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A Companion to W.V.O. Quine

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A Companion to W.V.O. Quine

Edited by

Gilbert Harman Ernie Lepore

This edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction: Life and Work 1

Gilbert Harman and Ernie Lepore

Part I Method 15

1 Quine and Epistemology 17Thomas Kelly

2 Quine and the A Priori 38Lars Bergström

3 Quine and Pragmatism 54Peter Godfrey-Smith

4 Quine’s Relationship with Analytic Philosophy 69Gary Kemp

5 Quine on Paraphrase and Regimentation 89Adam Sennet and Tyrus Fisher

6 Quine’s Naturalism 114Alan Weir

7 Quine’s Naturalism Revisited 148Peter Hylton

Part II Language 163

8 Inscrutability Scrutinized 165Alex Orenstein

contents

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9 Quine on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction 181Gillian Russell

10 Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence 203Ernie Lepore

11 Indeterminacy, Relativity, and Behaviorism 219Gilbert Harman

12 Indeterminacy of Translation 236Peter Pagin

13 Developments in Quine’s Behaviorism 263Dagfinn Føllesdal

Part III Logic, Mathematics, Science 279

14 Quine’s Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics 281John P. Burgess

15 Bolzano, Quine, and Logical Truth 296Sandra Lapointe

16 Quine on Observationality 313Olav Gjelsvik

17 Observation 333Bredo C. Johnsen

18 Quine on Evidence 350Robert Sinclair

19 Quine on Reference and Quantification 373Michael Glanzberg

Part IV Relation to Other Philosophers 401

20 Quine and Russell 403Gary Ostertag

21 The Place of Quine in Analytic Philosophy 432Scott Soames

22 Quine’s Naturalistic Explication of Carnap’s Logic of Science 465Gary Ebbs

23 Quine and Chomsky on the Ins and Outs of Language 483Barry C. Smith

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24 Quine’s Conception of Explication – and Why It Isn’t Carnap’s 508Martin Gustafsson

25 The Relation between Quine and Davidson 526Hans-Johann Glock

26 Quine and the Revival of Metaphysics 552Gideon Rosen

Name Index 571Subject Index 576

Notes on Contributors

Lars Bergström is Emeritus Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His main areas of interest are moral philosophy, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of W.V. Quine.

John P. Burgess is the John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1975. He is the author of scores of papers on different branches of mathematical and philosophical logic, on philosophy of mathematics and logic and language, and on the history of analytic philoso-phy. He is also author or coauthor of seven books, most recently Saul Kripke: Puzzles and Mysteries.

Gary Ebbs is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloom-ington. He is the author of Rule-Following and Realism (1997), Truth and Words (2009), and (with Anthony Bruckner) Debating Self-Knowledge (2012), as well as a number of articles on topics in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy.

Tyrus Fisher’s primary area of research is in the philosophy of language, though his work intersects with issues in the philosophy of science and the history of analytic philosophy. He is a graduate student at the University of California, Davis.

Dagfinn Føllesdal studied science and mathematics in Oslo and Göttingen 1950–57 before going to Harvard to study with Quine. After his PhD in 1961 he taught at Harvard and then in Oslo (1967–99). From 1968 to 2012 he taught at Stanford, from 1976 as C.I. Lewis Professor of Philosophy.

notes on contributors

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He is the author of books and articles on philosophy of language and on phenomenology.

Olav Gjelsvik is Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Educated in Oslo and at Balliol College Oxford, he works in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, and has also written several papers about addiction. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and also of the Academia Europaea.

Michael Glanzberg is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in the areas of philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics.

Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), and Visiting Professor at the University of Reading (UK). He is the author of A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell, 1996), Quine and Davidson on language, thought and reality (Cambridge University Press, 2003), La mente de los animals (KRK 2009) and What is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He has published numerous articles on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the history of analytic philosophy, and Wittgen-stein. At present he is working on a book on animal minds and co-editing The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein.

Peter Godfrey-Smith has taught at Stanford, Harvard, and the Australian National University, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include Theory and Reality and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.

Martin Gustafsson is Professor of Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He has published papers on Quine, Cavell, Davidson, McDowell, Witt-genstein, and others. He is the editor (together with Richard Sørli) of The Phi-losophy of J.L. Austin (Oxford University Press, 2011).

