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Critical Notice - W.V. Quine Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990. Pp. viii + 113.
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W.V. Quine Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990. Pp. viii + 113.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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References
1 Pursuit of Truth, viii. Further references to this book will be made parenthetically in the text.
2 Here is a brief sample of refinements and reinforcements. Behaviourism: ‘In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice’ (37-8). Intersubjective likeness of stimulation: “... we can simply do without if (42). Observation sentences: They ‘continue to be the entering wedge for child and field linguist, and they continue to command the firmest agreement between rival manuals of translation; but their distinctive factuality is now blurred by the disavowal of shared stimulus meaning’ (43). Privacy: In Word and Object (p. 8) I pointed out that communication presupposes no similarity in nerve nets.... Now in my new move I give the subject yet wider berth, allowing him the privacy even of his sensory receptors’ (44). Ontological Relativity: Previously ‘unclear in my own mind [I] can now say what ontological relativity is relative to. It is relative to a translation manual’ (51).
3 Quine, W.V. The Time of My Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1985), 85Google Scholar
4 Quine, W.V. Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), 79Google Scholar
5 Quine, W.V. ‘Structure and Nature,’ Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992) 5-9, at 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Quine, Q.V. ‘Ontology and Ideology Revisited,’ Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983) 499-502, at 501CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Quine, W.V. ‘Whither Physical Objects?’ Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science 39 (1976) 497-504, at 503CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Idem, emphasis added.
9 Ibid., 503-4. We have in the distinction between ontology and metaphysics a philosophical theme arising from Rudolf Glocenius’s coinage in the seventeenth century.
10 This triumph of hyper-Pythagoreanism has to do with the values of the variables of quantification and not with what we say about them. It has to do with ontology and not with ideology7 (Ibid., 503).
11 For ‘all that matters by way of evidence lot [a] theory is the stimulatory basis of the observation sentences plus the structure that the neutral nodes serve to implement’ (34, emphasis added).
12 Quine, W.V. ‘Ontological Reduction and the World of Numbers,’ in The Ways of Paradox, revised and enlarged (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1976) 212-20Google Scholar; see 217 ff.
13 Hilbert, David and Bernays, Paul Grundlagen der Mathematik, 2 vols. (Berlin: Springer 1934 and 1939)Google Scholar
14 Putnam, Hilary Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 It is interesting that in 1977, Putnam did not think it inappropriate to argue that the theorem lias profound implications for the great metaphysical dispute about realism...’ (Idem).
16 ‘Ontological Reduction and the World of Numbers’ 217
17 Bonevac, Daniel A. Reduction in the Abstract Sciences (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1982)Google Scholar; see esp. ch. 7, ‘Pythagoreanism and Proxy Functions.’
18 For many years David Savan has urged it upon me that Quine is an undeclared idealist. Sa van’s opinion is seconded by Putnam, Hilary Realism With a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990)Google Scholar, where on page 274 Quine is characterized as a linguistic idealist.’ The emphasis of late on ideology gives the attribution further comfort.
19 McGee, Vann Truth, Vagueness, and Paradox (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1991), 25 and 76 ff.Google Scholar
20 Quine, W.V. Quiddities (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1987), 131Google Scholar. Cf. 109: ‘... the term [=‘knowledge’] does not meet scientific and philosophical standards of coherence and precision.... [F]or scientific or philosophical purposes, the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job’ (emphasis added).
21 Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991) 265-74
22 Quine, W.V. ‘Reply to Hilary Putnam,’ in Hahn, H.E. and Schilpp, P.A. eds., The Philosophy of W.V. Quine (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1986) 427-31Google Scholar, at 430
23 Idem.
24 Think of the surprising empirical fruitfulness of category theory in organizing the methodology of mathematical physics. See Geroch, Robert Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985)Google Scholar. Recall, too, that the permanent stoppage of the heart is explanatorily opaque without a theorem from topology.
