Reading for January: On What There Is
Starting the new year with a classic, this month we're reading Quine's On What There Is.
If you've ever wondered just what kinds of things populate the furniture of the world, this is an excellent place to begin. The big, heady themes of Being and not-Being, Universals and possibility, are all addressed in Quine's inimitable fashion. It's a fun, 11 page paper, so hopefully everyone will be able to get in and have a thing or two to say.
As usual, please read the paper before commenting.
We won't be linking the paper here, but given its popularity, it's a fairly easy one to find.
If you've ever wondered just what kinds of things populate the furniture of the world, this is an excellent place to begin. The big, heady themes of Being and not-Being, Universals and possibility, are all addressed in Quine's inimitable fashion. It's a fun, 11 page paper, so hopefully everyone will be able to get in and have a thing or two to say.
As usual, please read the paper before commenting.
We won't be linking the paper here, but given its popularity, it's a fairly easy one to find.
Comments (77)
He seems to be saying that, since there's no general test for contradictoriness, and all contradictions are meaningless, then a test for meaninglessness is a test for contradictoriness; it follows that there's no general test for meaningfulness (or lack thereof). Quine regards the lack of a meaning test as a "severe methodological drawback." But I don't understand why this follows. Here's why: if "x is a contradiction" implies "x is meaningless," then any test that tells us that x is meaningful also tells us that x is not a contradiction. But that just shows that meaningfulness implies consistency. None of this, however, shows that the meaning test amounts to a generalized contradiction test, since a statement can be meaningless without being contradictory ("I have a kraffenbargle" is meaningless because "kraffenbargle" doesn't mean anything, but there's no contradiction in there).
I haven't read the paper by Church that Quine references, but does Church's result about the impossibility of a contradiction test also rule out a consistency test? If so, then Quine is right, but he doesn't seem to put it clearly.
Any help here? I'm assuming that I'm just not understanding Quine properly, because his argument as I've summarized it seems to commit a basic logical error (the kind where you confuse antecedent with consequent), and I would think that Quine of all people would not make such an error, so obviously, I haven't summarized him correctly. I know I'm wrong, I just don't know why.
Some excerpts with a quick commentary below to get conversation started:
* I found this interesting. This is the first paragraph Quine uses the term "conceptual scheme". It's interesting to me because it seems that Quine seems to give more priority, later in the essay, to phenomenolist accounts of ontology than others. He doesn't want to commit to phenomenalism, since he says we should, quote unquote, wait and see and explore and experiment -- but I'd say that this essay favors phenomenalism. This is interesting because here we might see why -- because of his basis of judgment on conceptual schemes.
But I'm not so sure that is as innocent an introduction as Quine might believe. (meaning, "conceptual scheme" is not ontologically neutral, but pregnant)
* Hence the importance of a proper account of names. (supposing that one were to want to save the arguments which Quine begins by attacking)
This is the nugget around which all the rest of the essay turns -- trying to give a criterion of ontological commitment so that ontology can be discussed, understood, and disputed with thereby committing oneself to an entities existence.
???
What does this analogy mean? I didn't follow this part of the essay at all until he got to the part about how objects are a myth view of physics and physics is a myth from the point of view of phenomenalism.
I had thought that is the very point Quine is making; that conceptual schemes are not ontologically neutral. Or are you wanting to say that the very notion 'conceptual scheme' is not itself ontologically neutral?
If it is the latter, then I would question why you think the notion could not be wedded to any old ontology.
I would say the analogy is that physical objects, just like irrational numbers, are not completely determinate; but this does not stop them being discursively useful.
Chalk it up to Quine's rhetorical skill, which is formidable.
I think Quine comments on meaningless strongly allude to the account of the peculiarity. "What is?" in the "philosophical sense" is really about contest of meaning. Different sides are trying discount opposition on the grounds of making a statement which says nothing rather than paying attention to the world and logic. Instead of viewing understandings, including incoherent and contradictory ones, for what they are, a meaning someone holds to be true, people are trying to discount them in the first instance. Not merely say what someone thinks is wrong, nor even say that what someone thinks is impossible (incoherence/contradiction), but rather wipe out there position entirely, as if they had made no comment or had no thought at all. They question is, really, entirely rhetorical.
Mistakes are actually meaning(s). When someone makes an error, they are not wrong because what they say is meaningless, but rather because what they say has all too much meaning. What they said, whether we are talking about an empirical error or a logical incoherence, is wrong. It is their meaning which is at fault. The very premise of the "What is?" question in the "philosophical sense" eliminates the means by which we notice and judge mistakes. If we asking that question, essentially: "What makes some statement meaningful and others not?," we have already lost. We are doing nothing more than playing a rhetorical game to insist upon our own preferred understanding.
Namely that the "object" is functioning as a simplified account of something else. Consider the object of a book. It is a collection of many individual things, pages, cover, words, binding, etc.,etc. So many different meaningful moments, which have an effectively infinite meanings in relationship, since the book may be looked, felt, heard, etc.,etc from countless different positions.
The book (or any object) has so many individual meanings to experience that we can't capture it all in any one experience. If we want to refer to another connected point of experience, we have no choice to point to it with a notion of an entity. Individual pages, words, symbols, points of the cover, etc.,etc. are condensed into the non-description of "book (object)." So it is with any object.
Irrational numbers are similar to this, at least according to Quine, in that the are a "simplified" account which points to something we haven't described in a moment of experience of the past (i.e. numbers as discrete decimal points).
