Quine

Christopher Hookway

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745602394, 9780745601755
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the work of Willard van Orman Quine, the most important and influential American philosopher of the post-war period. An understanding of Quine's work is essential for anyone who wishes to follow contemporary debates in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Hookway traces the development of Quine's work from his early criticisms of logical positivism and empiricism to his more recent theories about mind and meaning. He gives particular attention to Quine's controversial arguments concerning the indeterminacy of translation, comparing Quine's views with those of Davidson, Putnam and others. Hookway concludes by offering a critical appraisal of Quine's approach and of some of his fundamental philosophical commitments.

This lucid and balanced study will be essential reading for students of philosophy. It will also be invaluable for students in the social sciences and other disciplines who are looking for a clear introduction to Quine's ideas.

Part I

The Evolution of Empiricism

1

Language and the
World

1.1 INTRODUCTION

In ‘Five milestones of empiricism’, reprinted in Theories and Things, Quine describes ‘five points where empiricism has taken a turn for the better’ (TT, p. 67) since the seventeenth century. He sees his own work as the culmination of this process of improvement. Examining these five ‘milestones’ will enable us to introduce some of the doctrines for which he is best known, and will also help us to see how Quine himself views the historical context of his philosophical position. This will occupy us for the first three chapters.

We do not require a precise definition of ‘empiricism’: it is enough that empiricists take seriously the claims of the sciences to provide our best knowledge of reality, and hold that this knowledge is grounded in sensory experience. When we raise the philosophical question of how such knowledge of reality is possible at all, we tend to focus first upon questions of evidential support: how does experience enable us to sort our beliefs into those that are true and those that are false? But there is a prior question about how thoughts and utterances can be about the world at all: what is it for a sound, an inscription on paper or a blackboard, or a state of someone’s mind, to represent some external state of affairs? What is involved in understanding a thought or utterance, in knowing what it means? These questions raise a host of issues about representation, meaning and reference which have been fundamental for twentieth-century analytical philosophy.

It is an assumption of much twentieth-century philosophy that we naturally fall victim to certain deeply mistaken pictures of how thought and language relate to the world. They tend to be uncritically accepted, but seriously distort our philosophical thinking; indeed, these false pictures often give rise to apparent philosophical problems, which can be dismissed once the pictures that produce them are rejected. For many analytical philosophers, all of the traditional ‘problems of philosophy’ result from this kind of distortion. The ‘milestones’ to which Quine refers all involve developments in our philosophical understanding of representation: they promise philosophical enlightenment by overthrowing entrenched, but mistaken, conceptions of how thought and language work.

We can pass over the first milestone rapidly. It is ‘the shift of attention from ideas to words’; focusing the analysis of representation upon linguistic expressions or utterances rather than upon thoughts or ideas. The merit of this shift was that attention could turn from shadowy objects of introspection to more easily examined public representations. My concern in this chapter is with the second milestone, ‘the shift of semantic focus from terms to sentences’. This introduces some of the most important foundational doctrines for contemporary philosophy of language. Examining these will help us to explain Quine’s approach to issues of what he calls ‘ontology’, in his classic paper ‘On what there is’ (FLPV).

1.2 MEANING AND NAMING

A natural starting point for an explanation of how language works is that words stand for things; we understand a word when we know what thing it stands for. Thus, I understand the word ‘London’ when I know which city it refers to or denotes, and I understand ‘Quine’ when I know which person it names. A sentence can then be looked on as a sequence or arrangement of words, and our understanding of the sentence is built out of our knowledge of what the words stand for. Finally, we can say that a sentence is true when the arrangement of words in the sentence corresponds, in some fashion, to the arrangement in reality of the things that those words stand for. This is only a vague sketch of a possible theory – the notion of arrangement conceals a host of problems – but it will do as a stalking horse for our present discussion; it cannot be denied that it has considerable initial plausibility. In this section, I shall introduce some problems faced by any theory of this general shape. We can then investigate how Quine’s second milestone enables us to move beyond this theory and respond to these problems.

By way of preparation, we must labour the obvious point that a language such as English contains expressions of different kinds. Consider the sentence:

Quine is American.

The name ‘Quine’ functions as a subject expression which purports to pick out a unique individual: we shall call it a singular term. ‘London’ is also a singular term, and it is clear too that a more complex phrase, a ‘definite description’ such as ‘The author of Word and Object’, can also be used to pick out a single individual. The expression ‘is American’ does not purport to pick out a single individual, but rather expresses a general characteristic which can be applied to many things: such expressions can be called predicates. The sentence inset above is formally analogous to

London is populous.

Each employs a singular term together with a predicate which is used to apply some characteristic to the individual that the singular term refers to. Using upper case letters ‘F’, ‘G’ etc. to mark the places occupied by predicates, and lower cases letters ‘a’, ‘b’, etc. to mark the places of singular terms, we can express this common form:

Fa (It is a logician’s convention that the predicate is written first.)

A sentence such as:

Brutus killed Caesar

contains two singular terms (two subject expressions), ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’, together with a predicate expression that expresses a relation between two persons, that of killing. Using ‘R’ etc. to mark the places of relational predicates, we can express the form of this sentence:

Rab.

