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0:00 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@partiallyexaminedlife.com support. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 66 is something like what's the relationship between matters of fact and matters of logic? We read two essays by Willard Van Orman Quine on what there is from 1948 and two dogmas of empiricism from 1951.
Join the discussion, get the text and read loads of supplemental materials@partiallyexaminedlife.com and if you sign up there to become a pel citizen, you can access audio versions of both of these articles read by us, the podcasters. This is Mark Linsenmayer, free of ontological commitments in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:59 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, divorcing from the object of reference and wedding myself to the word in Austin, Texas.
1:06 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, who didn't prepare a witty ontological thing to say in Boston, Massachusetts.
1:12 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, just being himself as he is, in Middleton, Wisconsin.
1:18 Seth: Boring.
1:20 Matt: And this is Matt Teichman, ensnared in a web of belief in Chicago, Illinois.
1:25 Mark: See, that's a respectable intro. Matt is a podcast veteran.
1:29 Dylan: There you go.
1:30 Seth: He is a podcast veteran, actually.
1:32 Matt: Very pleased to be back on.
1:34 Seth: Welcome.
1:35 Matt: Thank you. Thank you.
1:36 Mark: Yes, if you don't remember Matt, he was on our Frege episode a while ago, which is that and the Bertrand Russell on math are probably the ones to prepare for this and the next one if you need to go back and listen to something else. Because we are now back in the land of analytic philosophy. People that like logic empiricists that want
1:56 Matt: to do math, two things you wouldn't have thought go together.
1:58 Mark: So Matt is our crutch for that, at least this time.
2:01 Matt: Well, I'll do my best.
2:02 Mark: Yes, you wanted it made clear that you are not an expert in this area. You are a graduate student. Interested?
2:07 Matt: Yes, certainly interested in Quine. I've had sort of a love hate relationship with Quine. I've been kind of cranky about him for a long time, but actually since rereading him in preparation for this episode, I think I've seen started to get a sense of where he's coming from. I will try to be charitable in my presentation of stuff next time.
2:23 Mark: We have a highly. It's not actually that technical. It's certainly not any more technical than the Russell on math one that we did. But it's a giant logical constructive system by Carnap, who was Quine's. Really his idol. Quine said that Carnap was like the most important philosopher of the 20th century. And what we are reading today is a direct reaction. And then Quine responds to him and he responds to Quine and so on. Carnap was about 18 years older than Quine when Quine. So Quine is from Ohio. He was just brilliant. Really liked the Principia Mathematica and got to go to Cambridge, I believe, to work ostensibly under whitehead.
Got his PhD in two years and then just got to meet all the greats that were there at the time, including Carnap, who was a student of Frege. And I read where he said he tried to get hold of Wittgenstein while he's over there, but Wittgenstein did not answer his letter. So sad, huh?
3:14 Matt: The Ohio thing is interesting. Is it right that he went to Oberlin for undergrad?
3:18 Dylan: Did I remember he did go to Oberlin.
3:20 Matt: David Lewis was the son of two Oberlin professors. Another interesting Quine. Lewis connection. Lewis was one of Quine's students and. But anyway, let's not. We don't want to drive Seth away already.
3:30 Mark: I know that Pat Churchland and Owen Flanagan, who were both on our episodes, were big sort of disciples. They really were in the Quinian mode.
3:38 Seth: Yeah.
3:39 Mark: That is of trying to make philosophy continuous with science. So Quine did not see philosophy as a foundational discipline to set up science in some way, but it was about clarifying what science is doing, clarifying the ontological commitments, like when you make a scientific theory. What kind of objects are you claiming are out there getting clear on the relationship between science and math, et cetera? But he was a self proclaimed naturalist, which we don't get into in these essays that much into what that actually means. I mean, he has all these essays later, like Epistemology Naturalized, that perhaps we could someday look at. But here we kind of have to read into the particular theses he's arguing for here.
4:23 Dylan: He considered philosophy a branch of science he considered completely continuous based upon just the two essays we read. In fact, I was trying to find the quote where he says exactly that.
4:32 Matt: Yes, that's certainly where personally I feel his influence the most these days is among contemporary naturalists who think that philosophy has no special subject matter, but it's completely continuous with science, as Dylan just said, and there's no methodology that's proper to philosophy as distinct from science. There's no facts in the world that are kind of only uncoverable via philosophical methods. Anything that really gets to count as a fact has to be something that is discoverable via natural scientific methods.
5:00 Mark: His conception of science, though, is pretty broad. It's not just based on hard physics or something like. He considers history a part of science.
5:08 Dylan: Yeah. He says science is a continuation of common sense.
5:12 Wes: And also we get some very suggestive statements at the end of the Two Dogmas of Empiricism essay where he calls the positing of physical objects myths and compares them to gods, Homer's gods.
5:23 Matt: Another thing I think is interesting that's maybe missing from contemporary Quinians is the close link he sees between logic and science. A lot of people who are influenced by Quine today might, for example, investigate morality by doing empirical psychology. But logic somehow seems never to enter into the equation the way it always does. For Quine, I guess the reason for that is that he sees science in its purest, most ideal form as happening in the most austere possible logical language that you can come up with. It's not necessarily the first thing you think of when you think of like, oh, what does the biologist do? Well, they do logic.