I don't actually like the analogy because irrational numbers are actually a description of a specific thing which is not properly accounted for with discrete decimal points. Irrational numbers are actually closer to pointing out a specific meaning of experience not given by a simplification of "object."
People sometimes have a tendency to think of new things only in terms of the old though.
Quine calls irrational numbers a "simplification" because he supposes we are meant to get a discrete decimal answer, rather than understanding that irrational numbers just don't do that. The correct version of the analogy would use rounding of irrational numbers to a discrete number of places.
It strikes me that these issues are contrived, in that they don't arise naturally (or so I think) but we manufacture them nonetheless. Language or its misuse may create confusion, lead to untenable conclusions, but there is something that precedes language used in an effort to describe the contrivance. Well, this may be a psychological issue and is in any case not something addressed in the article, so I'm probably going off topic, and will stop.
A lot of this thinking comes from my reading Davidson's paper 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual scheme' -- my opinion has morphed over time, but it's still a good paper.
What I meant was that the notion of a conceptual scheme seems to be compatible with idealism, anti-realism and realism; that is it seems to be compatible across the range of different ontologies. On the other hand, I don't see how physicalism could be wedded to, for example, an idealist ontology, wherein mind is considered to be prime substance, as this would be a contradiction.
I haven't read the Davidson paper you refer to, but I have heard a little about it in relation to translatability.
Sir Walter Scott is not.
The author of Waverly is not.
Either each thing failed to write Waverly or two or more things wrote Waverly.
[quote=Kripke]
Suppose that Walter Scott was not in fact the author of Waverly. A man named Schmidt whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend named Walter Scott somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Walter Scott. On this view then when the ordinary man uses the name 'Walter Scott' he really means to refer to Schmidt, as Schmidt is the unique person satisfying the description 'the man who wrote Waverly'[/quote]
*I switched out Godel for Walter Scott to make this work.
By description theory, saying Sir Walter Scott is not, would then be actually saying that Schmidt is not. But that's not really the way that language works. I only dabble in analytic philosophy so there may be defenses to description theory after Kripke. Given that I find Kripke fairly convincing Quines argument against the ontological commitment of names falls through.
He does have the back of using the verb 'is-Walter Scott' but I don't buy it (I could be convinced).
Walter Scott is not.
There is no person who performs the action of being Walter Scott. ??
Like Quine I want to meaningfully use names without granting that there are entities allegedly named. But what's the argument?
By the way, is the "ordinary man" referred to by philosophers a kind of cousin of the "reasonable man" we lawyers like so much? My guess would be he isn't, as the philosophers' "ordinary man" seems to be considered a dimwit and the "reasonable man" by definition is not.
Exactly, but then Russel's theory of description fails because 'Walter Scott' can not be replaced by 'the man who wrote Waverly'.
Edit: For clarity, if 'Walter Scott' has the same meaning to someone as 'the man who wrote Waverly' then that would imply that when they use the name 'Walter Scott' they mean - the man who wrote Waverly - so they mean Schmidt. But as you said, this isn't the case.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
As I mentioned Kripke's example was about Godel instead of Walter Scott. In the context the ordinary man is one who only know that Godel created/discovered the incompleteness theory, and knows nothing else about Godel.
So here 'ordinary man' means someone who knows only that Walter Scott was the author of Waverly and knows nothing else about him. Then the only description that can be use to pick him out is that he is the author of Waverly. The ordinary man is not dim, he just doesn't spend his spare time reading about the life of Walter Scott.
I think physicalism could be wedded to idealism in the same way that conceptual scheme could be wedded to the other's, at least. Kant's project is somewhat like this -- where materiality is a category applied to space and time.
Similarly, conceptual scheme + (any of these) would yield an ontology that privileges phenomenalism as the least mythic of stances.
I don't see this Moliere, because physicalism is the ontological position that asserts that physical matter is the only real substance or ultimate existent. Idealism is the opposite position; it sees 'mind stuff' as the only real substance. I also think Kant's position is not really idealism; in fact, as you are no doubt aware, he actually wrote a 'Refutation of idealism'.
I’d say the attraction many people have to universals is on account of everything not in everyday life. Universals are about specifying a logic rule which applies in any situation. We are drawn to universalising because it gives us an idea, solution, about what happens outside the moment of our existence.
When we deal with universals, we are either asking questions about logic, which doesn’t exist, or we are trying to access the meaning of a state which doesn’t exist, to manipulate causality to our liking. Universals are means of creating an reproducing a definitive understanding within the human community. The moment we notice anything about the world or logic, we are prone to posing a universal. To our minds, it’s a means of eliminate risk or danger: if I understand all lions are going to eat me (universal), the threat I’ve perceived (a lion chasing me) is seemingly dealt with going forward. I will never get stuck wondering whether this lion might be my friend or eat me, and (if it turns out the lion does eat me), get eaten. Or, sometimes, universals mean unstoppable purpose to a perceived obligation. If it’s universal that God must be followed, then their cannot be no legitimate challenge to that means of living. Logic demands we must follow. We want to control our future. Sometimes this manifests in attempts to do so with out thought, as if it was our thoughts, our ideas, the “universal” which we understood, which made the world. Philosophy is littered with this notion, in various forms,that it’s imagination which defines existence (e.g. Platonism, PSR, meaning to experience, etc.,etc).
