Quantifier variance and realism

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Volumn 36, Issue SUPPL., 2002, Pages 51-73

  Hirsch, Eli ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34248735220     PISSN: 00294624     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-0068.36.s1.2     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Hilary Putnam, "The Question of Realism" in Words and Life (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. , 1994), pp. 304-305.
2. Hilary Putnam, "Truth and Convention: On Davidson's Refutation of Conceptual Relativism", Dialectica, Vol. 41 (1987), 69-77, at p. 71.
3. "Truth and Convention", pp. 70 ff.
4. Subject to a slight qualification to be made later.
5. John Wisdom, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969).
6. Ernest Sosa's "existential relativity" has it that things exist relative to conceptual schemes, but Sosa takes great pains to disassociate himself from the idealist claim that language or thought literally creates things. An important question considered in Sosa's discussion, which I'm bypassing here, is how "far down" quantifier variance can go. See Ernest Sosa, "Existential Relativity", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 22 (1999), and my "Sosa's Existential Relativism", forthcoming in the Blackwell volume on Sosa and His Critics.
7. So the doctrine need not prevent us from agreeing with Thomas Nagel's claim in The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1986), p. 98: "We can speak of 'all the things we can't describe', 'all the things we can't imagine', 'all the things humans can't conceive of, and finally, 'all the things humans are constitutionally incapable of ever conceiving'. "
8. I am perhaps making some sort of controversial assumption here related to the inscrutability of reference, or better put, the scrutability of non-reference, for it might be questioned whether some kind of ingenious reference scheme assigning a reference to "touching" might somehow do the trick. I'm quite sure that this is impossible, but perhaps I should limit myself to saying more cautiously that I don't see what such a scheme could be. See, further, my Dividing Reality (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1993), pp. 102-109
9. and my "Objectivity Without Objects" in the Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Epistemology, Vol. 5 (Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University, 2000).
10. There may yet be a sense in which the qualities (features, points of similarity) signified by general words remain the same despite quantifier variance. I am leaving a number of questions open here.
11. This seems to be Putnam's assumption in "Truth and Convention. " See Donald Davidson, "On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, London, 1984).
12. In other words, they have the same "character" in the sense of David Kaplan, "Demonstratives" in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. K. Wettstein, eds. , Themes from Kaplan (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1989).
13. See Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.
14. See Thomas Nagel's criticism of Davidson in The View from Nowhere, pp. 94-98.
15. "The Question of Realism", p. 305.
16. See George Bealer, Quality and Concept (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1982), pp. 181-187
17. and David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Basil Blackwell Ltd, N. Y. , 1986), p. 56. It must be borne in mind that I have defined the notion of "truthconditions " - and consistently use it here - in the coarse-grained unstructured sense.
18. "Truth and Convention", p. 72.
19. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, 38.
20. I allude casually here to Carnapian tolerance because Putnam mentions it. I am not seriously discussing or defending Carnap's own thinking on these matters. He seemed to imply that realists ought to "tolerate" phenomenalists, which I think is out of the question for reasons that go beyond the present discussion. See Rudolph Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956).
21. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. , 1960), p. 261.
22. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford University Press, London, 1962), p. 8.
23. The notion of sortal-dependence has been introduced to contemporary philosophy by Wiggins's seminal work, but I cannot tell what his attitude is towards quantifier variance. See David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. , 1980).
24. I discuss sortal-dependence in The Concept of Identity (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1982), especially chs. 2 and 3
25. and "Basic Objects: A Reply to Xu", Mind and Language, Vol. 12, 3 (1997), 406-412.
26. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, p. 3.
27. A variation of Lewis's argument, with convincing arguments that there must be examples of the relevant kind of indeterminateness, is given in Theodore Sider, "Four Dimensionalism", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 106, no. 2, 197-231.
28. But the argument I am about to go through would be unaffected if we accepted instead Williamson's epistemic view of vagueness. Lewis and Williamson agree that, for the quantifier to be vague, it must admit of different "interpretations". The argument is unaffected by whether these interpretations are taken to be different possible "precisifications", as in Lewis, or different guesses (which we can't verify) about the one correct interpretation, as in Williamson. See Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (Routledge, London, 1994), especially pp. 164, 237, 257-258.
29. An argument similar to Lewis's, but somewhat more difficult to unravel, stems from the vagueness of identity sentences. Such an argument is given in Sydney Shoemaker, "On What There Are", Philosophical Topics, 16 (1988).
30. I try to show why that argument doesn't work, appealing in effect to quantifier variance, in my "The Vagueness of Identity", Philosophical Topics, 26 (1999).
31. For the uninitiated, who may possibly think that at least in this example I am tilting at windmills, the example actually expresses the position defended in Peter van Inwagen's extremely influential Material Beings (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N. Y. , 1990).
32. Philosophical Investigations, I, 122.
33. J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses", in Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, London, 1961). It goes without saying that we need not be sympathetic to everything that went under the name "ordinary language philosophy. "
34. Lewis often presents his methodology as involving this kind of balancing. See, for example, Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Oxford University Press, N. Y. , 1983), p. x
35. and On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 134-135.
36. See G. E. Moore, "A Defense of Common Sense", p. 41
37. and "Four Forms of Scepticism", p. 222
38. both in Philosophical Papers (Collier Books, N. Y. , 1962).
39. See also Ned Markosian, "Brutal Composition", Philosophical Studies 92 (1998), 211-249.
40. See his "Radical Interpretation", in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I.
41. Because to say that a shape is intrinsic might mean intuitively that a thing's having a certain shape at a certain time does not depend on how it is related to other things at that time.
42. In Dividing Reality I sought to uncover some general constraints that would make it impossible for a natural language to diverge (too much) from the taken-at-face-value semantic structure of English. My conclusion in that book was that no interesting constraints seem to be defensible. Had the sought-after constraints emerged, although they would certainly have allowed some forms of quantifier variance (in particular, the quantifier variance involved in quantifier vagueness, and that involved in sortal-dependence), they may have implied that either Lewish or Inwagish is not a possible language. An argument for the impossibility of Shmenglish would have to move in the opposite direction: to show that the taken-at-face-value semantic structure of English is not a possibility. In responding to an earlier version of my argument from Shmenglish a few years ago, Sider in fact held that Shmenglish is not a possible language (because, very roughly, its quantifier fails to correspond to the world's logical joints). (See, further, the Introduction to Theodore Sider, Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time [Oxford University Press, forthcoming]. ) Will that, I wonder, be the deep ontologist's standard response to my question?