On quine on carnap on ontology

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 102, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 93-122

  Alspector Kelly, M ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

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EID: 0042293250     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010353825006     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 203.
2. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1950), pp. 20-40
3. revised and reprinted as Supplement A in Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, 2nd Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). Subsequent references are to the latter.
4. W.V. Quine and Nelson Goodman, "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism" Journal of Symbolic Logic 12 (1947).
5. "W.V. Quine was the first to recognize the importance of the introduction of variables as indicating the acceptance of entities." ESO, fn. 3, p. 214.
6. "Internal questions and possible answers to them are formulated with the help of the new forms of expressions. The answers may be found either by purely logical methods or by empirical methods, depending upon whether the framework is a logical or factual one. An external question is of a problematic character which is in need of closer examination." ESO, p. 206.
7. See "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in Quine, From a Logical Point of View, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 46.
8. "Consider the question whether to countenance classes as entities. This, as I have argued elsewhere, is the question whether to quantify with respect to variables which take classes as values. Now Carnap has maintained that this is a question not of matters of fact but of choosing a convenient language form, a convenient conceptual scheme or framework for science. With this I agree, but only on the proviso that the same be conceded regarding scientific hypotheses generally. Carnap has recognized that he is able to preserve a double standard for ontological questions and scientific hypotheses only by assuming an absolute distinction between the analytic and the synthetic; and I need not say again that this is a distinction I reject." Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" p. 45.
9. "Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism." Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" p. 46.
10. London: Kegan Paul Trench, Trubner & Co., 1937, esp. Part V, "Philosophy and Syntax" (English translation and revision of Logische Syntax der Sprache, originally published in 1934.)
11. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, pp. 294-295.
12. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, Part V.
13. "What typifies the metaphysical cases is rather, according to an early doctrine of Carnap's, the use of category words, or Allwörter. It is meaningful to ask whether there are prime numbers between 10 and 20, but meaningless to ask in general whether there are numbers ...." Quine, "Existence and Quantification" in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 91.
14. "If I understand correctly, Carnap accepts my standard for judging whether a given theory accepts given alleged entities. The test is whether the variables of quantification have to include those entities in their range in order to make the theory true. Allow, of course, for a shudder between the word 'ontologicaF and the word 'commitment'." Quine, "On Carnap's Views of Ontology" p. 206.
15. "As seen, we can go far with physical objects. They are not, however, known to suffice ... we do need to add abstract objects, if we are to accommodate science as currently constituted.... Our tentative ontology for science, our tentative range of values for the variables of quantification, comes therefore to this: physical objects, classes of them, classes in turn of the elements of this combined domain, and so on up." Quine, "Scope and Language of Science" in Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, p. 244.
16. "We find philosophers allowing themselves not only abstract terms but even pretty unmistakable quantifications over abstract objects ... and still blandly disavowing, within the paragraph, any claim that there are such objects .... In our canonical notation of quantification, then, we find the restoration of law and order." Quine, Word and Object, pp. 241-242.
17. Quine, Word and Object, p. 275.
18. Quine, Word and Object, p. 275.
19. "In the foregoing paragraphs it has been urged that general terms have the virtue ... of letting us avoid or at least postpone the recognition of abstract entities as values of our variables of quantification. Some logicians, however, attach little value to such avoidance or postponement. This attitude might be explained in some cases by a Platonic predilection for abstract objects; not so in other cases, however, notably Carnap's. His attitude is rather that quantification over abstract objects is a linguistic convention devoid of ontological commitment; see his 'Empiricism, semantics, and ontology'." Quine, Methods of Logic, 3rd Ed. (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1972), p. 221. One can well imagine what Quine - for whom ontological commitment just is a matter of what one quantifies over - would think of this attitude.
20. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 271-273.
21. Quine, Word and Object, p. 272.
22. "Even the question whether there are classes, or whether there are physical objects, becomes a subclass question if our language uses a single style of variables to range over both sorts of entities. Whether the statement that there are physical objects and the statement that there are black swans should be put on the same side of the dichotomy, or on opposite sides, comes to depend on the rather trivial consideration of whether we use one style of variables or two for physical objects and classes." Quine, "On Carnap's Views on Ontology" p. 208.
23. Quine, "On Carnap's Views on Ontology" p. 211.
24. "Some Preliminaries to Ontology" Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 (1976), pp. 457-474.
25. "Carnap and Quine: Internal and External Questions" Erkenntnis 42 (1995), pp. 41-64.
26. "Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?" Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1998, pp. 229-262.
27. Haack, "Some Preliminaries to Ontology" p. 463.
28. ESO, p. 208.
29. Yablo, "Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?" p. 238.
30. Rudolf Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (Vol. XI of The Library of Living Philosophers'), Paul Arthur Schupp, ed. (La Salle: Open Court, 1963), p. 65.
31. Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" p. 65.
32. W.V. Quine and Nelson Goodman, "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism" p. 105.
33. Quine and Goodman, p. 105.
34. Quine and Goodman, p. 105.