5:56 Mark: Right. I mean, that could have been sort of just the trend as of the 40s and 50s, but he certainly kept that throughout his career and he lived until 2000. Yeah. The collection that these two essays are in, they're the first two essays that I have is from a Logical point of view, nine logico-philosophical essays from 1953 originally. So, you know, a lot of that has to do with the Carnap influence. Right. From Frege and Russell. In fact, Quine started like some of these other guys as a math guy, so his math and then philosophy of mathematics as sort of his secondary focus. So everything started with that. Even though it seems strange from, I don't know, at least what I as a non mathematician think that mathematicians would be interested in. It seems like it's a fairly natural movement.
6:41 Dylan: Well, especially at the time when Quine was around. Quine and Russell and those guys around at a time of upheaval in the foundations of mathematics. Gödel's theorem is 1930s. Russell's paradox is before that. All these attempts by Hilbert and these metamathematical trends trying to found mathematics within mathematics, which ultimately concludes with Gödel's theorem of showing that you can't have a complete and consistent account of arithmetic. So that's all a very philosophical bend of Mathematics, Right.
7:12 Mark: So that pretty much struck down the thing that Russell and Whitehead were trying to do in Principia Mathematica, which is what we summed up in our Philosophy of Mathematics episode. We had read a Russell sort of shortened, dumbed down version of that, where he just shows the foundation of basic arithmetic in logic. That was the starting point for Quine's thinking that he really liked all the proofs in that book, but he thought that the text surrounding it was kind of sloppy and inelegant and he wanted the ontology. He thought it was very wasteful.
It was very ontologically profligate. There are all these just extra entities all over the place that then Carnap continued that trend, at least according to Quine's analysis. Whereas Quine, just like if you were doing regular natural science, you don't want to posit extra types of entities if you don't need to. So he certainly was of the bent that if he could only talk about physical things and not talk about irreducibly mental objects, he was definitely in favor of that. This was also the heyday of behaviorism. He even saw John Watson, sort of the big founder of behaviorism, took a course from him and was pals with B.F.
skinner, another big behaviorist at the time. So was very much in favor, as was Carnap, in trying to reduce the complexities of whatever field you're looking at into as sparse a base as possible.
8:34 Seth: Can we talk about that for a second?
8:36 Mark: Sure.
8:37 Seth: Who cares? Who gives a shit how many entities there are, why there's so many or so few? Why is that important?
8:45 Matt: It's a good question. It's one I ask myself a lot. A lot of philosophers, especially metaphysicians, are worried about cluttering the universe with too many different kinds of things. So my own temperament is fairly ontologically promiscuous myself. So my inclination is to say, yeah, whatever, you know, sure.
9:00 Dylan: Well, let's look at what Quine says. He explicitly takes this on.
9:03 Wes: Right.
9:03 Dylan: He uses, in fact, if it isn't the word profligate, he uses something like that in the first essay.
9:08 Seth: I believe the word is promiscuous. It's not uncommon for philosophers to use metaphors that involve sexual connotations. I just want to point that out. We want to penetrate, get to the truth.
9:21 Matt: Plato's beard.
9:25 Seth: Plato's beard.
9:26 Matt: I like that. Let me see if I can find that passage. The desert landscapes passage, page three.
9:31 Seth: Here we go. Quine is referring in on what there is to the philosopher we'll call him Wyman. Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of those of us who have a taste for desert landscapes. But this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibilities is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. And then he goes on to talk about a fat man in a doorway.
9:59 Dylan: This is the answer to your question, right?
10:02 Seth: It's aesthetically unpleasing.
10:04 Dylan: Well, I think it's partly that. And it leads to confusion from his point of view. There becomes a muddle of whether or not you have two things or one thing, because you have given entity status to this huge array of cases.
10:19 Seth: Maybe we should rewind a little bit and.
10:21 Wes: Yeah, let's say what this Plato's beard is, because I think, you know, some of our listeners might read this and wonder why it is that someone thought that the term Pegasus had to refer to anything. It seems kind of absurd to say that you need an entity for Pegasus. So let's say what motivates them.
10:40 Dylan: In the very beginning, he presents this question of this old Platonic riddle of non being. Non being must in some sense be otherwise. What is it that there is nothing. This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard. And so he begins with this question of non being and tries to say, it's just a silly problem.
11:00 Wes: So let's say what that means. Non being must in some sense be otherwise. You know, I, like Quine, has a great style, but it's very dense, and I don't think he really fully spells this out for a newbie. So you take a sentence like pegasus has wings or Pegasus doesn't exist. You could take either one of those sentences, and the intuitive idea is that in order for it to have meaning, the term Pegasus has to be about something.
11:27 Dylan: It has to refer.
11:29 Wes: That in some sense, meaning depends on reference. Yeah, has to refer. And so that aboutness suggests that there's some entity to which it refers. And so what Quine is going to end up saying is that, in fact, meaning doesn't depend on reference. And we can use Russell's theory of definite descriptions, which we'll get to, in order to show why that is. But I just want to get at this, Plato's beard or the Platonic riddle of non being, because otherwise it'll seem kind of crazy that anyone would want to say that there has to be an entity for Pegasus. But the motivation is that otherwise, how do we ground the meaning of a word like Pegasus so For instance, someone might want to say, well, it refers to something in our imaginations, which of course doesn't work, because when we say Pegasus has wings, we don't mean that something in our imagination has wings.
12:21 Seth: We mean the actual Pegasus.
12:23 Wes: Right. We mean the actual, but not actual Pegasus at the same time. The possible Pegasus, or however you want to put it.
