Quinus ab omni nævo vindicatus

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 27, Issue , 1997, Pages 25-65

  Burgess, John P ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85063703054     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1997.10715961     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. This paper is a completely rewritten version of an unpublished paper, ‘The Varied Sorrows of Modality, Part II.’ I am indebted to several colleagues for information used in writing that paper, and for advice given on it once written, and I would like to thank them all—Gil Harman, Dick Jeffrey, David Lewis—even if the portions of the paper with which some of them were most helpful have disappeared from the final version. But I would especially like to thank Scott Soames, who was most helpful with the portions that have not disappeared.
2. Hintikka, J., 1982. ‘Is Alethic Modal Logic Possible?’. Acta Philosophica Fennica, 35: 89–105., opening paragraph. In context it is clear this is a description, not an endorsement, of a widespread impression.
3. 1947. From a Logical Point of View,: 97–113. The most important of Quine's presentations is ‘Reference and Modality,’ in (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, three editions, 1953, 1961, 1980). Citations of this twice-revised work here will be by internal section and paragraph divisions, the same from edition to edition. This work supersedes the earlier ‘The Problem of Interpreting Modal Logic,’ Journal of Symbolic Logic12 43–8. For commentary see Linsky, editor's introduction to Reference and Modality (Oxford: University Press 1971), and ‘Reference, Essentialism, and Modality,’ therein 88–100. See also D. Føllesdal, ‘Quine on Modality,’ in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, eds., Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine (Dordrecht: Reidel 1969), 175–85; and ‘Essentialism and Reference,’ in L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (La Salle: Open Court 1986)
4. 1947. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11: 95–6. A theme in his reviews in the (1946) 96–7 and 12
5. See the last paragraph of the third section of ‘Reference and Modality,’ ending: “. for if we do not propose to quantify across the necessity operator, the use of that operator ceases to have any clear advantage over merely quoting a sentence and saying that it is analytic.
6. Contrast the opening section of ‘Reference and Modality,’ on knowledge and belief contexts, with the antepenultimate paragraph of the paper, beginning: “What has been said in these pages relates only to strict modality.
7. 1962. The Development of Logic Oxford: Clarendon Press. For a contemporary account deploring such tendencies, see W. Kneale and M. Kneale, 628ff. Such tendencies are exemplified by the usage of all the participants in the exchange discussed in section II below.
8. The Philosophical Review, 7873–87. For a less rough formulation, see Parsons, ‘Essentialism and Quantified Modal Logic,’ 35–52, reprinted in Linsky
9. 1947. Journal of Symbolic Logic, S4 It may be worth digressing to mention that Quine's one and only contribution to the formal side of modal logic occurred in connection with this law, though the history does not always emerge clearly from textbook presentations. The earliest derivations of the law took an old-fashioned approach on which identity is a defined second-order notion, and on such an approach the derivation was anything but straightforward, and only went through for systems at least as strong as the second-strongest Lewis system Quine was one of the first to note that on a modern approach with identity a primitive first-order notion, the derivation becomes trivial, and goes through for all systems at least as strong as the minimal normal system K. This is alluded to in passing in the penultimate paragraph of the third section of ‘Reference and Modality.’ For the original presentation see R. Barcan (Marcus), ‘Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order,’ 12 3–23. For a modern textbook presentation see G. E. Hughes and M. J. Creswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic (London: Methuen 1968), 190.
10. Gabbay, D., and Guenthner, F., eds. 1984. Handbook of Philosophical Logic 249–308. Reidel: Dordrecht. In the original paper where (17) was derived there were no singular terms but variables, and nothing was said about application to natural language. For an idea of the range of options formally available, see the taxonomy in J. Garson, ‘Quantification in Modal Logic,’ in II
11. Shahan, R. W., and Swoyer, C., eds. 1979. ‘De Re See Ackerman, Prepositional Attitudes Toward Integers/in Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Lectures of Kripke have brought this formerly underappreciated paper to the attention of a wider audience. See also S. Shapiro, ed., Intensional Mathematics (Amsterdam: North Holland 1985); and especially G. Boolos, The Logic of Provability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), xxxiv and 226.
12. Workers in the cited fields have in effect suggested that something like indices can serve as canonical terms for more fine-grained intensional analogues of recursive sets and functions. But these too would be very special objects. The best discussion of these matters known to me is in some papers of Leon Horsten still at the time of this writing ‘forthcoming.’
