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Quine at 100 (J. Stanley)

Jason Stanley

A few weeks ago, I gave a short talk at a conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of W.V. Quine. Each of us had less than 10 minutes to speak. My purpose was two-fold. First, I wanted to write something that would be accessible to philosophically interested humanists not in philosophy. Secondly, I wanted to make it clear that philosophers have not been logical positivists for quite some time.

I’ve opened comments, not in search of criticism, but to give people the opportunity to say what they think of Quine’s influence on philosophy, right after the 100th anniversary of his birth.

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20 responses to “Quine at 100 (J. Stanley)”

  1. Daniel Harris

    I agree with a generalization of your conclusion, to the effect that philosophy could often use more and better PR, both directed toward other academic fields and toward the public. There are many potential benefits of having the field be better-understood. (See, for example, the second-to-last paragraph of Paul Boghossian's article on the Sokal Affair: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html).

    But, perhaps more importantly for the discipline, this kind of PR could go a long way toward helping to avoid any more issues like the recent one at the university of Florida. It seems that no university would ever cut funding in that way to a physics program, in large part because physics has gotten fantastic PR from popularizers like Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman in the last few decades. Think of what good could be done for philosophy by the philosophical equivalent of "A Brief History of Time".

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  2. Tomáš Sobek

    You neglect to mention that Quinean naturalism is the return to logical psychologism. 🙂

    Reply
  3. AndyK

    Though some might disagree with his self-identification as a "pragmatist" in the Dewey-Peirce mode, I think the revival of that methodology is partly attributable to Quine. A recurrent theme in his work is the elimination of useless formal categories in favor of holism.

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  4. DT

    As a philosophically interested humanist not in philosophy, I'm right in your target audience. I was pretty surprised, though, by your suggestion that Quine's great achievement was to make the world safe for contemporary metaphysics. My own (cursory, humanistic) acquaintance with the text led me to think that he was solidly anti-metaphysical … embracing that aspect of the positivist ethos, if not the justification for it.

    If I could venture an opinion, Quine's holism may have been in tension with his scientific spirit. Like it or not, scientists tend to be anti-holists, at least in practice: they formulate precise little hypotheses, and then run very specific little experiments to test them. Once you decide that our sentences stand the test of experience as a corporate body, then there's a temptation to get sloppy, and simply *assert* that (or propose relatively bogus arguments to the effect that) the best set of sentences contains "possible worlds are real" or "there are no large objects" or "space is gunky." You can say that this is just science writ large, but to those of us on the outside it seems pretty different.

    In any case, reading Quine I get the impression he was groping toward something more like experimental philosophy, rather than Rutgers-style metaphysics.

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  5. Alex Leibowitz

    I would not in general be wont to call philosophers a good influence, and in Quine's case I will make no exception.

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  6. Jason Stanley

    DT,

    Hmm, I doubt you are in my target audience, given that your interest in philosophy seems a bit more than casual!

    But Quine thinks that arguments about what there is are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are recognized as part and parcel of the general scientific project, and not standing outside of it and judging which parts are accurate (some of the anti-metaphysical rhetoric is directed against that latter attitude). And Quine himself has influenced the way metaphysics is done (see Van Inwagen's discussion of "Quinean meta-ontology" in his influential essay, "Meta-Ontology"). But of course you are right that Quine would not himself approve of certain parts of metaphysics, particularly modal metaphysics. I was generally making a point about Quine's causal effect, not what he himself would approve of (I myself think Quine's antipathy to modal semantics may not have been necessary to preserve his overall systematic world view – but that's another story). I do think that Quine made possible the reemergence of much traditional philosophy, even parts that Quine himself wouldn't approve of.

    You are of course right that the naturalized epistemology part of Quine does lead naturally to experimental philosophy. As Anthony Appiah and Stephen Stich emphasized at the conference, this is one effect of the general naturalist mindset he bequeathed to philosophy. This is worthy of mention, but I'm not sure it has been as significant an overall effect on the course of philosophy (at least so far) as the shedding of positivist shackles.

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  7. Charlie Huenemann

    Here I go, outting myself as a stupid person, but I really can't see why Quine receives such glowing accolades. He was a very smart man, of course, and had a unique writing style. But basically all he did was take a hard-nosed natural scientist's stance toward several questions in M & E, with the result that those questions ended up looking insoluble. That hardly takes much creative vision.