12:30 Matt: I kind of feel like Santa Claus is an intuitive example because there are people, namely people who are under the age of four who think that Santa Claus does exist. And you might walk up to one of them and say, actually, Santa Claus doesn't exist, and thus bursting their bubble. So this is often referred to as the problem of negative existentials, what Quine calls Plato's beard. And maybe one sort of intuitive way to set that up is, so I come along and tell you Santa Claus doesn't exist. And then you might say, okay, well, what doesn't exist? Can you point to the thing that doesn't exist? But of course you can't point to it. I mean, if you could point to it, it would exist. So, like, what is it that you're saying doesn't exist? And trying to answer that question gets you into sort of a paradox.
13:05 Wes: Yeah. It seems as if non existence is a property that you would have to attribute, paradoxically, to some objects that has to exist in order to have the property of not existing.
13:16 Dylan: Yeah. So you have the problem of the being of non being.
13:19 Matt: Yeah. So one route you might take, which is the route that the philosopher Alexius Meinong took, is to say, well, you know, in some sense, there is Pegasus. It's just that he doesn't have the property of existing. He merely subsists. Instead of existing, you develop this third realm, as it were, of imaginary entities that don't exist but could exist or something. So that's one of the things that Quine is especially critical of and sort of gets this paper going.
13:42 Seth: Is that the same as the possible worlds?
13:45 Matt: If you think that there is Pegasus, only he doesn't exist, maybe one way to spell that out would be to say that there is a possible world somewhere containing Pegasus, only it isn't the actual world.
13:56 Seth: Right.
13:56 Matt: There might be other ways of spelling that out as well that don't involve possible worlds.
14:00 Seth: Yeah, I mean, I think that the central problem here is that we are having a conversation where we seem to meaningfully refer to Pegasus, but there's no Pegasus in the world that can be a referent, as it were, of that utterance. And so the dilemma here is, how can we actually be speaking meaningfully or be making meaningful statements about something that doesn't exist. Right?
14:29 Mark: Yeah, right. So the solution he gives is the one from Bertrand Russell from his essay on Denoting, I believe, which is about analyzing these things away as descriptions. So when you say Santa Claus, you're not actually naming someone, you're describing some chap with a beard and the belly and all that. Just because there's a description of that sort doesn't mean that anything actually fits that description.
14:53 Wes: So, for instance, when you say Santa Claus is jolly, it's not like for that sentence to be meaningful, there has to be a referent for Santa Claus. But you can re parse that sentence in such a way, I think it would be there exists an X.
15:08 Mark: No, you would not want to. You would.
15:10 Seth: Yeah.
15:10 Wes: There exists an X such that X. If you were making this claim, which would turn out to be false. There exists an X such that X is Santa Claus or Santa Clausing or however you want to put it, and X is jolly, where Santa Claus is reducible in principle to a whole bunch of different sorts of descriptions which would ultimately fix him as the entity. Is that right, Matt?
15:33 Matt: Yeah. So you know something like, there is a jolly man who lives in the North Pole and gives everybody presents every Christmas.
15:40 Wes: There you go.
15:41 Matt: And. Oh, I said jolly, didn't I? Okay, so, all right, there is a man who lives in the North Pole and gives everybody presents every Christmas and he's jolly, and he's the only man who lives in the North Pole and gives everybody gifts on Christmas, or something like that. The reason that that's a solution is that Quine thinks the only way you commit yourself to the existence of something is by using this. There exists an X type phrase. So if you say Santa Claus doesn't exist, you're not committing yourself to anything because you're saying, well, that's not the case. You're putting a negation, as it were, in front of it. You're only committed to the existence of a real Santa Claus. If you say Santa Claus is jolly, because then you're saying there exists an X such that X lives in the North Pole. X is jolly, and he's the only one who lives in the North Pole.
16:30 Mark: Well, I think it's even clearer what the sort of ontological commitment or lack thereof is if you talk about it with the universal quantifier. So use a conditional. So for all things in the world, if they meet this description of Santa Claus, blah, blah, blah, then they are jolly. So that can be true. It just is Trivially true if there is no such creature.
16:50 Wes: Right? Yeah.
16:51 Seth: Say what you mean by trivially true, Mark.
16:53 Mark: The way that the conditional, the if then statement works in logic, that the only time it is false is if the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. So if you say if it happened to be the case that there was somebody in the world that met all the description of Santa Claus, so in other words, Santa Claus does exist, but yet it did not have the jolliness, then it would be false. Otherwise it's true is a little different than the if then statement in English where you always are implying the existence seemingly. It would be silly to say all pencils are made of graphite or something like that if there are no pencils. But as far as logic is concerned, if you say for all X, if X is a pencil, then it has graphite, that is still true even if there are no pencils in the world. But we say it's trivially true because it doesn't actually tell us anything about anything.
17:43 Matt: If there are no pencils.
17:44 Mark: Correct.
17:45 Dylan: The way you're using the word trivial seems very, very technical right now.
17:49 Seth: Yes, yes.
17:52 Mark: That is what Quine and Russell and all these guys like to do. They like to take natural language and make it more precise by using this technical vocabulary.
18:01 Dylan: The reason I'm balking at the use of trivial in that particular way is because that seems to make the ontological question, or even the truth value question about whether pencils exist as being the arbiter of whether or not the statement is true or not.