13. 1963. Acta Philosophical Fennica, 16: 65–82. Whose published proceedings make up one issue of and include not only Kripke's ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,’ 83–94, but also Hintikka's ‘Modes of Modality,’
14. Davidson, D., and Harman, G., eds. 1970. Semantics of Natural Language Reidel: Dordrecht. ‘Naming and Necessity: Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January,’ in 1972), 253–355 and 763–9; reprinted with a new preface (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1980).
15. 1946. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11 ‘Modalities and Quantification,’ 33–64; Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1947).
16. 1947. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12: 139–41.; with elaboration in his paper ‘Modality and Description,’ Journal of Symbolic Logic13 (1948) 31–7. Smullyan's priority for his particular response to Quine has been recognized by all competent and responsible commentators. See note 15 in Linsky, ‘Reference, Essentialism, and Modality,’ and Føllesdal, ‘Quine on Modality,’ 183.
17. Wartofsky, M. W., ed. Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1961/1962 Reidel: Dordrecht. Thus the items are: (i) the compendium, ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’; (ii) the ‘Comments’ later retitled ‘Reply to Professor Marcus’; and (iii) the edited ‘Discussion.’ They appear together in the official proceedings volume, 1963), 77–96 (compendium), 97–104 (commentary), 105–16 (edited discussion). The same publisher had printed them in 1962 in Synthese in a version that is textually virtually identical down to the placement of page breaks, (i) and (ii) in a belated issue of the volume for 1961, and (iii) in an issue of the volume for 1962. (There have been several later, separate reprintings of the different items, but these incorporate revisions, often substantial.) Two of the present editors of Synthese, J. Fetzer and P. Humphreys, have proposed publishing the unedited, verbatim transcript of the discussion, with a view to shedding light on some disputed issues of interpretation; but according to their account, one of the participants, Professor Marcus, has objected to circulation of copies of the transcript or the tape.
18. Evans, G., and McDowell, J., eds. 1976. Essays in Semantics 399–413. Oxford: Oxford University Press. These are the closing words of Kripke, ‘Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?’ in. The fallacy recurs again and again in other contexts in the literature. See B. J. Copeland, ‘On When a Semantics Is Not a Semantics: Some Reasons for Disliking the Routley-Meyer Semantics for Relevance Logic,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic8 (1979)
19. Gabbay, D., and Guenthner, F., eds. 1984. Handbook of Philosophical Logic Reidel: Dordrecht. Notably the Barcan or Carnap-Barcan formulas, which give formal expression to F. P. Ramsey's odd idea that whatever possibly exists actually exists, and whatever actually exists necessarily exists. (The ‘Barcan’ label is the more customary, the ‘Carnap-Barcan’ label the more historically accurate according to N. Cocchiarella, ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Quantification in Tense and Modal Logic,’ in II 309–53, which also explains the connection with Ramsey.) If these formulas are rejected, one must distinguish a thing's having a property necessarily (for every possible world it exists there and has the property there) from its having the property essentially (for every possible world, if it exists there, then it has the property there). I have slurred over this distinction so far, and will for the most part continue to do so.
20. 1995. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 36 As shown by examples in the opening section of ‘Reference and Modality.’ This point seems to be conceded even by some who otherwise take an uncritically positive view of the compendium, as in the review by G. Forbes, 336–9. The last sections of ‘Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?’ in effect point out that the claim that the ordinary language ‘there is’ in its typical uses is a ‘substitutional quantifier’ devoid of ‘ontological commitment’ is absurd, since ‘ontological commitment’ is by definition whatever it is that the ordinary language ‘there is’ in its typical uses conveys.
21. “What I've been talking about is quantification, in a quantificational sense of quantification, into modal contexts, in a modal sense of modality,” Wartofsky, 116
22. 1967. Noûs, 1 ‘Essentialism in Modal Logic,’ 90–6. And about the same time we find even the usually acute Linsky (editorial introduction, 9) writing: “Terence Parsons bases his search for the essentialist commitments of modal logic on Kripke's semantics, and he comes up (happily) empty-handed. He finds modal logic uncontaminated.” The continuation of this passage better agrees with Parsons’ own account of his work and its bearing on Quine's critique.
23. See Wartofsky, 90–2. It is just conceivable that this is deliberate exaggeration for effect, a rhetorical flourish rather than a serious exegetical hypothesis. ‘Essentialism in Modal Logic’ cites some other authors who have written in a similar vein about the example.
24. And “I did not say that it could ever be deduced in the S-systems or any systems I've ever seen,” Wartofsky, 113. Despite these forceful remarks, the understanding of Quine's views has not much improved in the later ‘Essentialism in Modal Logic.’