Even the (supposedly) empirical sciences have fallen to the allure of the imagined universal. They spend so long trying to find the “universal” theory which would allow us to predict everything, for the equation which would necessarily govern then true of the world. Particularly ugly sections like to suppose they’ve discovered the “rule” of human behaviour, such that they can proclaim “human nature” and specify there is a particular rule which necessitates some people must exist or act a certain way compared to others. Universals are essentialism.
There lies a great irony in lots of the “scientific” objections to Post-Modernism. Many of are not a defence of empirical science, as the objector thinks, but rather an attempt to protect and assert a universal. For all it sins, Post-Modernism formed out of a failure of our descriptions and logic. We hadn’t accounted for the individual properly. The role of each us, in our own individual circumstances, had no been addressed by the many accounts of natural forces and descriptions of society we had generated. It was directing us away from the rules which (supposedly) define the world, to examine individual states and what they express. It was a move to start describing parts of the world we were not (hence Post-Modernism’s focus on the individual experience and its presence in the world). Sometimes it stepped too far or said almost nothing in thousands of words, but it was sort of important to moving philopshy (including that which underpins science) past the allow reduction of the world to the meaning of one particular idea we had.
I'm still not getting it Moliere; do you mean to say that the conceptual scheme: idealism' can be translated into the conceptual scheme: 'physicalism'? Or to put it another way do you mean that idealism can be described, as a scheme, in purely physicalist terms?
I'm not sure what you refer to is that kind of universal.
Thanks Moliere, that clarifies one point for me, although I am still not sure how idealism and physicalism are themselves anything other than different conceptual schemes, and thus how it could change them, or for that matter what it could mean, to combine a conceptual scheme with them.
Interestingly, Davidson, while endorsing a view on radical interpretation that is broadly pragmatist, can't either countenance ontological relativity just because he challenges the Quinean dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content that sustains this relativity. Davidson still takes as point of departure for the (notional) process of radical interpretation of a language user her attitudes of assenting to, or dissenting from, declarative sentences in various perceptual contexts. The the view that emerges is coherentist, and non-foundationalist, since individual "perceptual beliefs" are open to challenge as much as are any other kinds of beliefs. But Davidson's view, while dispensing with sense data or surface irritations, still retains something of the idea of a perceptual boundary to the conceptually structured web of beliefs of a individual or community. (...Not entirely satisfactory, in my view, in accounting for the epistemic authority of experience, but still a progress over Quine's, possibly).
http://www.hist-analytic.com/Gricestrawson.pdf
EDIT: My mistake. I was just excited to have found this article and so wanted to share it, but this is really not a good follow-up to "On What There Is", but is obviously better suited to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
It is nevertheless and essential paper and I second your recommendation. I started typing in some comments about its relevance and its relation to the work of Kripke, which also raises difficulties for Quine's accounts of reference, meaning and proper names (one of them already mentioned by Shmik). But I would probably need to re-read In Defence of a Dogma first.
It's about protecting a certain understanding above all others at any cost. The "universal" is proposed to suggest that, within a given set of knowledge (say a disease and it symptoms), there is no other possible outcome or interaction in the situation. People do to try and ensure one particular understanding is always used in a particular circumstances.
As such it has ceased to be about describing the world at all. It's only concern is to prevent people from understanding the given situation in any other way. The status of the entity of "universal" is given because we need to imagine something is always there for the attempt to restrict understanding to function. If all we were working off were present moments (i.e. in these cases, this disease has caused "X"), there would be nothing to hang the (supposed) necessary outcome on. It would be obvious we haven't confirmed that the given outcome was always so for the given circumstance.
To say:"It's universal" means "The world is must be "X" at any time within this context." It gives us the excuse to say we know what must be so in a given situation.
For example, wallpaper is stuff; but it is an arrangement of stuff, namely wood fibres and other. Wood fibres are arrangements of cellulose and lignin which are arrangements of carbon and hydrogen, which are arrangements of protons neutrons and electrons, which are arrangements of quarks or strings or some such, which is stuff.
Wallpaper is often patterned.
Quoting Wiki
"There are 17 possible distinct groups."
It seems sensible to say this even if it happens that only 16 of the groups have ever been actually printed. But philosophically, it is an odd thing to say 'there are possible...', because ontology is all about what is actual. But mathematics is all about the possible arrangement of possible arrangements, and gives not a fig for ontology. If the universe turns out to be digital or discrete, and finite, then I suppose irrational numbers will turn out at the limit not to be instantiated along with ideal circles and right triangles. But however that goes, there will not be an 18th wallpaper pattern, and there will be 17.
In Haugeland's view, to be just is to be an intelligible (and empirically discloseable) pattern. I will leave aside your question whether for X to be part of an ontology, X must be actual (or perceived) or merely discloseable, and thus just potentially existing. I just want to focus on your idea of a dualism of pattern and 'stuff patterned' (as one might put it).
If seeing, or empirically disclosing, a real pattern consists in seing a pattern in the arrangement of some entities that can be independently identified, then seeing a pattern always is a case of seeing as. An example would be seeing an arrangement of chess pieces on a chess board (at a definite stage in the course of a chess game) as constituting a king being checkmated. But, more basically, it could also be a case of some wooden figurine shaped thus and so being seen as a bishop. To be a bishop, in the context of a chess game, just is to be a material figurine (say) that plays a particular role according to intelligible rules. For chess pieces to have the identities that they have (bishop, pawn, king, etc.) is for them to be ascribed roles that disclose intelligible patterns (from the point of view of someone who merely observed the game going on). The constitutive rules and standards that govern the practice of chess playing (when insisted upon by chess players) bring those patterns into existence.