18:16 Wes: Mark, when you say trivially true, usually a philosopher will say that to mean something like analytically true or true in virtue of meaning.
18:23 Matt: I think this is a different use of trivial. So every frog is green. It's true even when there are no frogs. The idea there is that. Well, okay, usually we say every frog is green when there are frogs. Usually that's sort of the assumption.
18:35 Dylan: Doesn't it have to mean something like, by frog, I mean a set of attributes that include green. And when I say every frog is green, that is trivially true because of what a frog means.
18:48 Wes: Right.
18:48 Dylan: Okay. And that's exactly the kind of thing that Quine is arguing against. Right. It's explicitly that kind of thinking about the world that he's saying that distinction. That's the analytic synthetic distinction right there.
19:03 Seth: All right, I'm lost.
19:04 Dylan: I agree. I'm getting lost myself. And so I think that this first essay in particular, I think, even though it's dense, is such an awesome rendition of the ontological question and what's gathered up in it. Even if he gives, some people who end up falling to his pen would protest, he still presents their argument. So you sort of have that landscape of ontological possibilities to use it in a different way than he used it. So I think we could kind of back up a little bit more and give a little bit more of a survey.
19:35 Matt: Can I give one more example of saying there is no something and then we'll move on, because I think that might be useful. Okay, so take the statement there are no unicorns. That shouldn't pose the problem of negative existentials. Assuming that you think being a unicorn is a property, let's say that you think that there's a property of being a unicorn. I like that property. It turns out everybody likes that property. They're no unicorns. Okay, so that doesn't raise the problem of negative existentials, because one way to explain what that means is you're just saying the property is a unicorn is not instantiated.
So there's no weird old thingy that sort of exists and sort of doesn't exist that you're pointing to. And you're saying that doesn't exist. You're just saying that there's this property, and that property has the feature of having nothing that falls under it. Quine takes Russell to be making that sort of move with things like there's no Pegasus and there's no Santa Claus. But by making Pegasus into a property or making Santa Claus into a property, if we can somehow make these names of people into properties, then we've gotten around the problem of making existentials, because there's no problem in saying, like there are no ghosts.
And that's just saying the property ghost is not instantiated. There's nothing that falls under it.
20:42 Mark: And so why shouldn't there be an ontological problem in saying there is this property pegasizing, but it is not instantiated? Didn't you say there is a property? Are you imputing that properties are part of your ontology, then?
20:55 Wes: Well, that's his next.
20:57 Matt: That's a different. So Quine will also be worried about that at some point you might still have a problem with making Pegasus into a property. The property of pegasizing.
21:04 Wes: Yeah, on page six we get this transition where he's saying, if the importing of such a predicate as pegasizes seems to commit us to recognizing that there's a corresponding attribute pegasizing in Plato's heaven or in the minds of men, well and good, this Stage where we worry about the being or non being of universals is the next phase of the argument. So first we want to get rid of these subsisting non existent, but somehow existent entities, and now we want to move to the phase where we say, well, there are no such thing as we don't need to treat universals themselves as entities.
21:40 Mark: Right.
21:41 Dylan: One way to summarize this beginning question about Pegasus and non being is he calls it a confusion between meaning and naming. And that the way in which you get bound up with wondering about the existence of Pegasus and stuff is that you miss the distinction that there's a huge, as he says, a gulf between meaning and naming, even in the case of a singular term, which is genuinely a name of an object. So he gives on page nine an example from Frege. It's at the top, he says, the phrase evening star names a certain large physical object of spherical form which is hurtling through space through some scores of millions of miles from here.
The phrase morning star names the same thing as was probably first established by some observant Babylonian. But the two phrases cannot be regarded as having the same meaning, otherwise that Babylonian could have dispensed with his observation and contented himself with reflecting on the meanings of his words. The meanings then being different from one another, must be other than the named object, which is one and the same in both cases.
22:40 Mark: Yeah, and he uses that in the next part, then arguing against universals as well. That at least is the first move against someone who says, ah, you just said this object pegasizes, or this is red, you know, Then you are adding something to your ontology. And he wants to say, well, no, because adding to your ontology is again naming some objects in the ontology. But you can use words that mean something, but they don't name anything.
23:03 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, that paragraph is actually pretty good, right? He says confusion of meaning with naming not only made one think that he could not meaningfully repudiate Pegasus, a continuing confusion of meaning with naming no doubt helped engender his absurd notion that Pegasus is an idea, a mental entity. The structure of his confusion is as he confused the alleged named object Pegasus with the meaning of the word Pegasus, therefore concluding that Pegasus must be in order that the word have meaning. But what sorts of things are meanings? This is a moot point, however.
One might quite plausibly explain meanings as ideas in the mind. Supposing we can make clear sense in turn of the idea of ideas in the mind. That's the direction that he doesn't want to go, he just wants to dispense with the problem of meaning in the end. But this is where he turns to the ontological problem of universals.
23:54 Wes: Right? So we've already seen that the meaning of sentences does not depend in cases where speaking falsely of reference to entities that don't exist. So the first case was a case of references to some specific entity like Pegasus. And now we're getting to a rejection of the idea of meanings as entities. So, you know, you might want to say, well, yes, granted the object Pegasus doesn't exist, but the meaning Pegasus somehow exists. And we, you know, this is something we saw on Frege. Listeners can listen to our Frege episode for an extensive account of this difference between sense and reference. And certainly, I think in Frege's ontology, these meanings, these senses, are entities. But Quine is going to help us do away with those.
