 245, 247; transparent, 89, 278, 279 Orenstein, Alex, 252, 266–268 Ortcutt, Bernard J., 245–247 O’Shea, Michael, 43–56 ostension, 115, 224, 239, 253 Ostermann, Robert, 293 Otranto (dictionary error), 290 Otto, Max Carl, 83 Owens, Father, 115, 117, 118 Oxford, 24, 67, 111, 206, 279, 300, 325, 336, 344 Paci, Enzo, 61 Pacific Ocean, 282 Palmer, George Herbert, 359 paradigm(s)/paradigmatic, 50, 55, 78, 80, 198, 227, 265 paradox(es), 45, 52, 88, 89, 163, 164, 200, 202, 203, 226, 243, 248, 264, 266, 268, 273, 303, 353, 354; barber’s, 88; Frederic, 88; Grelling’s, 197, 228; liar, 164, 201, 243; of quotation, 242, 243; Russell’s, 17, 45, 52, 219, 266, 353, 354; semantic, 202; set-theoretic, 202 Paraguay (map error), 275 Paranà, 275 Paris, Matthew, 283 Paris(ian), 271, 327 parsimony, 353–357 Parsons, Charles, 194–205, 235, 241 passion, 59, 68 Patoïka, Jan, 214 Peano, Giuseppe (Formulario Matematico), 60 Pearl River, 290 Pegasus, 18, 91, 317 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 60, 70, 146–148, 165, 169, 184, 188, 213, 223, 327 Penrose, Roger, 49 perception and empathy. See empathy and perception

375 perceptual similarity, 161, 216, 217, 236–238, 254, 259–261, 346–347 Perm (Russia), 290 Perry, Ralph Barton, 359 Persia/Persians, 284, 351 perspective(s), 1, 27, 40, 60, 65, 66, 96, 148, 267, 308. See also point of view Peru, 282 phenomenalism/phenomenalistic, 119, 120, 121, 126, 216, 263, 336, 337 phenomenology, 63–64, 198, 203–204, 214, 249. See also Husserl, Edmund phoneme, 226, 245, 322 Piaget, Jean, 271–272 pidgin, 192–193 Pivcevic, Edo, 21–29 planet, 67 Plato/Platonist, 40, 47, 91, 104, 176, 179, 268, 334; Cratylus, 334 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 34, 35, 39, 67; Eureka, 21, 34, 39, 67 Poincaré, Henri, 65, 134, 174, 191 point of view, 27, 40, 58, 70, 86, 119, 153, 175, 180, 236, 241, 245, 308, 344. See also perspective(s) Poland, 59, 105, 353, 356 Polanyi, Michael, 255 Polaroid, 50 Polish, 23, 57, 105, 187, 290, 346 Popper, Sir Karl, 5, 49, 145, 190, 255, 258, 261, 263, 300, 301, 337 Portugal, 62, 276 positivism, 36, 49, 57, 58, 66, 119, 124, 142, 190, 329 positivist, 36, 44, 53, 58, 65, 69, 77, 225 potential(ity), 44, 48, 90, 204 pragmatic/pragmatism/pragmatist(s), 36, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 66, 70, 83, 147, 213, 220 Prague, 23, 25, 57, 61, 62, 85, 142, 143, 144, 154, 213, 218, 337, 356 praise and blame, 108, 299, 309 Prall, David Wright, 182, 359 Prawitz, Dag, 233–234 predicate logic, 129–133, 138, 139, 140, 221, 239, 247. See also quantification theory prediction(s), 15, 26, 65, 72, 125, 141, 151, 240, 242, 261, 274, 315, 316, 337 preestablished harmony, 254, 260 pride, 105, 146, 148 Princeton, 60, 66, 145, 298, 325 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell), 22, 57, 59, 61, 63, 83, 84, 85, 88, 103– 105, 109, 111, 120, 204, 219, 257, 298, 328, 335, 352–354, 356