The sentence

London is south of Birmingham

is also of this form: it concerns a relation between two things.

There is one other kind of expression to which I want to draw attention here. In a sentence like

It is not the case that Quine is German,

the expression ‘it is not the case that’ is attached to the complete sentence ‘Quine is German’. Similarly, two complete sentences are conjoined by ‘and’ in:

Quine is American and Frege is German.

Following logician’s practice, I shall use ‘~’ to express ‘it is not the case that’ (negation) and ‘&’ to express ‘and’ (conjunction). The forms of our last two sentences can be expressed:

~Fa

Fa & Gb.

These expressions which attach to, or connect, complete sentences will be called connectives or operators. ‘Or’ (disjunction), formally expressed by ‘v’, functions analogously to ‘and’.

Thus, we have three kinds of expressions: singular terms, including names; predicates including relational expressions; and various operators. There is no suggestion that this exhausts the resources of a natural language, nor that it accounts for all occurrences of the expressions that we have mentioned. But it provides us with a useful account of a fragment of most natural languages, and contains just enough complexity to enable us to understand some important philosophical doctrines: we can formulate difficulties for our plausible account of language.

Let us begin by looking at how predicates work. It seems easy enough to find the things that singular terms stand for: ‘Quine’ stands for a man, ‘London’ for a city, and these are comfortably concrete observable objects. But what of an expression like ‘is red’, ‘is American’ or ‘killed’? These do not stand for concrete observable objects. ‘Red’ cannot stand for any particular red object for it could not then be used to say truly of any other object that it is red. The only candidate for the referent of ‘is red’ is that it stands for the attribute or general character of redness or of being-red. This does not seem to be a concrete or observable thing: I can see particular red things, but I cannot see the general character of redness. We seem to be committed by our account of representation to the view that there are such general characters, that we are aware of them, and that we only understand predicates by somehow associating them with such general objects.

A parallel problem arises from the use of operators or connectives: what do ‘not’ and ‘and’ stand for? There does not seem to be anything in our experience to serve as the meanings of these expressions, yet the theory of meaning under discussion requires that there be such objects and that understanding the expressions involves associating them with these objects. Once we extend the fragment of language with which we are dealing, it looks as if we shall be led into such absurdities as the claim that there is something, viz. nothing, which the expression ‘nothing’ stands for.

Finally, let us consider the expressions for which the referential theory of meaning seems best suited, names and other singular terms. We all of us, including Quine, presumably understand the two sentences below:

Hamlet killed Laertes

Pegasus was a winged horse

It does not matter for the present whether we think those sentences are true or false. It is enough that we can understand them, for they contain names – ‘Hamlet’, ‘Laertes’, and ‘Pegasus’ – for creatures from fiction or mythology. Although we can observe actors portraying Hamlet, we cannot see the Prince of Denmark himself. He stands in no causal relations to other concrete objects, and he has no location in space and time. Like Pegasus, he seems to be a non-existent object. If the views about names described above are correct, then our understanding of the names employed in these sentences shows that there are – and that we can talk about – real things which do not exist.

Even if this is accepted, there is scope for considerable disagreement about just what these names refer to. Some hold – implausibly – that Hamlet is an idea in someone’s mind; others claim that he is a merely possible object; others that he is a sui generis fictional entity. We do not need to get involved in these debates, since Quine does not consider that these examples raise a serious problem for the referential theory. Adopting a view that was anticipated by Frege, and has subsequently been developed in much more detail by John Searle and Gareth Evans, Quine suggests that talk of Pegasus, Hamlet and their properties is not serious factual discourse. We ‘frivolously’ pretend to make assertions about winged horses, and to talk about the goings-on in Elsinore, whenever our idiom deviates from talk of such concrete objects as texts and the inscriptions that they contain. Hence, I only pretend to use ‘Hamlet’ as an ordinary proper name, so my usage does not show that I recognize the reality of Hamlet (FLPV, p. 103).

However, as my last sentence indicates, I can use names for characters of fiction in what are plainly serious assertions. For example, I may truly say:

Hamlet did not really exist

Pegasus did not really exist

I understand those sentences and think that they are true. If I only understand the names they contain by knowing who or what the expressions name, then I must know that both ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Pegasus’ refer to something non-existent. So, Quine – and all of us – must agree that there are non-existent objects. Unless the names referred to things, the two sentences could not be true; and since the sentences are true, those referents must be non-existent. Hence, the theory of meaning we are considering suggests that there are non-existent objects.

These problems do not refute the theory of language from which we started, but they point towards philosophical problems that become very pressing once the theory is accepted. What are these objects? How do we know about them? What are their properties? It is easy to find the resulting view of the world very embarrassing. The world seems to contain far more objects than are explicitly discussed in the sciences. And our grasp of our familiar language appears to involve an acquaintance with objects which are not evident to our senses. For a philosopher who is sympathetic to empiricism, the burgeoning population of abstract objects is something to be avoided. Empiricists often prize their down-to-earth common sense, but the common-sense view of the world does not seem to find room for these curious abstractions.