The point of this example, that I am adapting from Haugeland, is that for X to be, in the sense that X is a re-identifiable part of an intelligible pattern that belongs to some empirically discloseable domain of experience, doesn't just depend on the way in which the constituents of X are arranged internally. The internal organization of X may or may not, in some cases, enable X to play the functional role, within some broader context of activity, that defines X as the sort of object that it is. So, whenever something is part of an ontology, because it can be seen as a P (where 'P' is a sortal concept that defines what specific sort of pattern any P is seen as), then P must be discloseable within some broader context of activity (i.e. an empirical domain being governed by constitutive rules, such as the laws of physics, for instance). It may or may not be the case that for some P to exist as such (i.e. as the P that it is, where 'P' is a sortal concept) consists in its being internally arranged thus and so.
This gives an ontology:
Bean, bean, bean bean, bean, five-beans-in-a-pod. It doesn't matter to me if you want to muddy things with that odd bean that is a sort of double, and that one at the end that is half-developed, it just leads to 'five to seven beans in a pod'.
Which is to say that though we must see a bean as a bean in order to count it as a bean, there is no 'seeing as' about how many beans make five.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
How am I to understand this 'exist as such', except as 'exist as stuff', as distinct from 'exist as a sortal concept': is this not the dualism of stuff and arrangement sneaked into the analysis without acknowledgement?
But there is a seeing as, a sortal concept, that makes something -- or rather singles it out as -- a bean. The question that can't possibly be answered through appeal to 'things as they are in themselves' is "How many objects are there in the pod?". Atoms are objets, so are bean parts, bacteria, and two beans stuck together may count as an object (for some purpose or other). Strip away all purpose and understanding (by us) and you dispense with all sortal concepts. But in that case there is no answer to how many "things" there are in the pod.
Frege got at this idea (in The Foundations of Arithmetic) when he proposed to define the concept of a number, understood as as expressing a specific count of something, as being signified by a second order functor that yields a truth value when saturated with a definite description (a first order functor). It then expresses the count of the objects that fall under the definite description. A definite description that single out material objects of a specific kind includes a sortal concept. The sentence "there are five beans in the pod" can then be analysed as "there are 5 x such that x ..." (a second order functor) saturated with the expression "...is a bean in the pod" (a first order predicate that includes the intelligible sortal concept of a bean). The concept of a pod merely restricts the scope of the quantifier in this example.
I'll respond to your second question later on...
I explained this to mean "exist as a P, where P is a sortal concept". It could be, for instance "exist as a bean". I didn't raise any issue about sortal concepts themselves 'existing'. What I was challenging is the idea (which you might not be strongly committed to) that for something to could as a P, quite generally, just is for something to have material parts, or constituents, and for those constituents to be arranged in the sort of pattern that makes them into a P. If this were the generalized explanation of a sortal concept, then every material object would be the object that it is only in virtue of its intrinsic, internal organization. But it often is the case that a material object is the object that it is in virtue of its functional role in a wider context, or some combination of its intrinsic arrangement and the existence of such a role. Consider, for instance, the concept of a planet (such that Saturn is one, but Plato isn't, because it didn't clear up its path, on one possible account of what it is for something to be a planet).
Just so. What counts a planet changes according to how we decide to see things. Yet such changes in terminology do not, I maintain, change the ontology of the solar system; Pluto does not go off in a huff because we demoted it. Nor does it change how many planets make five.
In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive?
Sounds a lil like that old P.K. Dick quote: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
Intimate relationships can - and often do - change as a result of how we think and talk about them. Do intimate relationships exist?
Well, I'll withdraw the definition, as it only fits one half of my dualism. But it's an unfair example, as an intimate relationship is composed to a considerable degree of how we talk and think about each other; it is misleading to say that they change as a result of what they are - though they certainly do, like radio-active elements.
I'd say you are good: intimate relationships don't exist. A relationship is not any state of the world. It's a logical expression expressed across many. An intimate relationship isn't formed by any one state, a hundred states of a person, or even ten billion states of a person. Intimate relationships are not objects. This is why trying to define what states of existence make a intimate relationships (or basically any other sort of relationship really) doesn't work. Such relationships can't be reduced to any one or multiple objects.
This definition might be false and naive under one reading, and unobjectionable, though consistent with the kind of realist conceptualism that I take from Frege, Wiggins, McDowell, Hornsby, Putnam and Haugeland. Under the second reading, things indeed don't change just because we change how we talk about them. But that is true also of planets and intimate relationships. The intimate relationship of course changes if *participants* in it change how they talk about it, but that's just because how they talk about it is partially constitutive of it (just as how we exchange money is largely constitutive of the value that it has). How *other* people change the way they talk about it doesn't have any such impact, except inasmuch as it might disclose different features of the relationship they are witnessing (and, of course, the participants themselves can be influenced by this external gaze if they come to be aware of it). But this is just to say that how they (the non-participant observers) talk about the relationship between Pat and Chris, say, determine which features they are disclosing, not that they are changing those features.