24:40 Seth: Right?
24:40 Mark: And you might say there have to be meanings in your ontology, because otherwise how would we understand each other? But he wants to distinguish between meaning as an ontological entity and some particular phrase being meaningful, which actually he prefers the word significant. And he seems to think that we can analyze significance actually in more or less behaviorist terms. Right? You can see if a phrase is significant if you speak it to the speakers and they don't look at you funny. That's all that you need for the difference between a statement being meaningful and it not being meaningful. It doesn't follow from that that there are any entities called meanings that somehow the sensible significant sentences or the terms in the sentences are picking out.
25:21 Dylan: Would it be right to say that this is where a kind of empirical data comes in, is the way in which you get meaningfulness? Significance is based upon some, broadly speaking, empirical data. That's the content of behaviorism here.
25:35 Wes: I think it's use, isn't it meaning here it sounds like amounts to use.
25:39 Matt: Well, it's something like a person's disposition to respond in a certain way to stimuli. That's the idea he tries to replace meaning with in word and object, which is not something we read for today, but certainly that picture is in the background here. It's sort of an overall skepticism about meaning, but not, as Mark pointed out, skepticism about the idea that sentences can be meaningful or words can be meaningful. Just skepticism about the idea that there's a separate thing that exists in its own right that makes them meaningful, that is the meaning. But of course, I think a lot of work to be done to figuring out exactly what that means.
26:13 Dylan: Doesn't it at least mean that Significance does not turn on ontology. That ontology, by itself, whatever that is, does not determine significance.
26:22 Wes: Yeah. We replace. Instead of saying that meaningfulness or significance depends upon this sort of naming, like relation or this relationship to these existing entities called meanings, we now cash that out in terms of, as Matt was saying, the behavioral dispositions, for instance, of a language user. To me, it sounds like. And it's probably not exactly right, but it sounds much like Wittgenstein's talk of meanings as use.
26:48 Mark: I wouldn't formulate what you just said, Wes, the way Dylan just said, which is we don't want to have significance based on ontology because those are very tightly connected. That the conclusion of this whole essay is something like our language has ontological commitments, and we need to understand what those commitments are to understand what is being said in the language.
27:09 Wes: Yeah.
27:10 Mark: So in that sense, yes, ontology is all over language. Just backing up and looking at Quine's whole project, he sees science as a linguistic enterprise. So the commitments of science, which is, again, going to be on a par with the ontological commitments of philosophy, there's no real distinction between them.
27:29 Wes: The commitment to physical objects is an ontological commitment, right?
27:34 Mark: Yes, exactly.
27:36 Dylan: Maybe there's a distinction to be made between whether the significance, in terms of it distinguishing one thing from another, which certainly would include the ontological commitments and the truth of it, or the way it lines up with the world, the evidence for it. And so significance would be the way in which your statements are different from one another, the claims that you've made, and those would have embroiled within them, ontological commitments that you've made. But that would be separate from whether atoms actually exist. For instance, having atoms in your physical theory involves ontological commitments about a whole host of things, and whether or not they, in a sort of everyday word, exist as a different problem and not the problem of significance. So I guess I'm agreeing with you, Mark.
28:19 Mark: Yeah. And there are sentences that we understand that are going to make ontological commitments that we don't really mean, that we're sort of either being frivolous. Right. We're telling a story about Santa Claus, or we are talking about things that a properly scientific language would reduce, but yet we still think we understand each other. Right. The fact that I'm talking about meanings and you're talking about meanings, and we think we understand each other. Well, that right there sounds, you know, if we're going to say everything that you mentioned that makes the statement significant has an ontological commitment, then there would be linguistic meanings. But since Quine is obviously objecting to that, that's the wrong interpretation.
28:57 Seth: Yeah.
28:57 Matt: Example I sometimes like to use from this philosopher, Achille Varzi. There are two ways you might talk about kisses. So you might say, in the age we live in, Adam gave Steve a kiss. And when you look at that sentence and you look at the stuff we mentioned in the sentence, namely a kiss, it sounds like, oh, okay, we're committed to the existence of these things, namely kisses. But wait a minute, you could also paraphrase that sentence in a different way. You could say Adam kissed Steve. And in that sense you're just saying that, well, Adam and Steve stood in the kissing relation one to the other.
Or at least Adam stood in the kissing relation to Steve. Now there's no more thing that you're referring to in that paraphrase. The stuff that we're really ontologically committed to on Quine's picture is the stuff that can't be paraphrased away. The references to things or the mentionings of things that no matter how much we tinker with the way we express our thoughts, we can't, as it were, get rid of. And the way we got rid of kisses just now.
29:45 Mark: Yes, any well regulated scientific language, we would not have expressions such as giving kisses that imply ontological commitments that we don't really mean. It's okay for convenience for us to use that kind of talk as long as we understand how it is to be analyzed away. Thanks for listening to this episode preview. You can purchase a full episode at our store page. Get it by supporting us through Patreon or become a partially examined life citizen. We provide supporters with ad free access to our full catalog, including new exclusive content. Configure our Citizen feed to get it all beamed straight to your Apple or Android device. Learn more at partiallyexaminedlife. Com Support.
excellent
same experience as Wes. When I first read Quine I was sort of angry about it, partly because I resisted analytic philosophy for no apparent reason. I guess I thought they were smug in their own way. I didn’t know enough about philosophy of science or philosophy of language to know what I was talking about when I wrote papers. I reread it about a month ago and it was awesome, particularly because I read in conjunction with Peire Duhem’s paper Physical Theory and Experiment which propounds some similar ideas and predates Quine by a full fifty years (Duhem published his paper in french in 1906).
