#w.v.o. quine

[wilkiecat]

Star Trek Meets Quine: The Nature of Knowledge

Quine’s View on Knowledge and “Science-Fiction” Metaphysics: A Star Trek Exploration W.V.O. Quine’s philosophy radically transformed how we think about knowledge, meaning, and metaphysics. He questioned logical positivism’s strict criteria for what counts as meaningful knowledge and rejected the division between “analytic” (true by definition) and “synthetic” (empirically verifiable) statements.…

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Ontological Commitment

Ontological commitment is a philosophical concept that deals with the assumptions and entities that a theory or belief system posits as necessary for its truth or coherence. It stems from the broader field of ontology, the study of what exists and the nature of being. When philosophers and scientists create theories, they often implicitly or explicitly commit to the existence of certain entities or concepts, which forms the basis of ontological commitment. The idea is essential in understanding how different theories relate to the world and what they imply about the nature of reality.

Key Aspects:

Quantification and Existence: Ontological commitment often revolves around the use of quantifiers in logical expressions, such as "there exists" or "for all." These quantifiers can indicate the existence of certain entities, leading to a commitment to their reality.

Theories and Models: In the context of scientific and philosophical theories, ontological commitment refers to the entities that must be assumed to exist for the theory to be valid. For example, a theory of physics might be ontologically committed to the existence of particles, fields, or forces.

Quine’s Criterion: Philosopher W.V.O. Quine is closely associated with the idea of ontological commitment. He proposed that a theory's ontological commitments are determined by what the theory quantifies over. According to Quine, "To be is to be the value of a variable," meaning that if a theory requires something to exist in order for its variables to have value, the theory is committed to the existence of that thing.

Debates in Ontology: Philosophical debates around ontological commitment often involve discussions about whether certain entities are "real" or merely useful fictions. For instance, are mathematical objects like numbers and sets real, or are they simply convenient tools for describing reality?

The philosophy of ontological commitment is crucial for understanding the assumptions underlying different theories and beliefs. It forces us to confront the question of what we are implicitly assuming to exist when we adopt a particular worldview or scientific theory. By examining these commitments, we can better understand the implications of our beliefs and refine our understanding of what it means for something to exist.

[ihadnointentiontoblog]

Which philosopher are you?

My Result: Sartre/Camus (late existentialists)(84%)

The world is absurd. No facts govern it. We live well once we truly accept the world's absurdity. YOU give our life's meaning, and YOU control your world. (see Nietzsche for very closely tied beliefs) --This quiz was made by S. A-Lerer.

Additional Results:

Sartre/Camus (late existentialists) (84%)

W.v.O. Quine / Late Wittgenstein (82%)

Aristotle (74%)

Early Wittgenstein / Positivists (59%)

Nietzsche (58%)

Immanuel Kant (51%)

Plato (strict rationalists) (19%)

Visit: Which philosopher are you?

[dlittle30]

Quine's indeterminacies

W.V.O. Quine’s writings were key to the development of American philosophy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His landmark works (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” “Ontological Relativity,” and Word and Object, for example) provided a very appealing combination of plain speaking, seriousness, and import. Quine’s voice certainly stands out among all American philosophers of his period. Quine’s insistence…

[shadowstarkanada]

What an interesting quiz.

I'm W.v.O. Quine / Late Wittgenstein. I have no idea if that's good or not because I have never read anything by either of these people (as opposed to Satre, Nitzshe and Kant who I have read... something of in translation back in high school comparative religions/philosophy class. Didn't like Sartre), but I'd generally agree with this statement:

"There is no provable absolute truth. The way you see things is dependant on your language. Truths exist only within a language, and change as the language does."

I tried taking this quiz as William and this is what it came up with.

(When I took it as myself, I got Nietzsche)

[perkwunos]

For Peirce, the key to understanding the difference between “Some dogs are black” and “All black dogs are black” lies in the nature of the diagrams involved in logical inquiry. As he sees it, the belief that “All black dogs are black” is warranted by the impossibility of constructing a diagram that represents the class of black dogs as having a non-black member. Since, for him, the diagrams used to show the truth of this claim do not involve signs that represent the way the world actually is, they reveal its truth to be independent of any facts that the natural sciences might disclose and that it holds in any world in which there is a truth to be discovered. Though an experimental finding on a par methodologically with findings in the natural sciences, “All black dogs are black” is necessarily true and logically prior to results in the natural sciences.