The case of planets is more clear cut. How we talk about them determines (or rather singles out) some determinate concept of a planet (a sortal concept) under which we subsume some celestial bodies. Given one possible perspicuous understanding of the word 'planet', one according to which a planet must (among other things) have cleared out its path, Pluto isn't a planet. But this fact doesn't change when we change how we talk about planets. What changes is the reference of the word "planet" (the sortal concept referred to, also on the level of Bedeutung according to Frege) and hence, also, the truth value of the *sentence* "Pluto is a planet" (since the sentence now has a different meaning).
Most revealing of all might be the concept of a secondary quality. Wiggins and McDowell both defend what has been dubbed secondary quality realism. This realism undercuts both scientism and the fact/value dichotomy (also attacked by Putnam). Secondary qualities, such a color and smell, that we perceive, and ascribe to objects, also don't change when we change the way that we talk about them. Not always, in any case. Talking about them can induce changes in the brute shape of our sensibility and aesthetic appreciation. That can lead to a change in the reference of the words that we use to refer to secondary qualities. That much is easily granted (it is akin to redefining the word "planet" under the impetus of some new pragmatic scientific consideration).
For an object to be red just is for it to look red to normal observers under normal conditions. What counts as normal, in both cases, is tacitly part of the way we understand and use the concept in ordinary use. (This necessary tacit understanding is underlined in Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) It would be an error to view the perceptual concept thus defined as being subjective and our judgments about unchanging objects liable to change if, and when, the conditions of our sensibility change.
This would be to misconstrue the definitional relationship between looking red and being red, rather in the way Russell's (or Quine's) definite description analysis of ordinary proper names misconstrues the naming relationship between names and objects. It misidentifies the modal character of the relationship. This has been highlighted by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Putnam (implicitly) and Wiggins (explicitly) have brought Kripke's insight to bear on the case of secondary qualities. Just as, when one uses the proper name "Gödel" to refer to Gödel, the Fregean sense of the mane can't be expressed with a definite description, even though such a description may (or may not) have been used to secure the reference of the name when it was first introduced into the language, the sense of the predicate "red" doesn't either reduce to the sense of the definite description "looks read to us". It is rather the reference of the predicate (the sensible quality) that is thereby fixed. The upshot is that "...being red" as predicated of particular objects yields perfectly objective judgments. We may change the way we use the predicate "...is red" (which would amount to changing the reference of the predicate), and, indeed, do so under the impetus of a change in the shape of our brute sensibility, aesthetic appreciation, and/or discriminatory abilities. But that would amount to changing the concept being used, that is, not (necessarily) a change in judgment, but a change in topic. (It can also occur that the conception was revised, and hence also the judgment, but that is beyond the present point).
Naive realists believe that there is a fact/value dichotomy, where values are placed on the side of our contingent sensibilities and understandings. They thus believe science ought to be tasked with peeling off (or explaining away) the appearances that our use of secondary quality concepts yield. What would remain of reality after mere appearances (to us) have been thus peeled of is the objective world as it is in itself. But if the dichotomy is illusory, as I believe it is, then the peeling off leaves nothing.
The problem is naive and direct realism doesn't realism advocate this. The peeling is only present when it has been presumed that reality (things-in-themselves) has a nature which is separate to appearances (things which appear). For the naive and direct realist, this separation doesn't exist. Reality is (in part) as it appears. Things-in-themselves, objects as the are, appear to us. That's the naive and direct realist's position. We experience (partly) what is there.
The "peeling off" is actually an indirect realist/anti-realist position, whether appearance are considered to have nothing to do with the nature of independent objects. Claims of the naive and direct realist are literally being ignored, in favour of those prescribed by to them those of indirect realist/anti-realist position. The indirect realist/anti-realists are inserting there own position of separation between appearances and objects, and then claiming it is what the naive and direct realist argues.
I simply do not buy this at all. Relationships are certainly states of the world, and one cannot talk at all without them. To say that the cat is on the mat is to affirm the reality of the cat, the mat, and their relation. 'On' cannot be merely a logical as opposed to an ontological term because the cat is not necessarily on the mat, but is sometimes in the bushes.
But a relation is not another thing, either; one cannot count - cat, mat, and on, and come up with 3 things. This works quite well too for abstracts like 'the orbit of Mars', which I take to be perfectly real and to consist of the spatiotemporal
relationship between Mars and the other celestial bodies.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I'd be interested to hear a bit more about this undercutting of the fact/value dichotomy. I'm inclined to say that values are (real) relations between observer and observed. Thus it might be that under evolution or gene therapy the human eye developed forth and fifth types of cones in the retina. This would give the potential for colour perception and terminology to be transformed from a three dimensional to a five dimensional range. At which, one suspects that 'red' would simply be inadequate to describe most of what is currently seen as red. Likewise, if we all became colourblind, colour terms would drop out of use, to be replaced by a more complex textural terminology. All this without changing the substance of London buses and poppies in the least.
I'll make a few more comments later on, but meanwhile let me just provide some of the most relevant references. There is, of course, Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. (Some of the "other essays" are quite relevant to the topic at hand, in addition to the titular one). McDowell's Values and Secondary Qualities (reprinted in Mind, Value and Reality) is a response to John Mackie that presses this analogy. Also relevant in the same volume (MV&R) are Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World and Projection and Truth in Ethics. Finally, but non exhaustively, are David Wiggins' A Sensible Subjectivism (reprinted in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value) as well as his recently published Truth, Pragmatism and Morality, a commentary on, and refinement of, Putnam's attack on the dichotomy.