25. 1960. Mind, 69 An earlier paper by the author of the compendium, ‘Extensionality,’ 55–62, reprinted in Linsky, ed., gives a more concise statement of the response in its last paragraph, where a footnote acknowledges the author's teacher Frederic Fitch. The latter, in his ‘The Problem of the Morning Star and the Evening Star,’ Philosophy of Science16 (1949) 137–41, and ‘Attribute and Class,’ in M. Farber, ed., Philosophic Thought in France and the United States (Buffalo: University Press 1950), 640–7, acknowledges Smullyan. (See footnote 4 in the former, footnote 12 in the latter, and the text to which they are attached.)
26. Klibansky, R., ed. 1967. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. I, New York: MacMillan. The major one being P. Weiss, ed., six volumes, and the minor one the collection of survey articles, Contemporary Philosophy, four volumes (Firenze: Editrice Nuova Italia 1968). The former contains Prior, ‘Logic, Modal,’ V 5–12; while the latter contains Marcus, ‘Modal Logic,’ 87–101. The conference talks are to be found in the previously cited proceedings, Marcus’ ‘Classes and Attributes in Extended Modal Systems,’ 123–36, and Prior's ‘Is the Concept of Referential Opacity Really Necessary?,’ 189–99. Another advocate of closely related ideas has been J. Myhill.
27. 1985. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism 113–5. La Salle: Open Court. Let me not fail to cite chapter and verse myself. For the most relevant pages of the most recently reprinted work, see
28. 1969. Reply to Sellare, in Davidson and Hintikka, 338. This formulation is the earliest adequate one known to me, the rebuttal even in the 1961 version of ‘Reference and Modality’ being inadequate.
29. As was pointed out in Kripke's last few remarks in the discussion at the colloquium. Quine seems to accept the observation in his last remark. Marcus had apparently ceased to follow by this point.
30. Fitch, ‘The Problem of the Morning Star and the Evening Star,’ explicitly claims that Quine's contention is “clearly” false if the key expression are taken to be names.
31. 1960. Prior, ‘Is the Concept of Referential Opacity Really Necessary?,’ 194–5. Prior was from Balliol, and I have heard it asserted—though I cannot confirm it from my own knowledge—that there was a tradition of setting examples of this kind on undergraduate examinations at Oxford in the s.
32. ‘Classes and Attributes in Extended Modal Systems,’ 132. Note the characteristically Carnapian expression “meaning postulates.
33. For the published version, too familiar to bear quoting again, see Wartofsky, 115. This is one of the parts of the discussion where comparison with the verbatim transcript could be most illuminating. It is a shame that the scholarly public should be denied access to so significant an historical document.
34. Wartofsky, 83–4. This passage has sometimes been misleadingly cited in the later literature as if it were unambiguously about ordinary names in ordinary language.
35. Wartofsky. 115101 Quine surely means that (12a’) is not just a linguistic empirical discovery but a properly astronomical empirical discovery. By contrast, Marcus in Wartofsky, distinguishes “such linguistic” inquiry as leads to discoveries like (12a’) from “properly empirical” methods such as lead to discoveries about orbits.
36. Cohen, R. S., and Wartofsky, M. W., eds. 1965. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science New York: Humanities Press. The quotation from Quine is from ‘Reference and Modality,’ antepenultimate paragraph. The work of Føllesdal where it is quoted is ‘Quantification into Causal Contexts,’ in II 263–74; reprinted in Linsky, ed., 52–62. Føllesdal's final footnote suggests that “causal essentialism” is better off than “logical essentialism,” and that Quine's own proposal to treat dispositions as inhering structural traits of objects is a form of “causal essentialism.
37. Klibansky. 91ff. This echoes Fitch, ‘Attribute and Class,’ where it is said (553) that: “Smullyan has shown that there is no real difficulty if the phrase [sic] ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ are regarded either as proper names or as descriptive phrases in Russell's sense.” The syntactic ambiguity in this last formulation as to whether “in Russell's sense” is supposed to modify “proper names” as well as “descriptive phrases” matches the ambiguity in the formulation quoted earlier as to whether “Russellian” is supposed to modify “the distinction between proper names and descriptions” as well as “theory of descriptions.” The ambiguity is appropriate, since the theory of names in question is neo-Russellian.
38. Though this may not yet have been made clear at the time the encyclopedia article was written, since the formulation of the rebuttal I have quoted dates from two years later.
39. 1961. Referential Opacity and Modal Logic, 32 See Follesdal, §17,96ff. of doctoral dissertation, Harvard, reprinted as Filosofiske Problemer (Oslo: Universitets- forlaget 1966). Church, review in the Journal of Symbolic Logic 15 (1950) 63. Both address Smullyan and Fitch.