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  8. Wes Anderson

    Just a small note: Quine helped end logical empiricism of the Carnapian (phenomenological) vein. Logical empiricists like Neurath were already pressing for a strictly physical/natural scientific conceptual scheme (for similar reasons Quine did later) in those days. You might say that in the early 20th century Carnapian logical empiricism reigned and in the late 20th century Neurathian-Quinean logical holistic-empiricism reigned.

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  9. Michael Lynch

    Jason's comments on Quine and his impact are astute. A small additional note: In my discussions with other researchers in the humanities about contemporary philosophy, I've often found that they mean something different by "logical positivism" than what I mean by it (or what the positivists meant by it). A widespread assumption is that logical positivists are philosophers who believe that serious philosophy is closer (in terms of methodology and content) to the sciences than to the rest of the humanities. This description fits both Carnap, Quine and many contemporary philosophers, so it helps (or helped me) to understand why some folks believe philosophy departments are bastions of positivism.

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  10. Jason Stanley

    Michael,

    Yes, sometimes I've thought that our colleagues in other humanities departments have a Comte-inspired understanding of "positivism" rather than a Carnap-inspired one. That could explain their tendency to think that they sometimes think we want to make e.g. the study of morality or aesthetics into a science (and Comte was a sexist to boot).

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  11. ravi

    A short and edifying summation of the core of Quine's contributions to philosophy! The "money quote" if I may:

    ==== quote ====
    With his view that there are no clear distinctions between traditional questions of ontology and the hypotheses of the natural sciences, he also laid the groundwork for the contemporary reemergence of classical metaphysics.
    ==== end quote ====

    I do wish, though, that you had had the time to intimate your audience with greater detail on the content of Quine's critique of the positivist accusation of language confusion. The three paragraphs, preceding your mention of Quine's critique, are a lucid and accessible description of the positivist position. The refutation of it should have received equal consideration… yes? A trifling nit!

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  12. Tom Hurka

    Jason: Are you one of the "number of philosophers" mentioned in your third last paragraph? If so, then you're saying Quine "ended" logical positivism by a bad argument. He said there's no analytic/synthetic distinction, hence logical positivism is mistaken. But there is such a distinction, and positivism is mistaken for a different reason. Quine had the right conclusion (supposedly), but gave the wrong argument for it.

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  13. T. Parent

    I may be the only one, but I feel a bit uncomfortable in characterizing Quine primarily as a "naturalist" and "anti-positivist." These are perhaps the elements in Quine which are most appealing to philosophers today, but to define his work primarily in these terms seems somewhat misleading.

    As concerns his anti-positivism, "Two Dogmas" does not criticize the central tenant of positivist philosophy, viz., verificationism. Rather, it criticizes the idea that *single* sentences have verification conditions, in isolation from a body of theory. I would have thought it was Pooper who heralded the end of positivism per se, showing that the principle of verification fails its own test for meaningfulness.

    As concerns his naturalism, Quine's view here is notably distinct from the what present-day philosophers think of as "naturalism". His naturalized epistemology, for instance, should be viewed alongside his "web-of-belief" apporach to epistemic matters. Also, though he was a scientific realist in ontology, he also called himself a *relativist* about ontology in 1960. (Arguably, in "Ontological Relativitly", he also concedes a sense in which he is an *indeterminst* about ontology, given that he maintains an indeterminacy in what our theories say.) So to think of Quine as a naturalist without much further comment threatens to simpify his view too much, at least in my mind.

    I recognize I may not be in Stanley's intended audience either, though I would have liked to see just a few qualifications to the portrayal of Quine he develops.

    P.S. In response to DT, I would hesitate to align Quine with the kind of oridnary language philosophy embedded in x-phi (if I understand x-phi correctly).