The paper is basically broken into two parts. The first is an attack on what might be called 'ontological substantiality' - the idea that we can parse in any kind of substantial way – as if one were God deciding before he made the universe – what kinds of things are, or are not. The second part of the paper will go on to argue that if we cannot grant this substantialist conception of ontology, then we ought to instead grant what might be called a ‘relativized ontology’, wherein what is, is relativized in accordance to whatever we happen to be speaking about at the time, and hence, to language – or what Quine will later call ‘a semantical plane’.
Anyway, Quine begins by wrestling with the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’. First, he notes that it’s not a simple case of declaring that certain things are not, without in fact implicitly admitting that they are (there’s a performative contradiction in doing so, as it were). He continues by noting that one way to avoid these paradoxes is to leave behind the is/is-not distinction, and instead cleave a distinction internal to being itself, wherein what is, is either thought about in terms of actuality on the one hand, and possibility on the other. Quine rather quickly dispatches this line of thought with the wonderful passage about the possible fat men in the doorway. And to further drive the point home, he then tries to see what happens when the realm of possible is expanded to include the contradictory (like the ‘round square’ Copula on Berkeley collage). This too doesn’t end well.
Having done with his destruction of substantialist ontologies, Quine now turns to sketching out his deflationary, relativized one. The basic idea is simple: that using words to mean something does not commit one to positing the being of that thing. Stated baldly by Quine: “we no longer labour under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term.” It is in fact Russell’s theory of descriptions which allows Quine to make this move, insofar as per Russell, any singular terms can be ‘analyzed out’ in terms of bound variables like ‘something, ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’, such that when we speak of ‘X’, all we are committed to saying is something like: ‘there is a something, X, of which we are speaking about’.
This, in turn, allows Quine to bypass the paradox of speaking about that which ‘is not’: to say that something ‘is not’ is simply to say that there is nothing which satisfies the thing X, of which we are speaking about. Cashing out the is/is-not distinction in this way is important because it deprives the motivation of projects like Wyman’s, which have to recourse to possible entities in order to deal with the paradox of not-Being, here now diffused by Quine. As Quine puts it, “we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is …. But we do not commit ourselves to ontology containing Pegasus when we say that Pegasus is not”. Simple.
Anyway, in holding to this view, it is important for Quine that names become reducible to descriptions. Only in this way can Russell’s theory hold for singular terms. This is important to take note of because in future developments, this idea will be challenged (like @schmik pointed out) by those like Kripke, for whom names are in fact irreducible to descriptions, and require a ‘primal baptism’ that fixes their referents in all possible worlds. As the paper stands however, Quine sees no issue with reducing names to descriptions, writing that “Names are, in fact, immaterial to the ontological issue … whatever we say with the help of names can be said in a language which shuns names altogether.”
To the degree that names are reducible to descriptions however, this will allow Quine to pronounce the paper’s ultimate point, which is that “to be is to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” A most concise statement of what it is to be as there’s ever been. Concluding, Quine then affirms that if this is the case, our differing ontological commitments in turn entail that we can have different ‘conceptual schemes’ when it comes to talking about ontology. It is the convergence or divergence of our conceptual schemes which allow us to find – or not find – common ground by which to make arguments. As such, “ontological controversy… tends into controversy over language”. Again this is important because this too will be challenged down the track by those like Davidson, who will aim to do away with ‘the very idea of a conceptual scheme’.
But circling back to Quine, the upshot the reference to different conceptual schemes is the pluralistic thought that “what ontology to actually adopt still stands open, and the obvious counsel is tolerance and an experimental spirit” (although Quine does end by suggesting that the ‘epistemological point of view’ – one among a variety of others – holds a certain priority).
Lots of critical comments to make, but this'll do for now.
This post strikes me as an excellent summary, much better than I could have done myself. I thought for a second that you had misconstrued Quines' treatment of proper names because of your phrasing ("there is a something, X, of which we are speaking about"), which is a bit hard to parse as a definite description, but you cleared that up later on. I'm looking forward to reading your critical commentary.
I do wonder, though, about the 'voluntarist' - or perhaps better, rationalist - terms in which Quine frames this autonomy. In the following passage for example, the common denominator is that our ontological commitments follow as a result of our saying that such and such 'are': "We commit ourselves to an ontology containing numbers when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is." But if - and I am inclined to make this move - 'saying' is simply one type of action among others, can we not implicitly commit ourselves to ontologies in our ways of acting? Can one say, in a political vein, that a city commits itself to an ontology of home owners when it chooses to ignore the building of facilities to accommodate the homeless (or even, implement 'anti-homeless' features, like spikes on flat surfaces, as has been done in certain cities?).
To make a move like this of course is to once again 'substantialize' ontology in a way that Quine would probably find unpalatable, relativizing ontology not to language, but to a broader realm of 'significance' more generally. One consequence of making a move like this would also be to relativize language itself as one type of sense-making apparatus among others (which might include, to continue with our example, the structuring of movement and rest by our architectural and planning decisions, which can in turn structure the intelligibility of the populations who reside in a certain territory). Anyway, the point is: do our ontological commitments need to operate at the level of explicit enunciation (at the level of 'saying' that such and such is), or can they operate also at the level of implicit commitment, at the level of behavior, action, habit, and practice more generally? And if there is indeed a reason to make such a distinction, what in Quine would authorize it?
I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to @Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence.
I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before.