Its status as a fallible experimental finding notwithstanding, Peirce allows that the belief that “All black dogs are black” is less vulnerable to error than findings in the natural sciences. However, he attributes this to a special connection between the diagrams studied in logic and what they represent. As he sees it, logical diagrams are what he calls “icons”. They are signs that represent their subject-matter by instantiating it—as a paint chip represents a colour by possessing it. If, for example, we represent the class of black things by a circle and represent the class of black dogs by a second circle drawn within the first one, then the relation among the points circumscribed by these two circles is the very same relation of class inclusion that the diagram represents to hold between black things and black dogs. Inasmuch as this diagram represents abstract logical relations by exemplifying them, it qualifies as an icon. Peirce insists that conclusions arrived at by experimenting on diagrams are fallible—inquirers can misread logical diagrams and draw unwarranted conclusions from them. However, he insists that as icons the diagrams themselves are inherently reliable as representations of logical relations. A diagram cannot misrepresent its own structure and that structure instantiates the very relations the diagram is used in logical inquiry to represent. On this view, observing the structure of diagrams is not merely a helpful way to conduct logical inquiry, it is the essence of logical inquiry inasmuch as the structures exhibited by diagrams are the very subject-matter of logical inquiry. This marks a significant contrast between logic and those sciences in which the concern is not with the abstract relations instantiated by symbols but rather with the nature of the objects those symbols represent. Given a symbolic representation of the world—a theory of black holes, say—and valid conclusions drawn from it, Peirce thinks there is no guarantee, as there is in logic, that the structure of one’s symbolic representations corresponds to the intended subject-matter. This leaves inquiry in the natural sciences vulnerable to sources of error that do not arise in logical inquiry and this, he thinks, is what accounts for the greater security of findings in logic. It is important to note, however, that, for Peirce, this difference in security does not reflect a difference in the sort of knowledge uncovered in logic and the natural sciences. Results in both domains of inquiry are justified by the same experimental method and are true in one and the same sense of “truth”. The difference is rather one of subject-matter—abstract relations exemplified by iconic diagrams, in the case of logical inquiry, and the configurations of objects and events in the natural world, in the case of the natural sciences.

Paul Forster, First philosophy naturalized: Peirce’s place in the Analytic tradition

[anaxerneas]

W.V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth

I swear there's a phenomenological ontology (like Peirce's categories) trying to shine through the language of 'mentalism' and 'projection' here..

[affirmation--negation]

Apart from political considerations, the deliberate ignorance and chronic undermining of Anglophone philosophy might be accounted for in terms of parochialism. It is quite undisputable that there used to be, and to some extent there still is, something like a deeply rooted sense of national intellectual superiority in France, especially towards American philosophy and American culture at large. Accordingly, in his work on the early reception of pragmatism in France, Shook emphasizes the insulting claims issued by Jean Boudreau, a German philosophy scholar, against pragmatism in a 1909 paper where the latter was described as the exact opposite of “our national and secular traditions of pure and disinterested speculation.” Accordingly, pragmatism is depicted as a philosophical movement made by and bound for business men and plutocrats craving for material comfort and economic power, ready to justify whatever belief they need in order to achieve success and thus, “eventually importing imperialism even into philosophy”. This point would remain just a minor and trivial one if this kind of harsh and chauvinist attitude was something of the past. The divide between analytical and continental (one may even say French) philosophy has almost reached the status of a founding myth in France. Anyone trying to trace its origin is necessarily led back to the allegedly traumatic episode of “Royaumont.” This refers to a large colloquium specifically devoted to “La Philosophie Analytique,” the purpose of which was to convene French and Belgian philosophers on the one side, and Anglo-American philosophers on the other, so they could debate together. Thus the list of speakers included W.V.O. Quine, Gilbert Ryle, P. F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, B. Williams, J. O. Urmson and R. M. Hare. The audience gathered the very young Charles Taylor, A. J. Ayer, and on the “continental” side, M. Merleau-Ponty, J. Wahl and H. L. Van Breda, founder of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. Unfortunately this noble endeavor led—or is supposed to have led—to the exact opposite effect to the one that was aimed at. The event took place in 1958 at Abbaye de Royaumont, and soon became famous as the “locus classicus” of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Aude Bandini, “Sellars and Meillassoux, A Most Unlikely Encounter.”

[eka-mark]

Whatever the proper analysis of the contrafactual conditional may be, we may be sure in advance that it cannot be truth-functional; for, obviously ordinary usage demands that some contrafactual conditionals with false antecedents and false consequents be true and that other contrafactual conditionals with false antecedents and false consequents be false. Any adequate analysis of the contrafactual conditional must go beyond mere truth values and consider causal connections, or kindred relationships, between matters spoken of in the antecedent of the conditional and matters spoken of in the consequent.

W.V.O. Quine, Methods of Logic

[amymcools]

Happy Birthday, W.V.O. Quine!

Happy Birthday, W.V.O. Quine!