W.V. Quine was Gilbert Harman’s dissertation adviser at Harvard. Harman teaches at Princeton University, where he is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. He has wide interests in epistemology, language, mind, and ethics. His books include Thought (1973), The Nature of Morality (1977), and Change in View (1986). Judith Thomson and Harman wrote Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (1996). Sanjeev Kulkarni and Harman have written two books, Reliable Reasoning (2007) and An Elementary


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Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory (2011). Some of his philosophical papers have been republished in two collections, Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind (2009) and Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (2010).

Peter Hylton was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and at Harvard Uni-versity. He is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor at the Uni-versity of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1990), of Quine (Routledge, 2007), and of numerous essays, chiefly on the history of analytic philosophy, some of which are collected in Propositions, Functions, and Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Bredo Johnsen received his BA in philosophy from Wayne State University in 1961 and PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1973. He has taught at the University of Houston since 1967. His work has centered largely on skepticism, especially on Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Hume, Goodman, Quine, and Wittgenstein, with detours into Putnam, Rorty, Plantinga, and Dretske. For some time, his efforts have been devoted to showing how, beginning with Goodman, and culminating in Quine, Hume’s “skepticism” has inspired the development of a powerful conception of epistemic justification.

Thomas Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Prior to coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Notre Dame and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, where he received his PhD. His published work includes papers exploring the nature of evidence and rationality, the sig-nificance of disagreement, and the status of “common sense” responses to revisionary philosophical theorizing. He is currently at work on a book about dogmatism.

Gary Kemp is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Along with papers on Frege, Russell, Davidson, Wittgenstein, and Quine, he is the author of Quine versus Davidson: Truth, Reference and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2012), and of What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? (2013).

Sandra Lapointe is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Academic Director of the Lewis and Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. She specializes in the history of analytical philosophy. She is the author of a number of books, articles, and book chapters on Bolzano and various other aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy in the German-speaking world and beyond.


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Ernie Lepore is a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He works primarily in philosophy of language and mind.

Alex Orenstein, Professor Emeritus, The Graduate Center, and Queens College, City University of New York, Visiting Member of the common room, Wolfson College, Oxford. Works include W.V.O. Quine (Princeton University Press, 2002); Knowledge, Language and Logic, Questions for Quine, Boston Studies in the Phi-losophy of Science, ed. A. Orenstein and P. Kotatko (Kluwer Academic Publish-ers, 2000); “Reconciling Aristotle and Frege,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Summer 1999; and “Quine versus Quine” in Naturalism, Reference and Ontology, Essays for Roger Gibson, ed. Chase B. Wrenn (Peter Lang, 2009).

Gary Ostertag is the Director of the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Nassau Community College. He is the editor of Definite Descriptions: A Reader (MIT Press, 1998) and Meanings and Other Things: Essays on Stephen Schiffer (Oxford University Press, 2014). He has published in the philosophy of language – particularly in the areas of propositional attitude attribution and the theory of descriptions – as well as the history of analytic philosophy and musical ontology.

Peter Pagin is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm University. He works in several subareas of the philosophy of language. Among other things, he has written about compositionality, non-extensional contexts, assertion, and vagueness.

Gideon Rosen is Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Gillian Russell is an Associate Professor in the philosophy department at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of Truth in Virtue of Meaning: A defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction as well as papers on topics in the philosophy of language, logic, and epistemology.

Adam Sennet works on a variety of topics in the philosophy of language such as presupposition, context sensitivity, vagueness and (bi-)conditionals. He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis.

Robert Sinclair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. His work examines themes at the intersection of pragmatist philosophy, philosophical naturalism, and the


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history of analytic philosophy. He is currently working on a manuscript that charts the influence of C.I. Lewis on Quine’s early philosophical development.

Barry C. Smith is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and found-ing director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses. He has published in the philosophy of language and mind, and on flavour perception. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (Oxford University Press, 2008) with Ernest Lepore; and in 1998 he co-edited Knowing Our Own Minds (Oxford Uni-versity Press) with Crispin Wright and Cynthia Macdonald.