25 Ibid., 269; emphasis added.
26 London Review of Books 10 (April 21,1988), 11-13; reprinted with this title in Hilary Putnam, Realism With a Human Face, 268-77
27 Creath, Richard ed., Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press 1990), 438Google Scholar
28 Though the change was underway as early as 1970. See Quine, W.V. Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1970), 34.Google Scholar
29 Quine, W.V. Word and Object (Cambridge, MA and New York: MIT Press and John Wiley 1960), 221Google Scholar
30 Idem.
31 Churchland, Paul ‘The Direct Inspection of Brain States,’ Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985) 8-28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Churchland, Patricia S. Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1986)Google Scholar; Nelson, R.J. The Logic of Mind (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 Quiddities, 109
33 Idem.
34 Churchland, Paul M. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and Structure of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989), 16Google Scholar
35 Idem.
36 Ibid., 18
37 Idem., emphasis in the original.
38 Quine, W.V. ‘Comment on Ullian,’ in Barrett, Robert B. and Gibson, Roger F. eds., logic, Words, and Objects: Perspectives on Quine (Oxford: Blackwell 1990), 347Google Scholar
39 Putnam, Hilary Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 60Google Scholar. The full conversation can be found, along with Churchland’s supplementary remarks, in Pylyshyn, Zenon and Demopópoulos, William eds., Meaning and Cognitive Structure (Norwood, NJ: Ablex 1986).Google Scholar
40 Reprinted in English as ‘The Establishment of Scientific Semantics,’ in Woodger, J.H. ed. and trans., Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1956) 401-8, at 406Google Scholar
41 McGee,81
42 Tarski, ‘Truth and Proof,’ Scientific American 220, 6 (1969) 63-77CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 68
43 Idem.
44 Concerning Russell’s paradox, Quine writes of ‘the thundering heptameter that shattered naive set theory: the class of all those classes not belonging to themselves’ (Quiddities, 146); he went on to characterize levels or type-theoretic resolutions of this paradox, and Grelling’s too, as ‘desperate accommodations’ (148). It is, for Quine, the same way with semantics. In dealing with the Liar, ‘the accommodation is similarly desperate: levels again’ (149). The hierarchy of truth predicates is something ‘that we were driven to by the Liar Paradox’ (94).
45 Putnam, Hilary ‘Meaning Holism,’ in Hahn and Schilpp, 405-25, at 424Google Scholar
46 W.V. Quine, ‘Reply to Hilary Putnam,’ in Hahn and Schilpp,430, emphasis added
47 By me, ‘Critical Notice’ of Hahn and Schilpp, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989) 617-60, at 618.
48 Ontological Relativity, 107
49 Of Quine’s fairly recent writings, ‘Ontology and Ideology Revisited,’ Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983) 499-502, is the place to look for indications of the watershed. A short piece, ‘Ontology and Ideology Revisited’ should be read conjointly with the passages in Pursuit of Truth where Quine discusses empathy: 42-4; 46; 62-3, and 68. In the Journal of Philosophy note, Quine repeats an earlier characterization: one’s ideology is ‘one’s stock of simple and complex terms or predicates’ (501). He goes on to extend the notion 1>eyond the subject’s own verbal limits, to cover the inarticulate abilities to recognize and discriminate’ which ‘shun ... the subject’s semantics’ (501). Thus does Quine anticipate the decision in Pursuit of Truth to give to empathy a certain theoretical weight Empathy is interesting. It displaces the usual semantic talk of common principles of individuation.
50 Research for this note was generously supported by a Fellowship-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study during the first half of 1990, and was later supported by a Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. There is no better place to think about Quine than the leafy glades of Wassenaar, and I thank most warmly all concerned for marvelous hospitality — especially Dirk J. van de Kaa, Director of NIAS, and Frans H. van Eemeren, leader of my research group. I am also grateful for helpful criticism to Roger Gibson and Lorenzo Pena, and to my Lethbridge colleagues Ronald Yoshida, Bryson Brown, and David Grover. Grover and I spent numberless hours talking about Quine’s philosophy in the Fall term of 1991. I thank him for his enthusiasm and critical discernment. My gratitude also to Randa Stone for technical assistance.