More on Quine, language and ontology
First, thanks all for participating in these discussions. I view my blog entries as a sort of reading club of one-plus. Basically, I’m putting up notes from readings and seeing who else has thoughts. Soon I’ll be able to do this in person, which will probably increase the quality of the posts you see. And perhaps diminish their frequency.
That said, Alan and Colin asked a few questions/made some comments in the last threads which I wanted to address:
1. The reference to “wits” was taken from the article “The Indispensibility of Translation in Quine and Davidson” and may reveal a misunderstanding on Johann-Glock’s part, perhaps? He states, “According to Quine, holding certain beliefs involves ontological commitments, the acknowledgement (sic) of the existence of certain entities. When we switch from ‘Betty is witty’ to ‘Betty possesses wit’ we imply that there is an attribute called ‘wit’, and hence must be prepared to countenance a certain kind of abstract entity.* Equally, according to Quine, no one should admit that there is a prime number between 2 and 5 unless he is prepared to countenance a Platonist realm of numbers.”
When I read this, having only read half of Word and Object and a couple of essays by Quine (not yet, sadly, “Ontological Relativity”, which it seems is a must-read**), I assumed this was a correct representation of his views. (Honestly, it struck me as rather odd…) The passage above says “equally, according to Quine”, which I read as meaning that the second statement was a paraphrase of Quine just as is the first. Perhaps that isn’t the case. I can’t make a judgment on that until I read a bit more. I did go back to some Davidson essays this afternoon, though, which are much more intelligible after reading Quine himself. There are still some bits for which I need more in-depth logical training, however.
2. On the ontology of “folk” - Colin wonders “Even if the average person believed in tables, does this matter to metaphysics?” and, two, “If people were more careful and critical in forming their ontological commitments, would the average person still believe in tables?”
So, on the first question, there are Peter Van Inwagen’s own words (he is an eliminativist about things like tables and statues): “any philosopher who denies what practically everyone believes is, so far as I can see, adopting a position according to which the human capacity for knowing the truth about things is radically
defective. And why should he think that his own capacities are the exception to the rule?” Because of this, there are attempts to make folk beliefs jive with the ontological conclusions of these denialist philosophers. That’s the primary concern of the workshop that I’m participating in at UT Austin in a few weeks.
The other approach, which is explaining how people get so wrong-headed about metaphysical things, seems more promising to me, but isn’t one that we’re spending much time on. It’s more interesting, too, especially given a parallel in the area of folk physics. Despite having some physics training, it appears that most people tend to answer basic questions about physics from an Aristotelian rather than a Newtonian perspective (the source for this is my recollection of studies in Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy). If it is unlikely that reflection will help the “average person” in that situation, I wonder how much help carefully forming ontological commitments would help in the case of tables and chairs. (Tangentially related is the difficulty of philosophers to form anything resembling a consensus in this area, in comparison to scientists–though that’s a separate discussion that I know Colin has had on his blog).
A similar point could be made for many of the “folk X’s”, like “folk philosophy of mind” and how we think/talk about consciousness.
3. Alan asks “Does a specifically evolutionary account of meaning any different from a neurophysiological account of meaning? Does the evolutionary story about how those neural mechanisms developed contribute anything essential to our understanding of how they work? And if not, why bring in evolution?” I’m still chewing on that and wonder out loud whether this might have any connection with Davidson’s distinction between the “proximal” and “distal” accounts of how observation sentences work in Quine. At least as I’m thinking out loud, the mirror neuron story told by certain scientists seems to try to bring together the two, so that by way of brain states (proximal) we are essentially sharing the stimulus of our interlocutor (distal). Whether, however, this is a peculiarly evolutionary account or just neurophysiological, I am not certain. It seems like evolutionary assumptions form a certain explanatory role in a neurophysiological description.
Davidson, by the way, as I recall in this article, claimed that the problem with the proximal account is that Quine is still prone to skeptical concerns about content, just as are the empiricists whose dogmas Quine himself challenged. At least as I recall (I’m sweltering too much in the Chicago humidity to get up and find the book from this afternoon!).
Anyway, here, too, I am reminded of the challenges of interpreting scientific results in the context of philosophy–not only understanding the science, but making the correct application to philosophical problems and not being too hasty to jump on bandwagons.
*As I re-read this, perhaps the biggest problem was my talk about “wits”, which might sound like I was implying that people are bound to believe in small, fuzzy things with feet (or whatever a “wit” might look like), not an abstract entity. Although “the existence of wits” doesn’t commit us to much, ontologically, I suppose–because I don’t know that we’d posit any kind of causal efficacy to wits themselves. Although, I suppose if we say “Betty got onto the wrong bus because she’d lost her wits,” there’s a sense in which we are? I would have to go back and look, but in the essays I read in philosophy of science (”Two Dogmas of Empiricism”?), I thought Quine made some point that physical things and abstract entities are similar posits.
**While I’m making tangential connections in this post, I’m curious what “must-reads” in philosophy you haven’t read (if you want to admit this on a public blog!), or are aware aren’t getting read. Naturally, choices have to be made and professors have to decide which seminal texts get the most focus. Perhaps another question, then, which I know has been asked many places before: what are the must-reads?
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:58 pm
On the “must-reads” that one hasn’t read: This makes me reflect on the status of texts in academic philosophy, as opposed to culture at large. In other words, asking a philosopher “What ‘great’ works haven’t you read” is quite a bit different from asking, say, a book critic, “What great novels haven’t you read?”
An obvious example: coming from many analytic philosophers, an acknowledgment of never having read Sein und Zeit is not at all a confession of a lacuna in one’s education, but an affirmation of one’s philosophical allegiances.
In addition to this sort of disdain and hostility, there’s a second reason many “classic” texts remain unread even by competent and well-trained philosophers: respect for their profundity and scope. It’s the attitude that “I’m not even going to crack this book open until I have five years to devote to it, because that’s what giving it a fair appraisal would require.”
With that said, it’s personal confession time: the previous paragraph pretty much sums up my attitude toward both Sein und Seit and Process and Reality.
And, more important for the conversation that’s going on on this blog: that’s been my attitude towards Nagarjuna, too, although it’s beginning to look like maybe it’s time to take the plunge.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Alan, good point! I was an English major as an undergraduate and I hadn’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses by the time I was graduating, so I spent finals week doing that (I wasn’t the best student in college…)
I’ve dipped into Process and Reality since I wrote my thesis on Whiteheadian views of time and Dharmakirti’s views, but I can’t say I read the entire thing.
Re: Nagarjuna–are you talking about taking the plunge in Sanskrit or in translation? If you’re serious about reading him, when I get to Austin, if I have time, perhaps we could do a mini-reading group? I’d still like to translate through the Vigrahavyavartaani, which is a short work…
August 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Colleen,
Apologies for the delay in responding.
Re the the Nagarjuna reading group: I think I should preface my response by pointing you to this, although in all probability you’ve seen it before. Which is by way of saying: do you really want to be starting any reading groups? Personally, I think “Start another reading group” should be added to “Read another book” on the list of “Simple Ways to Avoid the Stomach-Churning Agony . . . “, but that’s just me.
Seriously, if you’re up for it, let’s talk about it when you get to Austin.