Scott Soames is Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Philoso-phy at the University of Southern California. His recent books include: The Analytic Tradition, Volume 1: Founding Giants, What is Meaning?, Philosophy of Language, Analytic Philosophy in America and other Historical and Contemporary Essays, and, with Jeff King and Jeff Speaks, New Thinking about Propositions.

Alan Weir is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He has published a monograph on philosophy of mathematics – Truth through Proof: A Formalist Foundation for Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 2010) – and articles on, among other topics, Quine, philosophy of mathematics, and logic, in journals such as Mind, Philosophia Mathematica, and the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.

Introduction:

Life and Work

GILBERT HARMAN AND ERNIE LEPORE

W.V.O. Quine was born on June 25, 1908 in Akron, Ohio. He graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1930 with a major in mathematics and honors in mathematical logic. He tells us in his autobiography that he worked through Venn’s Symbolic Logic, Peano’s Formualiair de mathematiques, Courtura’s Algebra of Logic, Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics, and Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. This last work together with Russell’s “On Denoting” deeply impressed Quine, as did his exposure to J.B. Watson’s behaviorism in a psychology class. (Quine’s version of behaviorism is discussed by Dagfinn Føllesdal and Gilbert Harman in this volume.)

Quine entered the graduate program at Harvard in the fall of 1930. He amazingly completed his PhD in two years at the age of 23, with a dissertation The Logic of Sequences: A generalization of Principia Mathematica, directed by Whitehead. He was awarded a Sheldon Travel Fellowship for 1932–33, during which he visited Vienna, attending Moritz Schlick’s Vienna Circle, where he met Kurt Godel, F. Waismann, and A.J. Ayer, among others. He worked with R. Carnap in Prague and later visited Warsaw, where he met the logicians Stanis-law Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz, and Alfred Tarski.

On Carnap’s influence on him, Quine wrote:

Carnap was my greatest teacher. I got to him in Prague . . . just a few months after I had finished my formal studies and received my Ph.D. I was very much his disciple for six years. In later years his views went on evolving and so did mine, divergent ways. But even where we disagreed he was still setting the theme; the line of my thought was largely determined by problems that I felt his position

A Companion to W.V.O. Quine, First Edition. Edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernie Lepore.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

gilbert harman and ernie lepore

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presented. (“Homage to Rudolf Carnap,” 41; cf. also Gary Ebbs’ essay in this volume)

Upon his return to the United States, Quine began a three-year fellowship in the first class of the Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1934, he gave three lectures on Carnap, introducing his philosophy to an American audience. Martin Gustafsson’s contribution to this volume discusses Carnap’s and Quine’s contrasting conceptions of explication.

In 1936, Quine was appointed to the Harvard philosophy faculty. In 1942, he joined the Navy, resuming his position at Harvard in 1946. In 1948, he was made a senior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He remained at Harvard until 1978; he continued to lecture around the world and to publish until 1998, when he was 90. He died on Christmas Day, 2000 at the exact age of 92½.

During his 65-year-long career he published over twenty books and well over a hundred articles, having made significant contributions to a large number of fields within philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, logic, set theory, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. It is uncontroversial that Quine was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein. (See the website maintained by Quine’s son, Douglas Quine: http://www.wvquine.org.)

1. Naturalism

Quine’s naturalism committed him to:

1. There is no first philosophy – no experiential or a priori foundation outside of science upon which science can be justified or rationally reconstructed.

2. It is up to science to tell us what there is (ontology) and how we know it (epistemology). Further, the currently best science advocates physicalism and empiricism.

Quine’s naturalism is discussed by the authors in the first section of this volume: Thomas Kelly, Robert Sinclair, Lars Bergstrom, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Adam Sennet and Tyrus Fisher, Alan Weir, and Peter Hylton. In the philosophy of language, Quine’s physicalism involves a rejection of mind–body dualism and mentalistic semantics, a rejection that Barry Smith discusses in his contribu-tion. On the other hand, Quine accepts the existence of abstract objects of mathematics, such as numbers and sets. According to Quine, science would be

http://www.wvquine.org

introduction: life and work

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impossible without them. Gideon Rosen, John Burgess, Gary Ebbs, Hans-Johann Glock, and Alan Weir discuss Quine’s views about these and related issues.