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  14. Jason Stanley

    Tom,

    I haven't had the opportunity to revise my thinking on this in a while, so my views remain the same as when I first read Putnam's "The Analytic and the Synthetic", which I've kind of taken since undergraduate school to be a fairly widely shared view. The view is that even if there is an analytic-synthetic distinction, it can't bear the philosophical weight the positivists wanted it to bear. It's hard to see that a lot of the traditional claims of metaphysics are going to end up in the same boat as "Bachelors are unmarried", even if the latter is in fact analytic. So I do think that Quine went after a larger target than he needed to in "Two Dogmas". But this doesn't mean he wrong – he wasn't far off the mark in his view that the big claims of metaphysics are just as substantive as the big claims of the traditional natural sciences. Now how does this bear on the issue you raise, which is how much credit goes to Quine? Well, here is Putnam on that topic:

    "Thus I think Quine is wrong. There are analytic statements: 'All bachelors are unmarried' is one of them. But in a deeper sense I think that Quine is right; far more right than his critics. I think that there is an analytic-synthetic distinction, but a rather trivial one…I think, in other words, if that if one proceeds, as Quine does, on the assumption that there is no analytic-synthetic distinction at all, one would be right on far more philosophic issues and one will be led to far more philosophic insights than one will be if one accepts that heady concoction of ideas with which we are all too familiar, the idea that every statement is either analytic or synthetic, the idea that all logical truths are analytic…"

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  15. Jason Stanley

    T. Parent,

    My short piece was intended to capture Quine's impact and effect on philosophy. It was not intended to be a portrayal of Quine's systematic philosophical position. I tried to be clear about the distinction between these tasks in the piece. For example, Quine argues for holism about meaning from verificationist premises. These are the "various confusions about linguistic meaning" that I mention in the text as now widely rejected. For Quine, these views are somehow connected to his naturalism. But what has descended from Quine is the naturalism, stripped of any connections to meaning holism or even pragmatism.

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  16. Joachim Horvath

    I think that Quine ended Logical Positivism because he put an end to the analytic-synthetic distinction as Logical Positivists THEMSELVES conceived of it. The reason why this is often overlooked is that the Quine never states the tenets of his target in a clear and explicit way, maybe because it was simply too obvious for him at the time.

    Now, recall the positivist criterion of meaningfulness: A statement is meaningful (roughly) iff it is about something observable or analytic, i.e., true in virtue of meaning. With this criterion in mind, consider the statement 'Some sentences are analytic'. Is it about something observable? What Quine shows with his famous circle-of-terms argument in the first part of "Two Dogmas" is that it is not, for the term 'analytic' can only be explained by close cognates like 'synonymous' that are equally removed from something that is observable, e.g. human behavior. Yet, is the above statement maybe itself analytic, that is, true in virtue of meaning? The Logical Positivists took analytic sentences to be confirmed "come what may", that is, by any evidence whatsoever. Quine now argues, in the second part of "Two Dogmas" that no statement is confirmed no matter what the evidence is, for every statement can be revised in light of some recalcitrant observations. But if no statement is confirmed "come what may", then there simply are no analytic statements. Therefore, the statement 'Some sentences are analytic' neither is about anything observable nor is it analytic, so it must be meaningless, given the Positivist criterion of meaningfulness.

    Since most philosophers today do not share the core tenets of Logical Positivism, they do not tend to be moved a lot much by Quine's arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction. So, many contemporary philosophers still (or again) hold, like Tom Hurka in his post above, that there is a viable analytic-synthetic distinction. This should not lead them to deny, however, that Quine's attack on this central distinction, as understood by the Logical Positivists THEMSELVES, really was the crucial nail in Logical Positivism's coffin.

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  17. Keith DeRose

    Weren't there other grounds against positivism being pressed by others that were very much in play? I'm not here wondering about what are the best reasons for rejecting LP, but in the historical question of what really turned the tide against the positivists. Based on what I was taught many years ago, Quine's role is being overstated here. But I wasn't around at the relevant time, and am not very confident in what I was taught about it.

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  18. Aaron Preston

    “Weren't there other grounds against positivism being pressed by others that were very much in play?”

    I don’t know if this is what you have in mind, but the idea that the verification principle was self-undermining had been in play since the 1930s (Barry Smith, in _Austrian Philosophy_, has Roman Ingarden deploying this criticism at the 1934 World Congress of Philosophy).