376 probability, 173–175, 232, 263 pronoun(s), 90, 116, 188, 209, 221, 244, 257, 258, 317, 318, 319, 338 propositional attitudes, 16, 130, 214, 221, 235, 244–248, 273 Protagorean, 225 proxy, 160, 188, 223, 224, 227 proxy functions, 93, 140, 195, 219, 230, 239, 240, 241, 253, 323 Prussian Academy, 62 Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Carnap), 142 Psychologie in physikalischer Sprache (Carnap), 121 Ptolemaeus, Claudius/Ptolemy, 147, 281–283; Geographia, 281 Puerto Williams, 276 Pusey Library, 327 Putnam, Hilary, 66, 92, 150, 235, 241 quality/qualities, 1, 79, 176, 178, 321 quantification theory, 89, 298 quantifier, 29, 124, 129, 140, 176, 195, 196, 197, 228, 245, 246, 267, 274, 317, 320 quantify, 89, 134, 196, 201, 221, 239, 245, 258 quantum mechanics/quantum physics, 28, 36, 49, 76, 77, 97, 151, 208, 309 quasi-analysis, 218 quasi-concepts, 249 quasi-definitional, 124 quasi-epistemological, 253 quasi-necessary, 241, 242 quasi-nominalistic, 199 quasi-syntactic, 121–122, 169, 171, 172 Quincy Street, 359 Quine, Cloyd Robert (father), 29, 68 Quine, Douglas, 1, 365 Quine, Elizabeth (daughter), 105 Quine, Harriet Van Orman (mother), 29, 351 Quine, Marjorie Boynton, 34, 110, 145, 297, 344, 350, 359 Quine, Naomi Clayton, 23, 61, 142, 143 Quine, Robert Stanford (grandfather), 29, 68 Ramsey, Frank P./Ramsey sentences, 80, 124, 163, 224 Ramsey, Norman, 147 Random House Dictionary, 285–286, 288–290 rational, 139, 144, 177, 261, 280, 332 Rawls, John, 34 realism, 33, 120, 141, 229, 233, 323, 340 recursion, 164, 215 referential, 116, 138, 245, 247, 267, 268, 323

Index referring 91, 187, 188, 191, 209, 229, 319, 321, 348 Reichenbach, Hans, 57, 119, 337 reification, 129, 132, 133, 137, 139–140, 199, 204, 217, 220, 234, 238–239, 263, 266, 267, 336, 338, 348 reinforce/reinforcing/reinforcement, 29, 132, 161, 254, 259 religion, 89, 309, 310, 351 resemblance, 238 Rhineland, 62 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 107 rigid, 30, 205, 247 Riska, Augustin, 213–215 Roberts, Elizabeth. See Quine, Elizabeth Rockefeller Fellowship, 85 Rockefeller University, 325 Rodríguez-Consuegra, Francisco A., 157–158 Rolf Schock Prize, 69 Roman (map), 280 Rorty, Richard, 37, 55, 80, 121, 149–151, 334 Rosser, J. Barkley, 298 rules, general (Hume), 117 Russell, Bertrand, 17–19, 22, 24, 34–36, 40, 45, 48, 52, 57–61, 63, 66, 69, 80, 83, 84, 86, 89, 103–111, 119–121, 129, 134, 140, 144, 154, 158, 174, 188, 203, 214, 215, 219, 224, 246, 248, 249, 257, 258, 266, 273, 300, 301, 328– 329, 335, 336, 352, 353, 354, 356, 359. See also Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell) Russell Tribunal, 63 Russell-baiting, 111 Russia/Russian, 63, 327 Rwanda, 276 Ryle, Gilbert, 336 Saarbrücken, 281 Saarwerden, 281 Salk, Jonas, 295 Salmon, Wesley, 235 Samoa, Western. See Western Samoa San Marino, 235, 290 Sanders Theatre, 110 Sarton, George, 60 Saunders, Simon, 49 Sawada, Nobushige, 349 Saxton, Christopher, 283 Scandinavia, 281, 282 Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie (Carnap), 120, 121, 125 schema, 316 schematic/schematism, 126, 195, 281