2. Extensionalism

Quine argues for purely extensional descriptions of the world. A description is extensional if and only if its truth value does not change when replacing a constituent sentence with another of the same truth value, or a predicate by another with the same extension, or a singular term by another with the same designatum. For example, the context of “Hesperus” in “Hesperus is the morning star” is extensional because a co-designatum of “Hesperus”, say ‘Phosphorous’, can be substituted in the context to produce a sentence (‘Phosphorus is the morning star’) with the same truth value. However, the context ‘The ancients believed that Hesperus is the morning star’ is not extensional because its co-designatum, ‘Phosphorus’, can be substituted in the context to produce a sen-tence with a different truth value.

Quine’s extensionalism is the doctrine that extensionality is necessary for a full understanding of a theory. A paradigmatic extensional language is first-order predicate logic with relations including identity and the membership relation of set theory. That is Quine’s canonical idiom. Quine maintains that one can determine the ontological commitments of a theory only if it is expressed in the canonical idiom. Then one must note the range of its bound variables. This criterion does not determine what exists, it determines what a theory says exists. Moreover, for an entity to be the value of a bound variable, it must have identity criteria: no entity without identity. For example, physical objects are identical if and only if they occupy exactly the same region(s) of space-time, while sets are identical if and only if they have the same members. Quine’s ontological physicalism countenances a bifurcated but extensional ontology: When the best scientific theory is translated into a canonical idiom, we find it irreducibly quantifying over both concrete and abstract objects, namely, physi-cal objects and sets.

Gary Ostertag’s contribution to this volume contains a critical discussion of Russell and Quine on extensionalism. Other relevant contributions include those by John Burgess, Sandra Lapointe, Michael Glanzberg, Scott Soames, and Martin Gustafsson.

3. Empiricism

Returning to Quine’s naturalism, we should note that as an empiricist Quine accepts its two cardinal tenets: “Whatever evidence there is for science is sensory


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evidence . . . [and] all inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence” (“Epistemology Naturalized,” 75). Consistent with his naturalism, Quine cites science as the source of these tenets:

Science itself teaches us that the only information that can reach our sensory surfaces from external objects must be limited to two-dimensional optical projec-tions and various impacts of air waves on the eardrums and some gaseous reactions in the nasal passages and a few kindred odds and ends. (The Roots of Reference, 2)

His acceptance of a physicalist ontology and an empiricist epistemology is based on scientific findings. The domains of the scientist and of the philosopher are distinct but overlapping. In Word and Object, Quine put the point as follows:

Given physical objects in general, the natural scientist is the man to decide about wombats and unicorns. Given classes, or whatever other broad realm of objects the mathematician needs, it is for the mathematician to say whether in particular there are even prime numbers or any cubic numbers that are sums of pairs of cubic numbers. On the other hand it is scrutiny of this uncritical acceptance of the realm of physical objects, or of classes, etc., that devolves upon ontology. Here is the task of making explicit what had been tacit, and precise what had been vague, of exposing and resolving paradoxes, smoothing kinks, lopping off ves-tigial growths, clearing ontological slums . . . . The philosopher’s task differs from others’, then, in detail; but in no such drastic way as those suppose who imagine for the philosopher a vantage point outside the conceptual scheme that he takes in charge. There is no such cosmic exile. He cannot study and revise the funda-mental conceptual scheme of science and common sense without having some conceptual scheme, the same or another no less in need of philosophical scrutiny, in which to work. (Word and Object, 275–276)

Quine’s commitments to physicalism and empiricism are strong but cautious. See also John Burgess’s contribution to this volume.

4. Naturalized Epistemology

Quine repudiates first philosophy, but does not repudiate epistemology alto-gether. There remains naturalized epistemology: the scientific study of man’s acquisition of science.