One philosopher which travels under the radar quite often is Arthur Fine. His Natural Ontological Attitude is an extremely good read. I bring it up because you guys have never done an episode which tackles the realism-antirealism-nonrealism debate directly. Obviously the issues get mentioned and covered as side issues but it would be great get a whole episode devoted to it. Fine represents the non-realist position and NOA would be the perfect article to read for the nonrealist position.
having no feel for the inner workings of mathematics this is a foreign language/orientation for me but my sense is that such analytic views seem to suffer from the kinds of disconnect/abstractions from actual practices/lives that limited progress in A.I. in ways that Hubert Dreyfus and others have pointed out.
have you folks covered the debates over the myth of the given or the scheme-content distinction?
This was the first time I streamed the show from a phone and it worked great. I feel as though I’ve now officially been inducted into the future.
At some point along the way it was remarked, ‘There has to be something more at stake here than just an aesthetic deficit.’
I think Quine’s role really will have been to perform a lot of the skeptical work that cleared out a space free of so much prior dogmatism which allowed for the introduction of Carnap’s style of a minimal formal ontology, but more importantly Searle’s demarcation between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image. Through which, all concepts produced by the manifest image conceivably can and should be pushed as a kind of focusing lens by way of the negatively discursive form of natural sciences. The reason we can’t leave it simply as a matter of totalizing affirmative language practices is because you still at least will never circumvent the (material) labor cost of conceptualization. This formal ontological dualism is the basis for any possible monist distinction to be made between that which is and that which is not.
I’m happy the point about the law of the excluded middle was shortly raised, as a lot of the problems addressed on this episode are symptomatic of beginning from some theoretic presupposition about which kind of logic we are certain to be working within. And in the same sense Quine would attack meaning as not necessarily being any specific kind of particular formal entity in order to be, we must give up on there being only one kind of logic in order for there to be logic at all – and this also possibly for reasons of political emancipation which would have eluded Quine in his time. Philosophy can be a radical project by treating paradoxes, exemplified in our society by what are often presented to be irreconcilable class differences, as being worth addressing as lived problems equally with ‘trivial’ clarificatory problems as it has historically reduced to.
There can’t be this absolute shared space of common sense in which we set aside all of our other recognized differences and reach a logically identical conclusion about some given things, this is the deception of liberal democracy that all voices are some how atleast being heard for exactly what they had intended to mean. But we know this is less the case today than it has ever been before, given a multitude of different communities, states, languages, and educational/technological barriers, and also the bewildering pace of expansion in the flow of information overall. All of our beliefs are disconnected and segregated, and this kind of divisive state of affairs inherent even at the level of nature is exactly that which necessitates the evolution of conceptualization in the first place.
Thanks to PEL I now know about Matt T.’s own podcast: what a great show! Especially enjoyed the Searle and Ted Cohen episodes.
Michael
This dude is talking 8-bit philosophy, wake up man, Deep Blue kicked Kasparov’s ass; logical correctness is passé. 😉
Excellent podcast, as always. It is very interesting to hear all these ideas volleyed around in your style.
I found Quine’s analysis of the problem of negative existentials inadequate. There is no need to rid ontology of fictional beings in the way that Russel’s definite description theory does, because the “problem of the being of nonbeing” is not actually paradoxical. When we speak of a fictional character or idea, there is always an existent referent: the sum total of the set of information making up what that fictional concept is (rotund, magical elf living at the North Pole, makes and delivers some of the presents which appear underneath the tree on Christmas morning, wears furry red winterwear, etc…). There is no ontological divide; whether we speak of fictional concepts or nonfictional concepts, we are always referencing groupings of information which exist. In the case of fictional characters, included in the information describing the character is the fact that the character is not someone you could find in the real world. It is understood that the character is the product of a human imagination, which can group any existent ideas into new concepts (e.g. what it would look like if a bird’s powers of flight were given to a full-sized horse), whether those concepts are possibly instantiable in the physical world or not.
I must say that the way ontology was approached by the 20th century analytic giants makes me a bit impatient, because it seems that the assumption on which their entire project is founded, that linguistic forms are the true lens through which ontology can be understood, is mistaken. This idea overestimates the power of language, as if the way we choose to speak about things could possibly change their ontological status. Anthropocentrizing ontology in this way is a grave error; the Universe existed and exists perfectly independently of how we try to interpret it; it did before we were here, it does now, and it will after we are gone. For this reason, the worry over whether certain linguistic forms make “ontological commitments” completely misses the point.
It is not the case that having a pristine logical language would give us a perfect understanding of ontology, because the fundamental problem of ontology does not ask “what is the logical structure of things which exist?”, it asks “what does it take for things (or for that matter, everything) to exist?” There is no reason to assume that conducting a perfect analysis of linguistic forms would give us insight into this question, because language is simply a method of describing what we find when we look out into existence. The logical relationships which language communicates exist prior to the slow development of language; in forming a language we are matching concepts to phenomena which already exist. At most, analyzing the logical form of language can give us the logical form of the existent objects and their relationships (which language’s logical forms mimic), but in itself it can never reveal why those relationships constitute the phenomena’s existence. This is not to say that the analytical project is valueless, only that it is ill suited to investigating the fundamental problem of ontology.