Index Schilpp, Paul Arthur, 143, 194 Schlick, Moritz, 57, 62, 67, 119 Schock Prize. See Rolf Schock Prize Scholz, Heinrich, 300 Schroeder, Ernst, 185 Scotland, 279, 281, 282 Scott Stamp Album, 290 Scott, Sir Walter, 104 Scrabble, 34 Scutari (dictionary error), 290 Searle, John, 224 self-awareness, 308 semantic(s), 15, 16, 22, 25, 107, 122, 123, 149, 162, 163, 164, 169, 187, 196, 199, 202, 214, 220, 226, 229, 242, 245, 250, 299, 325, 336 semantical, 94, 123, 125, 138, 160, 164, 221, 231 Sen, Amartya, 34 sensation(s), 10, 115, 144, 148; sense data, 124, 126, 261, 262, 265, 312, 313, 335, 336; sense impressions, 25; sensory receptors, 24, 28, 126, 137, 140, 220, 312, 357 Shakespeare, William, 292 Sheffer, Henry M., 105, 359 Sheila (American Heritage Dictionary), 290 Sheldon Fellow, 152, 153 Shepard, Roger, 342–343 Shimony, Aber, 49 Shoenfield, J. R., 203 Siberia, 235, 282 significance, 51, 58, 119, 125, 175, 196, 216, 220, 248, 294, 354 Singer, Irving, 110 Skeat, Walter, 329; Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 329 skeptic, 103, 140, 152, 154, 155, 206, 207, 209, 307 skill, 54, 196, 278 Skinner, Burrhus Fred, 59, 64, 154, 291–292, 300, 301, 365 Skinner, Eve Blue, 292 Skoplje (dictionary error), 290 Sleigh, Robert, 247 Smart, J. J. C., 251–252 Smith, Henry Lee, Jr., 288 Smullyan, Raymond M., 303–305 Sober, Elliott, 266 social, 19, 34, 62–64, 72, 78, 143, 213, 295, 297, 302, 309 Society of Fellows, 63, 152, 291, 292, 325 South America, 275, 351 space, 8, 77, 126, 180, 197, 204, 210, 218, 236, 238, 239, 246, 282, 308

377 space-time, 14, 126, 135, 137, 139, 170, 204, 210, 238, 239, 257, 308 Spanish, 252, 327 spatial, 7, 135, 179, 182 spatio-temporal, 179 species, 12, 161, 311, 320 Spencer-Brown, George, 110 Spitzbergen, 276 St. Lawrence Island, 282 Stacchini, Emmanuela, 235 Stanford, 145, 161, 325, 342 state of affairs, 49, 309 Stegmüller, Wolfgang, 201, 300 Stein, Gertrude, 292 Stetson, Raymond, 64, 291 Stevenson, Charles Leslie, 105, 251 stimuli. See nerve(s) Stine, Gail Caldwell, 306 Straits of Anian, 282 Straits of Mackinac, 276 Strassburg (atlas), 281 Strawson, Sir Peter, 66, 206–210, 336 Stroll, Avrum, 265 Stroud, Barry, 235 substance, 90, 208, 224, 342 substitutivity of identity, 245, 247 Suginamiku Kamiogikibo (Tokyo), 349 Sumerian(s), 280 surface, 45, 46, 160, 189, 236, 237, 256, 258, 324, 334, 337; “save the surface and you save all”, 46 Sweden, 69 Switzerland/Swiss, 214, 282, 354 sympathy, 358 syncategorematic, 133 synonym(y), 44, 59, 92, 122, 162, 171, 177, 217 Szubka, Tadeusz, 259 Takeda, Hiromichi, 349 Tarski, Alfred/Tarskian, 24, 57, 58, 61, 63, 78, 105–107, 122, 130, 131, 153, 163, 164, 196, 197, 201, 202, 214, 215, 218, 227, 228, 239, 242, 243, 249, 252, 268, 304, 326, 335, 337, 353 telepathy, 313 Tennant, Neil, 153, 216–221 Terminist view, 268 Terra de Lauatore, 283 Texas (example), 294 Texas Tech University, 146 Thales of Miletus, 8, 67 theology, 310, 342 Titano, Monte (San Marino), 235