A far cry, this, from old epistemology. Yet it is no gratuitous change of subject matter, but an enlightened persistence rather in the original epistemological


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problem. It is enlightened in recognizing that the skeptical challenge springs from science itself, and that in coping with it we are free to use scientific knowledge. The old epistemologist failed to recognize the strength of his position. (The Roots of Reference, 3)

Some philosophers claim that Quine’s naturalized epistemology is no epistemol-ogy at all, for epistemology is normative and naturalized epistemology (the scientific study of man’s acquisition of science) drops the normative in favor of the descriptive. However, as Quine explains,

The normative is naturalized, not dropped. The crowning normative principle of naturalized epistemology is nothing less than empiricism itself; for empiricism is both a rule of scientific method and a scientific discovery. It is natural science that tells us that our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory surfaces. And it is conspicuously normative, counselling us to mistrust soothsayers and telepathists . . . . For normative content of a more technical kind we may look to mathematical statistics. These norms, again, are at the level of science itself. Normative epistemology, under naturalism, is simply the technology of science, the technology of predicting sensory stimulation. It is scientific method. (“Comment on Lauener,” 229)

Quine regards naturalized epistemology to be far from Descartes’ rationalism and Carnap’s empiricism:

I think that for scientific or philosophical purposes the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job and make do rather with its separate ingre-dients. We can still speak of a belief as true, and of one belief as firmer or more certain, to the believer’s mind, than another. There is also the element of justifica-tion . . . . These reflections perhaps belong in their rudimentary way to the branch of philosophy known as epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Rejection of the very concept of knowledge is oddly ironic. (Quiddities, 109)

Consider three versions of Quine’s naturalism: (1) Science contains epistemol-ogy in the sense that engaging in epistemology presupposes an accepted scien-tific framework as background; epistemology contains science insofar as science is constrained by the findings of epistemology. (2) Quine embraces Neurath’s likening “science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank, while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat” (Word and Object, 3). (3) On positing of objects, Quine writes:

To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede


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existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory, the best we can muster at the time. (Word and Object, 22)

Thus, revising one’s conceptual scheme and speculating on the positing of bodies never takes place in a vacuum; there’s always an accepted background theory. As Quine states,

[My] position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science in the same boat – a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while saying float in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. (“Natural Kinds,” 126–127)

See Thomas Kelly’s, Robert Sinclair’s, and John Burgess’s contributions to this volume for more on naturalized epistemology and its role in defending empiricism. Olav Gjelsvik, Bredo Johnsen, and Robert Sinclair discuss Quine’s views about observation and evidence.

5. Analyticity

Beginning in Prague in 1933 and regularly during the 1940s and 1950s, Quine and Carnap disagreed about analytic/synthetic distinction. Analytic statements would be those true (or false) solely in virtue of their meanings (e.g., “All bachelors are unmarried”). Synthetic statements are true (or false) in virtue of their meanings and how the world is (e.g., “There are eight planets”). Carnap accepted this distinction; Quine rejected it.

In his most celebrated essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine attempts to advance considerations that show that the analytic/synthetic distinction is a dogma of empiricism, a metaphysical article of faith. More particularly, con-sistent with his commitment to extensionalism, Quine rejected analyticity because it relies on an unempirical notion of meaning (true solely in virtue of meaning). But why did both Carnap and Quine regard analyticity as important? One answer is that as empiricists they regarded all knowledge of the world to be a posteriori, and contingent, yet logic and mathematics appear to be both a priori and necessary. How can empiricists account for this?

First, there is John Stuart Mill’s approach, according to which the truths of logic and mathematics have empirical content and are therefore not necessary.


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They are empirical generalizations based on induction. As such, they are con-tingent; their apparent necessity is nothing more than the product of habituation.

Second, there is Carnap’s approach, according to which the truths of logic and mathematics lack empirical content but are necessary. Such statements pose no threat to empiricism since their lack of content and their necessity follow directly from their analyticity: The statements of logic and mathematics are true (or false) solely in virtue of their meanings. In a word, they are tautolo-gies. Quine conjectures that Carnap’s commitment to analyticity was due largely to his philosophy of mathematics.

Third, there is Quine’s approach: “I answer both [problems] with my moder-ate holism. Take the first problem: lack of content. Insofar as mathematics gets applied in natural sciences, I see it as sharing empirical content” (“Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” 269).