Okay, I think this creates its own kind of horrors, where claims of or representations of things are taken to have all the power of what traditionally was taken to be those things themselves. So the age-old phenomenon of crocodile tears is impossible because there is no disingenuousness when to be represented as evil, oppressive, oppressed, etc. is the same as being any of those things.
Some liberals of course still cling to the notion that material conditions (like not having food) make you poor, but this has already been abandoned for gender, and not the gender ontoogy has exploded because it is as large as anyone cares to say it is. So second-wave feminists who silly them thought that gender oppression was a material status with concrete effects that superseded ~*identity*~ and ~*representation*~, are dead. And I bet you poverty will follow at some point: who is going to be the first rich kid to ~*identify*~ as poor?
In what sense wouldn't it be doing so? Call it a value judgement if you like: this would just to be say that our ontologies are based on value judgements; call it a desire for revenue through property taxes: this could just be to say that a particular ontology is motivated by such a desire. When Quine simply defines 'the ontological problem' as 'what is there', nothing in the question motivates a response in terms of our saying 'such and such is'. When, as a disabled person, a city doesn't build the ramps and elevators required to access otherwise "public" space, is not your very existence (or being, as Quine is wont to say) being in some way denied? When, as a gay person, your ability to express your desire is curbed by draconian laws that make "sodomy" a felony, is not the same at work? Perhaps you think this is overwrought, but some of the largest political movements in history - over race, over gender, over class - have been born from just this impulse to wring social and cultural existence out from systems which do not acknowledge them to exist in some way or another.
Quine, at the end of the paper, speaks of how our differing conceptual schemes might enable or disable our ability "to communicate successfully on such topics as politics, weather, and, in particular, language." But why construe 'communication' so narrowly, to our 'saying' things? Is protest not communication? Are petitions not communication? When the population took to the streets in the Ukraine at freedom square, they weren't just hanging around for a bit of fun. I don't think anything in principle limits 'ontology' to a practice conducted by (what tends to be) old white men writing about other, deader, old white men and the philosophical tracts they produce. It seems to me perfectly intelligible to speak about 'the ontology of modernity', or 'the ontology of capitalism' and so on, as is in fact the case in many areas of study.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yeah, this sort of 'identity politics' has been disparaged for quite some time, where identification and recognition is construed to be the sort of be all and end all of politics. I agree that when taken as such it's generally pretty fucking disastrous for all involved, but on the other hand, it does make for a good starting point. When the Oscars executive governing board looks like this:
And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idris Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on.
But the Oscars don't matter. They have no artistic importance, anyway.
Instead, the response is to demand entry into the institution that has admitted it doesn't much care for them. So the message seems to be: we are only worthwhile insofar as worthless institutions accept us.
I don't know, the Oscars seems to me to be the epitome of dumb / decadent identity politics. They're literally nothing but that.
And it seems to me to be a reductio. Premise; things matter to the extent people think they do. But people think the Oscars matter, even though they don't. Therefore, the premise is false.
The thing is, as dumb as the Oscars may be, a lot of really dumb people are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the dumb decisions dumb institutions make when those dumb institutions are seen as having some sort of cultural authority (which so many dumb people imagine the Oscars to have.) And these dumb people are the same dumb people who occupy positions of power or influence in other dumb institutions (whether as DA or as jury member.) So as dumb as the dumb Oscars may be, they still have legitimate influence on things that actually matter (unlike the dumb oscars.)
I don't know how much you talk to non-academics, but it's very clear that, for many of them, their perceptions of other races (whether that means white or black or latino or asian or whatever) has a whole lot to do with how they're portrayed in film and television. And, for better or for worse, what type of performers wins oscars is directly correlated with what roles are allowed to be considered 'serious', and which people are allowed to play such roles.
Unfortunately, your average jury member likes Hollywood more than Cioran, as dumb as that may make him.
Something does not add up here. And I am extremely skeptical of the claim that media portrayals influence attitudes, rather than vice-versa. It smacks of 'representationalist' politics to me. I don't know; maybe the 'linguistic turn' in AP is part of this general shift in attitude toward top-down views of the world, things being how they are as a result of how they're represented.
And even if it weren't, it still perversely advocates granting institutions like the Oscars legitimacy by admitting that they are so important that we can't live without brown people (who, according to liberal politics, form a coherent class, 'people of color,' as distinct from white people, who are unique and prestiged in that they are 'colorless,' have transcended ethnic culture, and so have a duty to provide culture for everyone who has not yet made the climb) getting statues from them. But the Oscars are just the institution we're supposed to hate, according to the liberal narrative -- no no, they say, we only hate them insofar as they don't do the benevolent brainwashing they're supposed to. I just don't buy it. I don't think that supporting this kind of rhetoric about representation is harmful, but rather emblematic of how impotent and deluded liberal politics is. Maybe this talk of ontology has something to do with it.
Maybe if someone who has my skin color plays the lead role in Transformers 6, I'll become a bound variable...the more you think about it, the less it makes any kind of sense.
I don't think "being" is involved in any significant sense in such issues, unless it is defined in such a fashion as to mean something which presumes existence and includes other considerations, ethical, legal and political. In that case, though, it would seem ontology isn't a distinct area of study or inquiry.
Of course, those who achieved the adoption of laws or obtained court decisions addressing the rights of the disabled and gays didn't do so by maintaining that their being was being denied. Maintaining that it was denied or is being denied would only serve to obfuscate the questions addressed by the courts and legislatures which are and have been decision-makers as to such issues. I don't think treating social, political or legal problems as involving ontological questions would be beneficial to their resolution.