40. 1960. For work on difficulties with the Fregean theory in the 1950s and early s, see the discussion in ‘Naming and Necessity,’ and J. Searle's article on ‘Proper Names and Descriptions’ in Weiss, VI 487–91. The doctrines in ‘Naming and Necessity’ were first presented in seminars in 1963–64, and whereas that work apologizes for being spotty in its coverage of the literature of the succeeding years, it is pretty thorough in its discussion of the relevant literature (work of P. Geach, P. Strawson, P. Ziff, and others) from the immediately preceding years. (Searle discusses work of yet another contributor, Elizabeth Anscombe.)
41. 1989. Realism, Mathematics and Modality Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In, chapter 3. Field also cites several expressions of the same or related views from the earlier literature, and such citations could in a sense be carried all the way back to the ‘principle of predication’ in G. H. von Wright, An Essay in Modal Logic (Amsterdam: North Holland 1951).
42. 1990. Entities and Indices Dordrecht: Kluwer. In. Cresswell also cites several expressions of the same or related views from the earlier literature, and such citations could in a sense be carried all the way back to D. K. Lewis, ‘Anselm and Actuality,’ Nous 4 (1970) 175–88. This is the earliest relevant publication known to me, but its author has suggested that there was very early unpublished work on the topic by A. P. Hazen and by D. Kaplan. The parallel phenomenon for tense in place of mood was noted even earlier by P. Geach.
43. 1967. Past, Present, and Future Vol. S5, Oxford: Clarendon Press. See Prior, chapter VII, and among later work R. H. Thomason, ‘Combinations of Tense and Modality,’ in Gabbay and Guenthner, 135–65. The purely modal part is also for virtually all the workers there cited, as well as later ones like A. Zanardo.
44. Rescher, N., ed. 1968. Studies in Logical Theory Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ‘A Theory of Conditionals,’ in 98–112. This feature becomes even more prominent in later work on the same topic by D. K. Lewis and others.
45. 1977. Names and Descriptions 502–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Unfortunately this comes in the form of a review of a book by a third party, and is subject to the limitations of such a form. The third party is Linsky; the book is his; the review is by Marcus, Philosophical Review87 497–504. The three quotations to follow come from 498, 501, and
46. In this connection mention may be made of one serious historical inaccuracy—of a kind extremely common when authors quote themselves from memory decades after the fact—to be found in the book review, where it is said that the compendium maintained “that unlike different but coreferential descriptions, two proper names of the same object were intersubstitutable in modal contexts” (502). In actual fact, in the compendium it is repeatedly asserted that two proper names of the same object are intersubstitutable in all contexts.
47. 1986. Frege's Puzzle 133–53. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press. While the early Marcus followed Smullyan, the later Marcus has developed in response to Kripke an idiosyncratic theory that may be described as intermediate in degree of Russellianism between Salmon's and Smullyan's. See her ‘Some Revisionary Proposals about Belief and Believing,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research50 (Supplement)
48. For Kripke's rejection of this view, see the closing paragraphs of the preface to the second edition of ‘Naming and Necessity.’
49. Bull, R. A., and Segerberg, K., ‘Basic Modal Logic,’ in Gabbay and Guenthner, 1- 88. Other articles in the same work, some of which I have already cited, do recognize the importance of the distinction.
50. 1997. A Subject with No Object Oxford: Oxford University Press. It would be out of place to enter into technicalities here. See J. Burgess and G. Rosen,.
51. In actual fact, on Kripke's theory, for instance, a name can be given to any object that can be described, not excluding mathematical objects. But again see Burgess and Rosen. (The theory of R Geach probably deserves and the theory of M. Devitt certainly deserves the label ‘causal,’ and does have nominalistic implications.)
52. 1995. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 46: 267–74. For comparatively moderate instance see the review by S. Lavine
53. 1995. Synthese, 104 For an extreme instance see J. Hintikka and G. Sandu, ‘The Fallacies of the New Theory of Reference,’ 245–83. This work acknowledges no important differences among: (i) the neo-Russellian theory of Smullyan as expounded by the early Marcus (which incidentally is erroneously attributed to Marcus as something original, ignoring the real authors Smullyan and Russell); (ii) theories adopted in reaction to Kripke by the later Marcus; and (iii) the theory of Kripke.
54. In context, what is said to be right is specifically the rebuttal to Smullyanism on names quoted earlier. See ‘Naming and Necessity,’ 305.