The apparent necessity of mathematics is supposed to be cleared up by Quine’s holism without analyticity:

When a group of sentences are refuted by an experiment, the crisis can be resolved by revoking any one of the group. We hope to choose in such a way as to optimize future progress. If one is purely mathematical, we will not choose to revoke it; such a move would reverberate excessively through the rest of science. We are restrained by a maxim of minimum mutilation. It is simply in this that the necessity of mathematics lies: a determination to make revisions elsewhere. (“Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” 269–270)

In The Roots of Reference, Quine tried to see just what empirical sense could be made of analyticity in terms of language learning:

Carnap maintained, and Frege before him, that the laws of logic held by virtue purely of language: by virtue of the meanings of the logical words. In a word, they are analytic. I have protested more than once that no empirical meaning has been given to the notion of meaning, nor consequently, to this linguistic theory of logic. But now in the terms of the learning process can we perhaps find some sense for the doctrine? (The Roots of Reference, 78)

Quine goes on to explain that a standing sentence (i.e., a sentence that does not require the presentation of a nonverbal stimulus each time the sentence is queried for assent or dissent) is analytic “if everybody learns that it is true by learning its words” (The Roots of Reference, 79). If everyone in the speech community learns ‘bachelor’ by discovering that those speakers from whom they are learning their language are disposed to assent to it in just those


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circumstances where they would assent to ‘unmarried man’, then everybody in the speech community has learned the truth of the standing sentence ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’. This sentence approximates analyticity.

Still, there is no such radical break between analytic and synthetic sentences:

In learning our language each of us learns to count certain sentences as true; there are sentences whose truth is learned in that way by many of us, and there are sentences whose truth is learned in that way by few or none of us. The former sentences are more nearly analytic than the latter. The analytic sentences are the ones learned in that way by all of us; and these extreme cases do not differ notably from their neighbors, nor can we always say which ones they are. (The Roots of Reference, 80)

See Bergstrom’s, Harman’s, Burgess’s, Russell’s, Soames’s and Lepore’s con-tributions to this volume for contrasting views on Quine on analyticity and a priori knowledge.

6. Holism

One of the dogmas that Quine repudiates in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is analyticity; the other is reductionism: the view that each sentence of a scientific theory admits, individually, of confirmation or infirmation. His holistic “coun-tersuggestion . . . is that our statements about the external world face the tri-bunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body” (“Two Dogmas,” 41). What is holism?

It is holism that has rightly been called the Duhem thesis and also, rather gener-ously, the Duhem–Quine thesis. It says that scientific statements are not sepa-rately vulnerable to adverse observations, because it is only jointly as a theory that they imply their observable consequences. (“On Empirically Equivalent Systems in the World,” 313)

Quine’s holism in “Two Dogmas” is extreme because he intended the expression ‘corporate body’ therein to include all of science. However, later in Word and Object and in subsequent writings he moderated his holism. He acknowledged that it is more accurate to think of significant stretches of science, rather than the whole of science, as having observable consequences:

[W]e can appreciate . . . how unrealistic it would be to extend a Duhemian holism to the whole of science, taking all of science as the unit that is responsible to


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observation. Science is neither discontinuous nor monolithic. It is variously jointed, and loose at the joints in various degrees. In the face of a recalcitrant observation we are free to choose what statements to revise and what ones to hold fast, and these alternatives will disrupt various stretches of scientific theory in various ways, varying in severity. Little is gained by saying that the unit is in principle the whole of science, however defensible this claim may be in a legalistic way. (“On Empirically Equivalent Systems in the World,” 314–315)

Glock’s contribution to this volume discusses Quine’s holism.

7. Underdetermination

It is obvious that scientific theory deductively implies various statements descriptive of observable circumstances, and it is equally obvious that those same statements do not deductively imply the theory. In Quine’s terminology, any theory manifesting such empirical slack is underdetermined by experience. Quine articulates three main varieties of underdetermination:

1. Theories are underdetermined by past observation because some future observation might conflict with them.

2. Theories are underdetermined by both past and future observations because some conflicting observation may go unnoticed.

3. Theories are underdetermined by all possible observations because the observational criteria of theoretical terms are so flexible and fragmentary.

It is the third variety of underdetermination that Quine has focused on, for it suggests the philosophically intriguing prospect of there being alternative theo-ries that are empirically equivalent and yet logically incompatible with one another. This is Quine’s thesis of underdetermination of physical theory.