35. Quine and Goodman, p. 106. They continue: "It is fortified, moreover, by certain a posteriori considerations." It would seem that the preceding intuition is a priori. And, since Quine is a co-author, it is not analytic. It is also worth noting an indication that their distaste for abstracta has empiricist origins: "[E]ven when a brand of empiricism is maintained which acknowledges repeatable sensory qualities as well as sensory events, the philosophy of mathematics still faces essentially the same problem that it does when all universals are abandoned. Mere sensory qualities afford no adequate basis for the unlimited universe of numbers, functions, and other classes claimed as values of the variables of classical mathematics" (pp. 105-106).
36. ESO, p. 205.
37. ESO, p. 205.
38. ESO, p. 205.
39. "It is hoped that the clarification of the issue will be useful to those who would like to accept abstract entities in their work in mathematics, semantics, or any other field; it may help them to overcome nominalistic scruples." ESO, pp. 205-206.
40. Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" p. 66.
41. Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" p. 65.
42. ESO, p. 221.
43. "Many philosophers regard a question of this kind [whether to admit a framework] as an ontological question which must be raised and answered before the introduction of the new language forms." ESO, p. 214.
44. ESO, p. 217.
45. "Here is an important question which you must answer in order to make your conception clearly understandable: What is the nature of questions like: 'Are there classes (properties, propositions, real numbers, etc.)?' and of the true answers to them? You call them ontological & even frankly metaphysical. I suppose this means you regard them neither as analytic (purely logical) nor as empirical. Are they then synthetic a priori, so that you abandon empiricism? Or what else? More specifically, what is the method of establishing their truth? Supposedly neither purely log. analysis nor the scientific method of confirmation by observation. Perhaps Kant's transcendental analysis or Husserl's 'Wesensschau'?" Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work, Richard Creath, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Carnap to Quine, 1945-10-23, p. 387.
46. Quine responded that he was "not satisfied that a clear general distinction has yet been drawn between analytic and synthetic." Creath, Dear Carnap, Dear Van, Quine to Carnap, 1947-5-1, p. 409. But this is beside the point of Carnap's question. Carnap was worried that calling such issues ontological "and even frankly metaphysical" looks like an endorsement of synthetic a priori, first-philosophical inquiry, and he wanted to know if this was what Quine took himself to be doing. If Quine had assured Carnap that he did not mean to suggest that the synthetic a priori metaphysical project should be reinstated, instead of focusing his sights on Carnap's mention of analyticity, perhaps reconciliation between them would have ensued.
47. ESO, p. 214.
48. ESO, p. 214.
49. Yablo, "Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?" p. 239.
50. Yablo, "Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?" p. 239.
51. Quine, "On Carnap's Views of Ontology" p. 211.
52. "To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it .... Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe .... What reality is like is the business of scientists, in the broadest sense, painstakingly to surmise; and what there is, what is real, is part of that question. The question how we know what there is is simply part of the question ... of the evidence for truth about the world. The last arbiter is so-called scientific method, however amorphous." Quine, Word and Object, pp. 22-23.
53. "I maintained that what was needed for science was merely the acceptance of a realistic language, but that the thesis of the reality of the external world was an empty addition to the system of science." Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" p. 46.
54. Quine, "Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis" From a Logical Point of View, p. 79.
55. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, p. 43.
56. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, p. 43.
57. "It would be important to investigate what can and what cannot be expressed in a nominalistic language of a specified form, and, in particular, whether and how sentences of certain kinds containing abstract variables are translatable into sentences of the nominalistic language. Interesting results have emerged from investigations by Quine, Tarski, Goodman, Richard Martin, and others." Carnap, "Replies and Systematic Expositions" in Schilpp, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p. 872.
58. "True, my 1947 paper with Goodman opened on a nominalist declaration; readers cannot be blamed [for assuming that Quine was always a nominalist]. For consistency with my general attitude early and late, that sentence needs demotion to the status of a mere statement of conditions for the construction in hand." Quine, Word and Object, p. 243, fn 5.
59. See, for example, "Existence and Quantification"
60. Quine, "Designation and Existence" Journal of Philosophy 36 (1939), pp. 701-709.
61. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 236-237. "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism" was published eight years after "Designation and Existence" Quine seems not to have yet recognized the "dwindling" role of intuition in naturalized ontology when he co-authored "Steps"
62. Quine, "On Carnap's Views of Ontology" p. 204.
63. Quine, "On Carnap's Views of Ontology" p. 204.
64. "Your word 'ontology' definitely suggests Ib [the sense of 'exist' in its nonscientific, metaphysical sense]. If you do not mean this, I should advise strongly against its use. Or, at the least, you should add a remark to the effect that it is meant in the sense of la [use of 'exist' in its ordinary, scientific sense] ...." Creath, Dear Carnap, Dear Van, Carnap to Quine, 1945-10-12, p. 385.
65. "Quine has repeatedly pointed out the important fact that, if we wish to find out what kind of entities somebody recognizes, we have to look more at the variables he uses than the closed compound expressions ... I am essentially in agreement ... But ... I wish to indicate a doubt concerning Quine's formulation; I am not quite clear whether the point raised is not perhaps of a merely terminological nature." Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, p. 42.
66. Quine, "On What There Is" p. 19.
67. Creath, Dear Carnap, Dear Van, Carnap to Quine, 1949-8-15, p. 415.
68. "With respect to the basic attitude to take in choosing a language form (an 'ontology' in Quine's terminology, which seems to me misleading), there appears now to be agreement between us: 'the obvious counsel is tolerance and an experimental spirit' ...." ESO, fn. 5, p. 215.
69. "I have the impression that, among empiricists today, there is no longer strong opposition to abstract entities, either in semantics or in any field of mathematics or empirical science. In particular, Quine has recently taken a tolerant, pragmatistic attitude which seems close to my position." Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography" p. 67.
70. Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 1.
71. Field, Science Without Numbers, p. 2.