A much more successful approach is to leave aside the analyses of logical forms and approach the question directly: “What must it take for things to exist in the way that they do (obeying physical laws, embodying energy, instantiated in space and time, etc.)?” There is a book which follows this route to frame an understanding of ontology with great success, entitled The Fates Unwind Infinity. I want to give a brief summary of the ideas presented therein, beginning with its final conclusion and showing why it makes for a successful ontology. Forgive me for leaving out most of the arguments in favor of these assertions; what follows is presented much more carefully and methodically in the book.
—
Being can be understood in a monistic framework: all that exists is information. Such a statement may appear immediately suspect on first glance (what about matter? Mathematics? Logic? Consciousness?), but if its implications are fleshed out, it becomes clear that an information-based ontology is profoundly successful. Above, it was argued that fictional things are existent solely through embodying the information describing those things, and it is easy enough to see how this could be the case. Though the argument is a bit more nuanced, the same can be shown to be true for nonfictional things as well, that is, all the elements of existence we experience (including the four given above).
Any physical object we encounter in everyday life, for instance, a coffee cup, is comprised of physical energy bundled in various ways and abiding by the pertinent laws of physics. The information making up its form is encoded in the spatial relations between its constituent molecules, the information making up its spatial position in the Universe is encoded in its molecules’ spatial relationship with all other molecules (and all other possible spatial positions), and the information making up its temporal position is encoded in the chain of causality which brought those molecules from the big bang to the present moment. Its molecules similarly exist by virtue of the information which describes what those molecules are; the ways in which the energy bundled into those (and all) molecules can behave are dictated by the laws of physics. The information making up the property “repelled by equivalent electrical charge”, for instance, is an essential component of that energy’s existence, along with all other physical characteristics possessed by that energy.
The laws of physics themselves are informational in nature, built up from the logical necessities at the basis for Existence. Logical necessities are informational in nature as well, embodying exactly the content of what truths they represent and those truths’ logical consequences, and nothing else. At the very bottom of this hasty overview of the information-based ontology is the fundamental question, “if all that exists is information, what does it take for information to exist?”
The short answer is that information must be known in order for it to embody informational content. The triumph of this information-based ontology is that it makes this absolutely fundamental truth clear; the ontological basis for existence is Awareness, that which Knows information. Even with this additional insight, the monism described above holds; the existence of the Knower is entirely comprised of the information Known by the Knower. If there were nothing Known, there would be no Knower.
The entire Universe has existence solely through the informational content comprising its existence. This includes human consciousness; human (and all biological) awareness is a window through which the Knower looks into subjective, willful being. The fabric of consciousness, like the fabric of all things, is information. The informational modeling undergone by our neurons in response to stimuli (for example, the generation of a visual field from photonic impulses gathered by the retinas) represents a higher-tiered reproduction of the information gathered; the outside world is informationally reconstructed within the brain, and that informational model, like all information, has existence through being Known. We each experience a tiny little bubble of the Knower’s Knowing made up of the informational processing undergone by our neurons.
This has been an inordinately hasty overview of Chapters 2-5 of The Fates Unwind Infinity. The argument is far more nuanced and convincing in the actual body of the work, so give that a read if you want to better understand the nature of ontology, without slogging through fruitless syntactic analyses or convoluted logical frameworks. The heart of the matter is perfectly simple: to be is to embody information.
I think the term “vacuously” true is more standard than “trivially” true for the specific case of false antecedents.
Fair enough. Straying from the text into my misty memory is always risky…
Amazing content, but I do have one major issue that will change my listening style if it’s not addressed. I can’t stand commercials thrown into the middle of the podcast; it completely disrupts my train of thought and messes up the flow of the podcast. I already heard your commercials in the beginning, I know about PEL study group, donations, audible, etc..
You don’t need to marble your podcast with commercials, you have a discussion style podcast and layered commercials are awful for this format.
Take a look at the Joe Rogan podcast, now reaching a million+ listeners semi-weekly, he does a long commercial in the beginning, and then no more commercials for the rest of the podcast. He’s extremely successful and knows the business well.
You might contrast this commercial style with Smodcast or Sirius/XM’s talk shows where the content is superficial, and there’s lots of fart and dick jokes, so it’s easy to throw a commercial at the audience every 20 minutes without anyone losing their flow.
For your show, you really need an uninterrupted podcast. Come on guys, you can trust us to not “skip the commercials”, believe me, you have a great and loyal audience. I blog and fill up user generated content sites with with plugs for PEL, and I tell my friends, and I know of several ways to financially support you.
Please don’t make me have to edit your podcasts and translate all the commercials to the beginning. Thanks for your hardwork boys.
Thanks, Adam, obviously this is a point of ongoing consideration, as we’re new to the whole commercial thing.
The idea was that it’s two hours of audio, which works well to listen to half way, then take a break, then listen to the rest, meaning there’s space an hour in for commercials (and not marbled in every 20 minutes like a TV show or anything like that).
