Willard Van Orman Quine

Modern philosophy, and analytic philosophy in particular, has often been very thing-negative, very stingy about things.

Willard Van Orman Quine claimed a preference for ontological, quote, desert landscapes, meaning a world with as few things as he could get away with, only one ideally.

While Bertrand Russell found himself quite bugged in the brain by Meinung's Jungle, an eccentric ontology in which there are unreal things which subsist but do not exist.

Famously, Wittgenstein claimed that the world was made out of facts, not things.

Modern philosophy, and analytic philosophy in particular, has often been very thing-negative, very stingy about things.

Willard Van Orman Quine claimed a preference for ontological, quote, desert landscapes, meaning a world with as few things as he could get away with, only one ideally.

While Bertrand Russell found himself quite bugged in the brain by Meinung's Jungle, an eccentric ontology in which there are unreal things which subsist but do not exist.

Famously, Wittgenstein claimed that the world was made out of facts, not things.

So, of course, I was interested in Chomsky's linguistics.

So I was already quite knowledgeable about Chomsky before I went to Oxford to do, and I was interested in philosophy of language there, which is, you know, Davidson, Quine, Grice, Kripke, that kind of stuff.

And they are quite different.

There's not much overlap.

Yeah, they were both Wittgensteinian in that sense.

And Quine, I guess, as the intervening figure.

Yep.

So there's some sort of a, is there any distinction that doesn't make a difference, pragmatic kind of thing that comes up in this text?

Yep.

Right, he's trying to get...

Well, let's first, I picked this given that Wes was gonna be gone because long time ago, our first philosophy of mind episode, we did one little article by Quine along with, like, four other articles, five other articles? A lot of articles called "Quining Qualia" w-right, by Dennett, and Wes just had no tolerance for it at all [laughs].

And I think in talking to him about it now, I think he actually has chilled out, and he has more respect for Dennett now, but he just, the, the whole idea that by explaining consciousness, you are denying, you know, what is it like to be a bat principle, that there is some subjective private essence, that somehow he was denying that.

A necessary thing is something which cannot be another way from a modal perspective.

There's a guy called Quine who came out.

Quine.

His name is Quine.

And he said, "This whole thing is fuzzy, and it doesn't make sense." He rejected modal logic.

He rejected it.

I mean, and it-- This is very interesting.

Well, [laughs] I'm sorry to say, and this is-- these guys took a long time to get to this stage to, to think about that.

Other Platonists try to preserve the objectivity of mathematical truth while giving a more naturalistic account of how we come to know it.

The philosopher W.V.O., Quine argued for what he called indispensability.

Mathematical objects exist because they are indispensable to our best scientific theories.

We are committed to the existence of whatever entities our best science quantifies over, and our best science quantifies over mathematical objects extensively.

And a term that you might use that carries something of that positivist impress on it is, is naturalism, and I think that is still a, a, a live term in philosophy.

And when naturalism associated with someone that-- an American philosopher that, uh, actually, uh, was friends with and met in, in Vienna in, in the mid-'30s, someone called Quine, W. V. O. Quine.

And Quine is associated with this American form of positivism, or at least development of positivist materials, which still wants to take very seriously the idea that there is something privileged and important about science in the account that it gives of the world, and we should be deeply suspicious of any style of philosophy that posits all sorts of metaphysical, if you like, supernatural entities, things outside the, the boundaries of nature that can't be studied by sciences.

And that spirit, I think, still remains the animating spirit of, of analytic philosophy.

I think if you're not a naturalist in analytic philosophy, that would put you-- I mean, I've not done a survey of this, but I'm fairly sure most philosophers would say that they are naturalists of one sort or another.

Very few of them would say they're positivists, but then you might say then that naturalism is what has survived of that early positivist impulse.

impulse.And Quine, though he's an extremely famous philosopher, was not an Ayer-style celebrity.

I think it's fair to say.

No, not necessarily.

Um, the great American philosopher W. V. O. Quine spoke of a person's worldview as being like a web of beliefs, and beliefs that are closer to the center of the web are more deeply ingrained and are less easily given up.

Because if you were to pluck out one of those strands near the center of the web, the whole web would be disrupted and, and might even be destroyed.

But as you move farther and farther and farther out toward the periphery of the web, then those beliefs are not so deeply ingrained, and to remove one of those beliefs would not cause great reverberations through one's web of beliefs.