I don't mean to be tiresome, but wonder whether ontology is properly or usefully applied in this or other cases of social, political, legal, cultural controversy. What do we accomplish by treating such controversies as matters of "being"? In what sense is "being" at issue? It seems that there are objections because too many (or only) whites are nominated, too many (or only) whites involved in deciding who is nominated for and receives an Oscar. If the Oscars are about dispensing awards to outstanding movies and outstanding participants in movies, ideally race wouldn't be a factor in making any determination. But the situation is not ideal. So, what are the concerns? If the concern is that what is considered outstanding is prejudiced because too many whites are involved in determining who and what is outstanding, how does this involve "being" or how can it be rectified by the study of "being"? Would ontological analysis result in there being less whites involved? If the concern is that non-whites are being actively discriminated against when it comes to nominations and awards, is that the case because non-whites are denied "being", and will that cease when they are accorded "being"?
That doesn't suggest that amelioration of discrimination isn't worthwhile. It is. I didn't exist less before the state sodomy law was repealed, and I didn't exist more after repeal. I liked having those laws repealed, but it didn't alter my 'being' or 'existence'.
People are not actually "erased" or "rendered invisible" or turned into non-beings by people saying nasty things about them, or worse, not discussing them at all. They are being ignored, not being turned into non-beings.
Idk, I kinda doubt it. The Oscars is indeed an index of - and an influence on - people's attitudes about class and race but I'd say a better route would be to undermine its perceived authority. * What I found silly in your post was the idea that the Oscars don't matter because you think they have no artistic importance.
Well, quite obviously attitudes influence media portrayals. I don't recall anyone arguing otherwise. Are you really skeptical of the claim that media portrayals influence attitudes or do you just not like the way some people talk about media influence?
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*This is where you can say 'yeah but the *material conditions* are what most urgently need to be addressed. I don't disagree with this, but, considering the only way to address suffering you seem to find permissible is antinatalism (the mass espousal of which I'd hope you admit is sheer fantasy) I have trouble taking anything you say about changing conditions as sincere.
I'm not entirely concerned about what you do or don't think. The question remains: is there anything in Quine that in principle limits the question of being ('what is') what is said? And if so, what would motivate what I suspect is an arbitrary line in the sand? Note that none of this is to say that acknowledging the ontological implications of social or political acts in some way may or may not be 'beneficial to an issue's resolution'. Rather, it's a question of the bearing of the political or the social on the question of being: if what "is" cannot be limited to what is said, then do social and political acts (for instance) feed back into the question of what it is to be?
Isn't the point of the Oscars that they're supposed to have artistic influence? Doesn't the fact that the don't make their pretensions ridiculous on their own terms?
Quoting csalisbury
But it's common to think of all social and political issues as 'top down:' some group of people designs the way the laws work and so the way society is run, and therefore any flaws in society are traceable to bad decisions, presumably made by bad people whom we need to shame into behaving correctly, so we can design society the right way. Analogously, social attitudes are built top-down: the way we think about people governs the way we treat them, and representations of people govern how we think about them. Thus, identity politics is the most basic form of politics, and representation and existence or legitimacy are taken to be deeply entwined. So you may think this is obvious, but it seems not to be obvious to many people. Or if it is, their direction of attack makes no sense (and don't give me the 'feedback loop' nonsense: if they really think it's a loop, why is their approach so unidirectional?)
Quoting csalisbury
Yes. I think by and large media is a slave to those who consume it, and those who craft the media are impotent to enforce tastes deliberately on those they broadcast to. In other words, the only reason bad movies exist is because people watch them, and the second they stop is the second they will cease to exist. Media portrayals that don't reflect pre-existing prejudices will be destroyed, usually before they are even made, rather than change the prejudices to match the portrayal.
Quoting csalisbury
The mass espousal of anti-natalism is not a fantasy. Statistically, a large portion of the world are de facto antinatalists: they do not produce enough children to continue the human population. So in Western societies the birth rate is not even replacing the population, and their populatins are literally dying due to a de facto antinatalist trend. The material conditions that facilitate this are economic freedom and access to birth control: that is, precisely when people can control when they want to have children, and have the economic and social freedom not do have them, they don't. If you believe that material conditions will steadily improve, then you are hard pressed not to believe people will start having less children. If all the world was the West (which it may soon be, how things are going), we would literally need artificial incentives just to keep people producing children. Having children sucks. People promote it nominally, but they don't put their money where their mouth is when it comes right down to it. If they don't have to have kids, most of the time they don't.
Help! StreetlightX is depriving me of my being!
But if your concern is whether Quine does or does not in principle limit the question of being to what's said, I'd say that in this article he does not, perhaps because that possibility doesn't occur to him, perhaps for other reasons.
You see, I was trying to respond to what seemed to be your thoughts regarding the application of ontology. Your thoughts concerned me regardless of whether mine concern you. Perhaps we have different ontological commitments, though.
Here's an argument: if Quine does in fact want to limit ontology to the 'semantical plane', then he makes language in some manner otherwordly: no longer naturalized as one manner of acting or doing among others, language acquires a status that is somehow discontinuous with the rest of the world and everything in it. The onus would then be on Quine to justify this discontinuity of language with the rest of the universe, a move that would in fact be metaphysical - in the pejorative sense - through and through.