If we front-load the whole thing, I do think that new listeners will be turned off, but I have absolutely no evidence of this. I also see evidence that my giving the longer Not School update thing is very obviously getting more people to sign up for that, and given that it’s a vital part of the ongoing study project and not just a way to milk folks for cash, I don’t see a problem with including it, and am loathe to simply bury it in the last 5 minutes of the recording where it will undoubtedly then be tuned out completely by a significant portion of listeners (not to mention making it even less likely that people will listen all the way to my song at the end… I’m fine with people tuning that out, but don’t want to actually dissuade them from getting to it at all.).
Nonetheless, I’m glad to hear your opinion on this, and will weigh it with any others we receive as we figure out how to go forward with this.
Best,
-Mark
I appreciate your commercials and effort to support yourselves and this podcast. If you’re worried about plugs and time, maybe consider padding the front and back of the podcast with ads, but not the middle! Maybe consider organically including a break if you do want ads half in the middle, like you guys say, “break time!” and then come back to the discussion, so at least everyone is sync with the breaks.
My marbling analogy was brutal and comes from a fear of my beloved podcast changing and growing, forgive me! I can’t wait for you guys to get used to commercials and being podcast celebs 🙂
Good luck, I’m looking damn forward to the next episode!
-Adam
talking Bertrand Russell on BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p8fsr
To dmf’s point… I need someone to explain to me if and/or how this whole branch of philosophy is consequential to anyone outside of this branch of philosophy. The whole question of “What kind of metaphysics is compatible with science?” seems like a problem a career philosopher would come up with just so he could be the one to heroically solve it and ensure himself legendary status among Professional Philosophers. Call me simple-minded, but regular people have no problems discussing Pegasus… There is no point of contention. It seems like in the past, nit-picky, abstract philosophy was being conducted for the sake of understanding thought, wisdom, and humanity in the current social context… Descartes with the Renaissance, Kant and then Hegel with Enlightenment, Wittgenstein/Heidegger post-Age of Reason, etc. Quine seems to be doing philosophy for the sake of professional philosophy, and meanwhile down-to-earth people read these essays and suspect they must have been some kind of overwrought inside joke between Quine and his buddies. But before I jump to the conclusion that this is all just philosophical masturbation, maybe someone can give me an idea of the consequence Quine has had or might have on anything whatsoever! Thanks…
I normally try to avoid arguments where the intended conclusion is something like “you should appreciate this!”, but your post seemed to be sincerely inviting discussion. I actually don’t associate your style of objection with philosophers like Quine — look at his Wikipedia instead of his SEP page, for instance, and there is quite a bit about his contribution to computer science and mathematics. (I more readily understand [redacted]’s aversion to one of my personal favorites, David Lewis, than an aversion to Quine.)
But, why did his work on this “nit-picky” ontological stuff in particular make such a splash?
The question you wrote, “what kind of metaphysics is compatible with science?”, was not first asked by Quine, and I am sure many people feel that it is left unanswered. Insofar as we can say that fields of inquiry like Philosophy and Science aim to describe the same world, we might find it strange* if they NEVER converged and they continually seemed to be addressing wholly separate domains.
*Perhaps you don’t find it strange at all? If that is the case, and other people share this inclination, I would hope that there would me more people believing in the Aristotelian Theory of Celestial Bodies or Suhrawadi’s Cosmogony of Light with no regard for more recent developments in physics. Metaphysical pluralism sounds fantastic!
I thought the podcast described pretty well the issue of negative existentials like Pegasus or Santa Claus. I’ll add that part of the reason Pegasus is often used in these discussions is because the fact that Pegasus is non-actual is [relatively] uncontroversial. “Does Pegasus exist?” may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer to people without philosophical training, but if we were to plug in more contentious items like ’42’, ‘goodness’, ‘god’ and {42, good, god}, which aren’t readily recognizable as material, the stakes all of a sudden get very high.
Quine’s essays and your concept of philosophy as an attempt to achieve “understanding thought, wisdom, and humanity in the current social context” then become less radically different.
+ What is wrong with philosophical masturbation?
Congratulations on 2 million downloads!
You may have already had this brought to your attention but as for the identity of McX and Wyman in ‘On What There Is’, S. Paskin’s suspicion that they were intended to describe particular figures in philosophy is spot on. McX and Wyman are caricatures of the ontological positions held by the British Idealist John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (JME McTaggart) and the Austrian philosopher (proto-modal realist?) Alexius Meinong, respectively.
… Of course this info isn’t necessary in order to understand the essay and there may be many people in the history of philosophy who can be labeled crypto-McXs or -Wymans.
By the time Quine wrote this essay, I think these positions had largely fallen by the wayside (analytic philosophy was a violent response to the dominance of British Idealism and I believe Meinong’s position was idiosyncratic from the start).
Also, McTaggart was many *very interesting* things, but an “Irish Bastard” (to quote M. Linsenmayer) he was not. I am belaboring this because I hope that one day you guys will do an episode on the philosophy of time. McTaggart’s “The Unreality of Time” is still pretty widely read by people working on contemporary issues in the philosophy of physics. A fair amount of the modern terminology in that field was standardized/developed in that essay — though the issues it raises have since been given a more thorough treatment elsewhere.
I am sure you have a ton of episode ideas in the pipeline already, but one more can’t hurt… I hope.
Am I the only one who experienced Dylan being cut off at around 10 minutes as some surf rock song plays for a few seconds before returning to Mark in the middle of a sentence? Weird.
Criminy, I think that episode is haunted. For some reason that appears to have happened while converting the WAV to an mp3. I’ve replaced the version on the server with one that is at least clean of that particular glitch. Thanks for letting me know, Tim.