WVO Quine on the Bluenose II in Halifax, Nova Scotia, photo courtesy of Douglas Quine

The emphases in my undergraduate education in philosophy were Ethics, Politics, and Law, so I didn’t spend as much time studying Willard Van Orman Quine’s great contributions to philosophy as I would like. However, if my focus was Mathematical Logic, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, or Philosophy of…

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Metaontology

Metaontology is a branch of philosophy that examines the nature, methodology, and foundations of ontology itself. Ontology is the study of what exists, the categories of being, and the relationships between entities. Metaontology, therefore, addresses questions about how we should approach ontological questions, what methods are appropriate for determining what exists, and what it means for something to be considered part of reality. Here’s an in-depth exploration of the philosophy of metaontology:

1. Key Questions in Metaontology

What is Ontology? Metaontology seeks to clarify what ontology is about, exploring its scope and limits. It asks whether ontology is about listing all the entities that exist or about understanding the fundamental structure of reality.

How Should Ontological Disputes Be Resolved? Metaontology investigates the methods and criteria for resolving disagreements about what exists. It questions whether ontological disputes are substantive or merely verbal disagreements.

What Are Ontological Commitments? This branch of philosophy examines the commitments we make when we assert the existence of certain entities. It explores how language, logic, and theoretical frameworks influence these commitments.

2. Approaches in Metaontology

Quinean Metaontology: W.V.O. Quine, a significant figure in metaontology, argued that ontological questions should be framed within a scientific and empirical context. He famously said, "To be is to be the value of a variable," suggesting that our ontological commitments are tied to the variables in our best scientific theories.

Carnap’s Framework: Rudolf Carnap proposed that ontological questions are internal to linguistic frameworks. According to Carnap, ontological disputes are often about choosing a convenient framework rather than discovering objective truths about reality.

Neo-Fregeanism: Neo-Fregeans, like Crispin Wright and Bob Hale, argue that certain abstract objects, such as numbers, can be said to exist based on their necessity for our best explanatory theories, particularly in mathematics.

Modal Realism: David Lewis's modal realism posits the existence of a plurality of possible worlds, treating them as just as real as the actual world. This view brings metaontological discussions to the forefront by challenging conventional notions of existence and reality.

3. Substantive vs. Deflationary Ontology

Substantive Ontology: This approach asserts that ontological questions are meaningful and substantive. Proponents believe that there are objective facts about what exists and that ontology aims to uncover these facts.

Deflationary Ontology: Deflationists argue that many ontological questions are not substantive but rather hinge on linguistic or conceptual frameworks. They suggest that resolving ontological disputes often involves clarifying language and concepts rather than discovering new facts about reality.

4. Ontological Commitment and Language

Ontological Commitment: Metaontology explores how our language and theoretical frameworks commit us to certain entities. For example, using terms like "numbers" or "universals" in scientific or mathematical theories involves an implicit commitment to the existence of these entities.

Reference and Existence: The philosophy of metaontology examines how the reference of terms in our language influences our ontological commitments. It questions whether referring to something implies its existence or if reference can be understood in a more flexible way.

5. Methodological Considerations

Naturalized Ontology: This approach, influenced by Quine, suggests that ontological questions should be addressed using the methods of natural science. It emphasizes empirical evidence and scientific theories in determining what exists.

Conceptual Analysis: Some metaontologists use conceptual analysis to clarify and resolve ontological questions. This method involves analyzing the concepts and categories we use to talk about existence and being.

6. Contemporary Debates

Realism vs. Anti-Realism: Metaontology engages with debates between realists, who believe that there are objective facts about what exists, and anti-realists, who argue that existence is relative to conceptual schemes or linguistic frameworks.

Ontological Pluralism: This view holds that there can be multiple, equally valid ways of describing what exists, depending on the context or framework. Ontological pluralists argue that reality can be understood in various ways without privileging one over the others.

The philosophy of metaontology is a rich and complex field that delves into the foundations of ontology, examining the nature of existence, the methods for resolving ontological disputes, and the commitments we make when we assert the existence of various entities. From Quinean naturalism to Carnap's linguistic frameworks, metaontology offers diverse approaches to understanding the nature of being and existence. It challenges philosophers to consider the deeper implications of their ontological commitments and the methods they use to explore the fundamental structure of reality.

[ave1125]

The Problem of Gun Control

The Problem of Gun Control

The fundamental problem with gun control is that it is not about saving lives. It is not about numbers. The Right understands this and made this an issue of freedom and self-defense. You cannot argue against values with facts. For example, “theft is good” cannot be merely refuted by the fact that the person being robbed is hurt or feels bad. Even if the victims were numerous. This is a mere fact.…

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

The totality of our beliefs, from the most casual matters to the profoundest laws, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

from Two Dogmas of Empiricism by W.V.O. Quine

[perkwunos]

Richard Foley, Quine and Naturalized Epistemology

[anaxerneas]

I have the desire to read this paper by Dagfinn Føllesdal on Willard "mind-schmind" Quine's behaviorism sometime.