A prejudice in favour of the concrete is commonly found among philosophers who take science seriously, or who believe that our knowledge derives primarily from the senses. They show no reluctance to admit that the world contains objects which are visible; and invisible objects like protons are accepted because they stand in causal relations to other objects and are causally implicated in our ways of coming to knowledge about them. But abstract objects – things like numbers, classes, attributes, non-existent or fictional entities, which do not enter into the causal structures studied by the physical sciences, and have no location in space and time – are treated with suspicion. That Quine shares this prejudice is evident from the first paragraph of a paper jointly written with Nelson Goodman in 1947, ‘Steps towards a constructive nominalism’. This reads:

We do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities – classes, relations, properties, etc. – exist in space–time; but we mean more than this. We renounce them altogether.

(Goodman 1972, p. 173)

Although Quine subsequently came to acknowledge some abstract entities, and described this passage as expressing merely the hypothetical basis for the investigations occupying the rest of the paper, it is plain that he sympathizes with the mistrust of abstract entities here expressed.

In their 1947 paper, Quine and Goodman attribute some of this suspicion of the abstract to the belief that it is not possible to make sense of at least one sort of abstract object – the classes studied in set theory – without either running into contradiction or relying upon ad hoc and unnatural analyses. But, fundamentally, their refusal to admit the abstract objects with which mathematicians and others seem to deal ‘is based on a philosophical intuition that cannot be justified by appeal to anything more ultimate’ (p. 174).

In ‘On what there is’, Quine raises a question about the reality of attributes and considers it in relation to some of the assumptions about language that we are examining:

There are red houses, red roses, red sunsets; this much is prephilosophical common sense in which we all must agree. These houses, roses and sunsets, then, must have something in common; and this which they have in common is … the attribute of redness.

(FLPV, p. 10)

When he asks why we should admit that there is this abstract entity – the attribute, property, or ‘universal’, redness – the arguments he considers have the following basic strategy. When I make an assertion such as

The rose is red,

I employ a predicate expression – ‘red’ or ‘is red’. This expression is plainly meaningful; I understand it. If an expression is meaningful, then there is something it stands for, it has a meaning. The meaning of our predicate is this abstract entity, the attribute of redness. By granting that general terms are meaningful, we admit the reality of some abstract entities – their meanings. Universals are the meanings of general terms. If the referential theory of meaning is adopted, this seems hard to resist.

Thus, each of the three classes of expressions we have considered presents philosophical problems if our natural theory of meaning is adopted. At different times, some philosophers have been prepared to bite the bullet, accepting that there are far more things around than the sciences would have us believe. In different ways, around the turn of the century, Moore, Russell and Meinong were prepared to take a strongly realist view of many of these strange objects. The problems they raise are primarily of two kinds. The first, already alluded to, is epistemological: in order to account for our understanding of language, we must show that we are in cognitive contact with these things. It seems easiest to do that by positing a faculty for intellectual acquaintance with them which will grate with the prejudices of an empiricist.

The second problem is metaphysical: it is often claimed that we understand the nature of objects of a particular kind, and we can talk about them intelligibly, only when we can understand identity statements involving terms referring to the object. We may say such things as

There is a number that is prime

There is number which is the sum of two and seven

But we do not know what numbers are until, as well as using numerals to refer to them, we understand what is involved in saying

Nine is the same number as the sum of two and seven.

We know when two singular terms stand for the same number. It is a condition of our treating persons as objects that we know how to answer questions about whether two terms refer to the same person, and so on. Hence, one basis for questioning the reality of abstract objects concerns whether a clear sense has been attached to the appropriate statements of identity or sameness. (See FLPV, p. 4, where Quine uses just such an argument against the claim that there are possible objects – recall the claim in the joint paper with Goodman that reference to abstract entities is likely to bring paradox and unclarity with it.)

1.3. WORDS AND SENTENCES

The second milestone of empiricism was a doctrine introduced, and used to great effect, by Bentham; it was also embraced by Frege and Russell (TT, pp. 68–70). It involves a ‘shift of attention from words to sentences’: the primary vehicle of meaning is seen no longer as the word but as the sentence’ (TT, pp. 68–9); ‘the meanings of words are abstractions from the truth conditions of sentences that contain them’ (TT, p. 69).

Verbal behaviour primarily involves uttering sentences. These are the shortest units of language which can actually be used to perform linguistic actions. Unless a specific conversational context is provided, we can make no sense of the utterance of a single word. Our grasp of the meaning of a word enables us to use and understand the sentences in which it occurs. It is a natural corollary of this that an account of how language works is adequate if it makes sense of what we do with sentences: words are best viewed simply as recurrent features of sentences. Focusing on individual words in abstraction from a wider sentential context can then appear as a source of philosophical illusion. Thus, H...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on References
• Introduction
• Part I: The Evolution of Empiricism
• Part II: Logic and Reality
• Part III: Mind and Meaning
• Part IV: Knowledge and Reality
• References
• Index