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  19. Kenneth Winkler

    Like others, I've noticed how freely other humanists speak of philosophers as "positivists." Here's a way of making sense of it. They've been persuaded by Kant (or by considerations Kant made familiar) that the propositions of metaphysics must be synthetic and a priori, and they understand logical positivism as the view that there are no synthetic a priori propositions. (Ayer, as I recall, sometimes states logical positivism in just this way.) Now in "Two Dogmas," Quine simply takes it for granted that there are no synthetic a priori truths. In this respect, he's completely at one with the positivists. The only way of making out the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori, Quine assumes throughout that essay, is in terms of the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. It's been many years since I've looked at Quine's index card notes for his 1946 lectures on Hume, which Michael Pakaluk shared with me (for his account of Quine's lectures, see Michael essay in the Journal of the History of Philosophy for 1989), but in those fascinating notes, which conclude with Kant, the existence of synthetic a priori truths is expressly repudiated. Kant, Quine reports, set out to explain how synthetic a priori truths are possible. His mistake, he then says, was in supposing that there are any.

    From the point of view of our fellow humanists, who are concerned to save metaphysics from triviality (metaphysical propositions as analytic) and scientism (metaphysical propositions as a posteriori or empirical), the difference between the positivists and Quine doesn't loom all that large. They see Quine as no less of a threat to metaphysics, as Kant has taught them to view it, than Quine's positivist forbears. I don't mean to be endorsing their way of thinking – over the years, in sitting for example on committees awarding graduate fellowships in the humanities, I've found it extremely frustrating – but I think we should admit that it makes some sense, and that getting our fellow humanists to appreciate that metaphysics (for example) is now thriving won't be easy. It calls for a long continuation of the story Jason ably tells, taking them through, among others, both Kripke and Lewis. But it would be very helpful if someone could tell that story in a way adapted to their ears, because we can use their support, on those fellowship committees and elsewhere.

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  20. Jon Cogburn

    I agree with Jason completely, but want to clarify his point. The positivists attempted to explain aprioricity and necessity via analyticity. While Quine's own arguments and statements about this dialectic are often confusing, his genius was to inspire Hilary Putnam, Stephen Stich, Mark Wilson, and others to show with their own compelling (and broadly Quinean) arguments exactly why this program is doomed, and also to show how much contemporary philosophy is still implicated in it (e.g. Stich's fantastic piece on theories of reference).

    A few posts ago Fodor aphoristically states a reason why one shouldn't hold that the failure of the positivist's linguistic account of necessity and aprioricity leads us to a new era of metaphysics so aprioristic that Gustav Bergmann (he began books and lectures by enjoining us to consider a red square) would blush.

    I think some combination of anti-Quinean Friedmanesque clarity about the holistic neo-Kantian nature of Positivism (and how we might keep that in light of the failure of the linguistic account of necessity and aprioricity) and the form of Quinean naturalism that one finds in Mark Wilson, Stephen Stich, and Ian Hacking is the closest thing there is to a royal road to philosophy these days. Note that Wilson, Stich, and Hacking do not spend a lot of time bothering with metaphilosophical discussion of "naturalism," "natural kinds," etc. . . rather, their work just manages to have a tremendous amount of empirical friction while still addressing the most interesting extant philosophical issues in philosophically responsible ways. In light of this, I would say that the Good Quine is how his students and colleagues are so rightfully represented in the pantheon of contemporary philosophy, in many cases by having thought deeply about issues and approaches Quine raised and discussed with them.

    The Bad Quine is: (1) his "literary" writing style (a very reliable indicator of how few actual books a given philosophy professor has read is the extent to which they cherish Quine's ghastly attempts at alliteration; similarly, the funnier you find Fodor's jokes, the less funny you tend to be yourself), (2) the unclarity about many of Quine's key theses (e.g. try to even state the underdetermination one so that it is plausible and non-trivial), (3) the bad argumentation for those theses, (4) his badness at citing other people who had similar ideas (e.g. Carnap's Aufbau says "the unit of meaning is the language as a whole" and Ayer explicitly stated and endorsed what is now known as "The Quine Duhem Thesis" years before Quine), and (5) the sort of pseudo-scientificity of his story of language learning in "The Ontogenesis of Reference" part of "Word and Object" and those other books that nobody much reads (and I write this as a militant anti-Chomskyan; I wish Quine's behaviorist fantasies about acquisition were more help to the cause).

    The Ugly Quine is this insane business about physics having a "canonical notation" as well as "being being the value of a bound variable" suggesting a methodology for metaphysics.

    The contemporary revival of aprioristic metaphysics by people jazzed about "the bound variable stuff" notwithstanding, I've seen the classic Sergio Leone movie several times now, and I'm confident the Good will live to fight another day.

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