Quine’s views on underdetermination are discussed in many of the essays in this volume, for example, those by Alex Orenstein, Gideon Rosen, Gilbert Harman, and Peter Pagin.

8. Radical Translation

Do propositions exist? A necessary condition for something to be an entity, according to Quine, is that it possess identity conditions; for Quine there can be no entity without identity. If propositions are entities, then they must possess


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identity conditions that determine when we have a single proposition and when we have different propositions or the same proposition. How might we tell, for example, whether the utterance of “Obama is the 44th President of the United States” expresses a single proposition and whether its utterance and an utter-ance of “It is Obama who is the 44th President of the United States” express different propositions or the same one? A uninformative answer to the first question is that a proposition is a single proposition just in case it does not contain another proposition as a constituent. An unsatisfactory answer to the second question is that a proposition is what utterances of a declarative sen-tence and its translations have in common. And what they have in common is sentence meanings.

On this approach, one might say that if utterances of the two sentences above are translations of one another, then they are so because they express the same meaning (or proposition). Quine’s position is the reverse: If utterances of the two sentences in question are said to express the same meaning (or proposition), they do so because they are translations of one another. In his famous thought experiment of radical translation, Quine tries to establish that whatever propositions might be, they are not sentence meanings.

Radical translation is an idealized context in which a field linguist sets about translating a hitherto unknown language that has no historical or cultural connections with any known language. Nor does the field linguist have recourse to bilinguals. All the empirical data available consist of the observable behavior of native speakers amid publicly observable circumstances; none of this empiri-cal data is hidden from the linguist. Even so, the linguist’s completed manual for translating the foreign language into the linguist’s home language is under-determined by all of the possible empirical data. In particular, the translation of the foreign language’s terms and the meanings of its theoretical sentences are underdetermined. Quine concludes from this thought experiment that the translation of theoretical sentences is not merely underdetermined but is inde-terminate. (See Gilbert Harman’s and Peter Pagin’s contributions to this volume for discussion of radical translation and its consequences.)

9. Indeterminacy and Inscrutability

In what sense is the translation of theoretical sentences indeterminate?In the sense that the same foreign sentence can be translated equally well by

two (or more) different home language sentences. This is the core idea of Quine’s famous thesis of indeterminacy of translation.

If indeterminacy is accepted, then sentence meanings do not have identity conditions and therefore cannot serve as propositions or as objectively valid


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translation relations, for there is no entity without identity. Quine’s argument assumes, reasonably enough, that a necessary condition for the identity of propositions is as follows:

If P1, P2, and P3 are propositions, then if P1 = P2 and P1 = P3, then P2 = P3. But this is just the identity condition that indeterminacy of translation shows that sentence meanings lack. Consider: if S1, S2, and S3 are sentence meanings, then if S1 = S2 and S1 = S3, it does not follow that S2 = S3. In Quine’s own words, “What the indeterminacy of translation shows is the notion of propositions as sentence meanings is untenable” (Pursuit of Truth, 102).

Note that the indeterminacy of translation is not a problem that confronts translation; in particular, it is not the claim that some sentences are untranslatable.

On the contrary, it is the claim that some sentences have more than one acceptable translation. Thus indeterminacy is good news, not bad news.

(See Peter Pagin’s, Alex Orenstein’s and Adam Sennet and Tyrus Fisher’s contributions to this volume for more on Quine’s indeterminacy and inscrutability.)

10. Quine’s Influence on the Study of the Logical Form of Ordinary Language

Quine thought of logic as like algebra and calculus, as providing an improved notation for saying things that could not easily be said in ordinary terms. Nev-ertheless, he did write about “Logic as a Source of Syntactical Insights.” And, linguists and philosophers of language have used Quine’s own work as the basis for further investigation of ordinary language.

Consider some of the discussions to which Quine contributed in philosophy of language. (We do not mean that Quine originated these ideas or that he had the last word, but only that he discussed them at a high level and his example was important in later discussion right down to today.)

Quine is particularly associated with his challenge to the analytic/synthetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” along with related arguments by White, Goodman, and Hempel. In the 1950s, few philosophers agreed with this challenge. But as people replied to the challenge and their replies were seen to be inadequate, the tide turned. By the late 1960s, philosophers tended to be nervous about relying on the analytic/synthetic distinction.

