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Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects, ' the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.
165 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Willard Van Orman Quine
105 books221 followers"Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 Akron, Ohio – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van"), was an American analytic philosopher and logician. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was affiliated in some way with Harvard University, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as an emeritus elder statesman who published or revised seven books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, 1956-78. Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis. His major writings include "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which attacked the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and advocated a form of semantic holism, and Word and Object which further developed these positions and introduced the notorious indeterminacy of translation thesis." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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March 10, 2024Eigentlich liebe ich Unilektüre aber diese hat mich gequält. Ich habe auch nach der Lektüre keine Ahnung, was und wie Quine mit seinen Texten zum Weltverständnis beitragen möchte.
November 29, 2011
Quine’s six essays take a pragmatic epistemological approach to meaning and employ a coherence theory of truth, with some essays emphasizing language and others mathematics. For Quine, a strictly behaviorist analysis of language works best and brings us closest to truth. However, I didn’t see how this explained away ontology or refuted other epistemological theories.
The first essay, on language, was dead boring, taking 20 pages to explain how a child learns a word, and Quine restricts himself to outward descriptions of what a word might mean. In the eponymous essay the author leans on concepts such as the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem, so a background in mathematics is needed to appreciate it. A later essay closer to my own interests concerns existential quantification in logic.
The restricted emphasis on language was tedious and I found it hard to see how ever greater semantic precision against a relative background addresses broader problems such as how we can come to know reality or give meaning to what we say. How does the “ostensive” designation of reference help with abstract concepts? How can a background theory to which communication must be relative establish facts of reality when that background is itself relative?
Overall, I think the characterization of reality in terms of words asks too much of language. Nor does the reduction of epistemology to behavioral psychology eliminate the role of consciousness in philosophy; it only sidesteps the question of how humans obtain a mental grasp of reality. Although I didn’t get as much as I hoped for out of Quine's collection, readers better versed in mathematics and language theory might find this book a more fruitful study.
The first essay, on language, was dead boring, taking 20 pages to explain how a child learns a word, and Quine restricts himself to outward descriptions of what a word might mean. In the eponymous essay the author leans on concepts such as the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem, so a background in mathematics is needed to appreciate it. A later essay closer to my own interests concerns existential quantification in logic.
The restricted emphasis on language was tedious and I found it hard to see how ever greater semantic precision against a relative background addresses broader problems such as how we can come to know reality or give meaning to what we say. How does the “ostensive” designation of reference help with abstract concepts? How can a background theory to which communication must be relative establish facts of reality when that background is itself relative?
Overall, I think the characterization of reality in terms of words asks too much of language. Nor does the reduction of epistemology to behavioral psychology eliminate the role of consciousness in philosophy; it only sidesteps the question of how humans obtain a mental grasp of reality. Although I didn’t get as much as I hoped for out of Quine's collection, readers better versed in mathematics and language theory might find this book a more fruitful study.
March 16, 2015
this guy is politically an irredeemable rightwinger, but godsbedamned if his philosophical writing ain't spot on. here, linguistic holism. good stuff.
one might reasonably understand irredeemable rightwinger, incidentally, as 'undetached irredeemable rightwinger parts' or as 'transitory irredeemable rightwinger stages' at one's discretion.
one might reasonably understand irredeemable rightwinger, incidentally, as 'undetached irredeemable rightwinger parts' or as 'transitory irredeemable rightwinger stages' at one's discretion.
October 16, 2024
A DIVERSE SERIES OF ESSAYS BY THE FAMED LOGICIAN
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician who taught at Harvard University, and wrote many books.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1969 book, “The title essay of this book was presented as a pair of lectures of the same title at Columbia University, March 26 and 28, 1968. They constituted the first of the John Dewey Lectures… To help orient the reader, the title essay is preceded in the volume by ‘Speaking of Objects.’ This was my presidential address to the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in 1957… The remaining four essays in the book are of recent vintage. They were already at press before this book was thought of and they still are.”