Index

378 T-O view of world, 280 Tokyo, 349 Tomida, Yasuhiko, 349 Tooke, John Horne, 334, 335; Epea Pteroenta, Or, the Diversions of Purley, 292 Tractatus. See Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann transcendent, 164, 165, 226, 230, 242 transcendental, 60, 64, 92, 206 translate, 10, 13, 150, 160, 162, 200, 216, 304, 320, 322, 324, 327, 335, 352 transparent. See opacity/opaque triggered neural receptors. See nerve(s) trigonometry, 273 Trotsky, Leon, 327 true by definition, 95 truth: Wahrheitsbegriff (Tarski), 242 truth function, 29, 51, 89, 130, 132, 139, 140, 151, 176, 239, 240, 251, 266, 274 T-sentences, 163 Turing, Alan, 50, 51, 106 Tweedledum and Tweedledee, 291 Two Dogmas of Empiricism (Quine), 25, 43, 58, 59, 69, 74, 76, 150, 346 Ulan Bator, 276 under-determination, 150 unicorn, 91, 317, 323 United Kingdom, 278 United States Coast Survey. See Coast and Geodetic Survey universals, 179, 196 Urga, 276 Ushuaia, 276 utility, 78, 92, 139, 140, 234, 267, 320 vague(ness), 28, 31, 33, 64, 70, 72, 80, 83, 92, 136, 137, 150, 151, 173, 177, 203, 238, 249, 258, 262, 264, 338, 352 Van Heijenoort, Jean, 327 Van Orman, Jas. Henry (grandfather), 29 Vatican City, 235 vector, 191 Veery, 30–42 Venn, John, 175 verification, 10, 93 Vienna/Viennese, 23, 24, 57, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 85, 86, 119, 142, 143, 335, 336, 337, 352

Vienna Circle, 23, 24, 36, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 85, 111, 119, 125, 142, 143, 336, 337, 346 Villa Serbelloni, 297 Violi, Patrizia, 235 Vita, Steven, 30–42 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 139 von Neumann, John, 194, 200, 201, 214, 249 Wahrheitsbegriff. See truth Waismann, Friedrich, 62 Wang, Hao, 96, 201, 203, 215, 359 Warsaw, 23, 62 Washington, DC, 146, 344, 359 Watkins, Calvert, 288 Watson, John B., 64, 154, 291 Waverley (example), 104 Webster (dictionary), 285, 286 Weltauffassung, 119 Western Samoa, 276 Weyl, Hermann, 96 Wheeler, Samuel C., 133 White, Morton (Morty), 359 Whitehead, Alfred North, 18, 22, 57, 59, 61, 63, 83–85, 103, 104, 107, 110, 120, 140, 174, 177, 214, 215, 218, 257–258, 298, 328, 335, 352, 353, 356, 359. See also Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell) Whitehead, Evelyn Wade, 110 Wiesel, Torsten N., 50, 218 Wild, John Daniel, 359 William of Ockham, 334 Williams, Donald Carey, 359 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann, 24, 66, 120, 171, 206, 265, 307, 326, 336; Tractatus, 120 Wohlstetter, Albert, 144 Wolf Lake, 301 Woodger, J. H., 105, 176 World Almanac, 290 Yale University, 135, 325 Yamamoto, Makoto, 349 Yeats, William Butler, 39 Yosida, Natuhiko, 349 Zermelo, Ernst, 194, 200, 201, 204, 248, 249, 354 Zermelo-Fraenkel system, 214