As an empiricist, Quine was interested in the distinction between theory and observation and made the strikingly important point that this distinction has to be understood as a distinction between theoretical and observational sen-tences, not as a distinction between theoretical and observational predicates.


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Quine had much to say about the distinction between mass and count terms.He noted ways in which logical analysis of language could make good use of

appeals to temporal and other parts of objects and to sums of parts, temporal and other.

He discussed how to distinguish ambiguity from generality. Are questions hard in the same sense in which chairs are hard? Do numbers exist in the same sense in which people exist?

He stressed the importance of distinguishing use and mention of a term – the material conditional versus material implication.

He made much of the distinction between predicates and singular terms referring to properties or kinds. He argued that we should not see a reference to properties just because there is talk using predicates.

He discussed the interpretation of ‘is’ as a copula. He suggested that we can treat ‘is’ plus a proper name as a predicate true of the named object: ‘is Socra-tes’. He raised the question whether ‘is’ ever means instead ‘is identical to’. Quine thought yes, but the issue is still under active discussion (Burge, Fara).

Noting the importance of variables in logic, Quine discussed how pronouns might sometimes play the role of variables and how definite descriptions might play the role of variables (‘the former’, ‘the latter’, etc.).

He wrote about the scope of operators in ordinary language. How a word like ‘not‘ interacts with ‘any’, ‘every’, ‘some’, ‘each’, etc.

He wrote a great deal about what he called referential opacity and transparency.

He discussed apparent quantification into opaque contexts, for example, quantifying into the complements of verbs of propositional attitude or into modal statements. He noted connections with de re belief and essential properties.

He discussed how to interpret indefinite intentional objects, as in “Ernest is hunting lions.” He suggested that philosophers of perception could avoid appeals to sense data by thinking of perception verbs as creating opaque contexts.

In these and other cases, Quine has been important for contemporary lin-guistic semantics and linguistically aware philosophy of language.

Barry Smith’s contribution to this volume says more about the relevance or irrelevance of Quine’s views to ideas in contemporary linguistics.

11. Conclusion

Quine regarded himself to be a systematic thinker. The bulk of his philosophy from his repudiation of the two dogmas of empiricism (viz., the analytic/


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synthetic distinction, and reductionism), his holism, underdetermination of physical theory, and indeterminacy of translation, as well as his physicalism and empiricism, are just corollaries to his naturalism and extensionalism. His systematic philosophy renders him as the most influential philosopher of the latter half of the twentieth century: his philosophical interests and problems became the community’s interests and problems. But what will be Quine’s enduring legacy for this century? Only time can tell.

Bibliography

Couturat, Louis (1914). Algebra of Logic. Chicago and London: Open Court.Peano, Giuseppe (1960). Formulario mathematico, Rome: Edizioni Cremonese.Quine, W.V. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Philosophical Review 60, 20–43.Quine, W.V. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Quine, W.V. (1969). Epistemology Naturalized. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

(69–90). New York: Columbia University Press.Quine, W.V. (1969). Natural Kinds. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (69–90).

New York: Columbia University Press.Quine, W.V. (1974). Roots of Reference. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.Quine, W.V. (1975). On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World. Erkenntnis 9,

313–328.Quine, W.V. (1976). Homage to Carnap. In The Ways of Paradox (40–43). Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.Quine, W.V. (1989). Quiddities. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Quine, W.V. (1990). Comment on Lauener. In R. Barrett and R. Gibson (eds.), Perspec-

tives on Quine (229). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Quine, W.V. (1991). Two Dogmas in Retrospect. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21,

265–274.Quine, W.V. (1992). Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Russell, B. (1905). On Denoting. Mind 14, 479–493.Whitehead, A.N. (1911). Introduction to Mathematics. New York: Holt.Whitehead, A.N. and Russell, B. (1910). Principia Mathematica. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press.Venn, John (1881). Symbolic Logic. London: Macmillan.

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A Companion to W.V.O. Quine · Philip L. Quinn 10. Aompanion C to the Philosophy of Language Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright 11. Aompanion C to World Philosophies Edited by