Reds, Greens, and Logical Analysis by Hilary PutnamReview by: Nelson GoodmanThe Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 1957), pp. 318-319Published by: Association for Symbolic LogicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2963637 .

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318 REVIEWS

Craig explicitly disclaims any philosophical importance for this method of replace- ment. He acknowledges that his device is highly artificial and that it effects no clari- fication of the suspect terms eliminated. But this gives us small excuse for complacency. Artificiality is as yet a vague notion, and one may ask whether there is any need to clarify terms shown to be eliminable. While replacement by Craig's method does not satisfy the usual objectives of a replaceability program, we are hard put to it to say exactly why.

Evidently preservation of all theorems in non-suspect language is far from enough. What more, then, is required? For one thing, that the replacing system have an appreciable degree of deductive coherence or economy. The chief purpose of proof in a philosophical system is less to convince of truth than to integrate. If every theorem has its own postulate, no integration is achieved. But that is not the whole story. The fact that everything that can be said or established in non-suspect language in the replaced system can also be said or established in the replacing system leaves open the crucial question whether what can thus be done in non-suspect language is all that needs to be done. But the task of defining in general the nature of "what needs to be done" is a formidable one.

Thus the importance of Craig's paper lies in the challenge to explain why the device he offers is unimportant; for this raises the whole question of the objectives of philo- sophical replacement programs.

Although acknowledging that his method of system-for-system replacement is philosophically unsatisfactory, Craig thinks that definitional, or term-for-term, replacement programs are in general doomed to failure. He argues that certain plausible requirements for a term 'M' to be a suitable replacement for 'N' will be satisfied only if 'M = N' is already a theorem of the original system. But this seems to the reviewer to show only that the roughly plausible requirements Craig lays down need reformula- tion; and this is not surprising, since the pitfalls of adopting oversimplified criteria of definition have been discussed before (Craig cites an article by Tarski; see also Chapter I of the reviewer's XVII 130).

Craig goes on to make the currently popular remark that "empirical significance attaches to an entire framework of assertions of beliefs, and to individual expressions or concepts only indirectly, by means of that framework." This is salutary insofar as it reminds us that terms, phrases, or sentences must be interpreted in the light of their relationship to an entire framework, or warns us that a criterion of definition must refer to the relation between the entire set of definientia of a system and the entire set of definienda. But the holism that despairs of any expression-by-expression translation overreaches itself; for we can understand and use a language only when we can operate with relatively small particles of it. No one has gone far towards mastering Choctaw when he knows only that a given long discourse in Choctaw says just what a given long discourse in English says, if he is unable to make correlations between fairly small pieces of the one discourse and fairly small pieces of the other.

NELSON GOODMAN

HILARY PUTNAM. Reds, greens, and logical analysis. The philosophical review, vol. 65 (1956), pp. 206-217.

Putnam attempts to show that the statement "Nothing is both red (all over) and green (all over) at the same time" is analytic. He argues: (i) there must be at least one imaginable object A that is red (all over) and another B that is green (all over), such that A and B are distinguishable in color; (ii) to be red (all over) means to be exactly the same color as A, and to be green (all over) means to be exactly the same color as B; (iii) being exactly the same color as is an equivalence relation that implies indistinguishability; therefore, (iv) nothing is exactly the same color as both A and B;

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REVIEWS 319

hence, (v) by the very meaning of the terms involved, nothing is both red (all over) and green (all over) at the same time.

The argument fails. For (i) to hold, either A must be red-but-not-green (all over), or B must be green-but-not-red (all over), or either A or B must have some third color that the other does not have; otherwise A and B will not be distinguishable in color. Suppose that A is red-but-not-green (all over). Then what follows from Putnam's argument amounts to the trivial conclusion that nothing is both red-but-not-green (all over) and also green (all over) at the same time. On alternative admissible suppo- sitions, we get only such conclusions as that nothing is both red-but-not-green (all over) and also green-but-not-red (all over) at the same time, or that nothing is both red-and- green-and-blue (all over) and red-and-green-but-not-blue (all over) at the same time.

Incidentally, the statement that Putnam wants to prove analytic seems to be false. A mirror flanked on the left by a green wall and on the right by a red wall will be both red and green (all over) - from different points of view. Qualifications may be added, of course, until we arrive at a statement we are confident is true; and then, if we like, we may look for definitions from which this statement may be derived.

NELSON GOODMAN

CHARLES A. BAYLIS. Universals, communicable knowledge, and metaphysics. The journal of philosophy, vol. 48 (1951), pp. 636-644.

Baylis distinguishes "characteristics" (exemplified universals), "concepts" (thought- of universals), and "pure universals" (neither exemplified nor thought of). He claims, justifiably, to have shown that characteristics and concepts exist "at least in the sense that the same characteristics can be thought of ...and... exemplified repeatedly"; but this conclusion merely restates the principal datum of the problem, and completely fails in its assigned task of "explaining common meanings," of helping to "account /or the knowledge we appear to share" [reviewer's italics each time].

As for pure universals: " ... airplaneness had at least this sort of being before Leonardo thought of it, that many propositions were true of it. . . It was true ... that airplaneness would be thought of within the next century." But this was true also of airplanes; and the standard techniques for the elimination of medieval airplanes and golden mountains will usually serve also to eliminate universals as the apparent subject-matter of certain propositions. Baylis remarks (apropos of Quine) that even if this were always possible it "would only show that a nominalistic language is possible. It would furnish no evidence as to whether universals exist." In the re- viewer's opinion this comment cannot be assessed until 'Universals exist' is clarified. Baylis offers only (for pure universals) an echo of Meinong, and (for characteristics and concepts) something amounting only to "A non-nominalistic language is possible."

JONATHAN BENNETT

WOLFGANG STEGMULLER. Das Universalienproblem einst und jetzt. Archiv fur Philosophie, vol. 6 (1957), pp. 192-225.

This contains the first three sections of a longer work. They comprise a careful discussion of universals, wholly from the viewpoint of Quine, and, also from that viewpoint, twenty-four pages on the history of the debate. The historical matter is refreshing, when one recalls the logical capabilities of those into whose hands such work usually falls; and it is doubtless still useful for a competent logician to discuss the vacuousness of the ante resin rebus controversy, the inconsistency of the con- ceptualist attempt to disguise a Platonistic theory of meaning-universals as a theory of psychological particulars, the historical relationship between nominalism and the denigration of knowledge of universal statements, the imperfections in the nominalism of Roscelin, Duns Scotus, and Ockham and the logical purity of that of Berkeley, and so on. The reviewer suggests, however, that Stegmuller fails to do justice to the

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