He notes in the first essay, “There is indeed an archaic precedent for confusing sign and object; the earliest conditioning of the infant’s babbling is ambiguous on this point. For suppose a baby rewarded for happening to babble something like ‘mama’ or ‘water’ just as the mother or water is looming. The stimuli which are thus reinforced are bound to be two: there is not only the looming of the object, there is equally the word itself, heard by the child from his own lips. Confusion of sign and object is original sin, coeval with the word.” (Pg. 15)
He begins the title essay, “Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy.” (Pg. 26)
He points out, “So, though [Bertrand] Russell was wrong in suggesting that numbers need more than their arithmetical properties, he was right in objecting to the definition of numbers as any things fulfilling arithmetic. The subtle point is that any progression will serve as a version of number so long and only so long as we stick to one and the same progression. Arithmetic is, in this sense, all there is to number: there is no saying absolutely what the numbers are, there is only arithmetic.” (Pg. 45)
He continues in the same essay, “How then can there be no sense in saying what the objects of a theory are? My answer is simply that we cannot require theories to be fully interpreted, except in a relative sense, if anything is to count as a theory. In specifying a theory we must indeed fully specify, in our own words, what sentences are to comprise the theory, and what things are to be taken as values of the variables, and what things are to be taken as satisfying the predicate letters, insofar we do fully interpret the theory, RELATIVE to our own words and relative to our overall home theory which lies behind them. But this fixes the objects of the described theory only relative to those of the home theory, and these can, at will, be questioned in turn.” (Pg. 51)
He adds, “Ontological relativity is not to be clarified by any distinction between kinds of universal predication---unfactual and factual, external and internal. It is not a question of universal predication. When questions regarding the ontology of the theory are meaningless absolutely, and become meaningful relative to a background theory, this is not in general because the background theory has a wider universe.” (Pg. 53)
He says about Hume, “he did succeed in construing some singular statements about bodies as indubitable truths… But general statements, also singular statements about the future, gained no increment of certainty by being construed as about impressions. On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament.” (Pg. 72)
He asserts, “Induction itself is essentially only more of the same: animal expectation or habit formation. And the ostensive learning of words is an implicit case of induction. Implicitly the learner of ‘yellow’ is working inductively toward a general law of English verbal behavior, though a law that he will never try to state; he is working up to where he can in general judge when an English speaker would assent to ‘yellow’ and when not. Not only is ostensive learning a case of induction, it is a curiously comfortable case of induction, a game of chance with loaded dice.” (Pg. 125)
These essays are a highly interesting collection , that will be of great interest to anyone studying Quine, or modern logical philosophy.
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician who taught at Harvard University, and wrote many books.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1969 book, “The title essay of this book was presented as a pair of lectures of the same title at Columbia University, March 26 and 28, 1968. They constituted the first of the John Dewey Lectures… To help orient the reader, the title essay is preceded in the volume by ‘Speaking of Objects.’ This was my presidential address to the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in 1957… The remaining four essays in the book are of recent vintage. They were already at press before this book was thought of and they still are.”
He notes in the first essay, “There is indeed an archaic precedent for confusing sign and object; the earliest conditioning of the infant’s babbling is ambiguous on this point. For suppose a baby rewarded for happening to babble something like ‘mama’ or ‘water’ just as the mother or water is looming. The stimuli which are thus reinforced are bound to be two: there is not only the looming of the object, there is equally the word itself, heard by the child from his own lips. Confusion of sign and object is original sin, coeval with the word.” (Pg. 15)
He begins the title essay, “Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy.” (Pg. 26)
He points out, “So, though [Bertrand] Russell was wrong in suggesting that numbers need more than their arithmetical properties, he was right in objecting to the definition of numbers as any things fulfilling arithmetic. The subtle point is that any progression will serve as a version of number so long and only so long as we stick to one and the same progression. Arithmetic is, in this sense, all there is to number: there is no saying absolutely what the numbers are, there is only arithmetic.” (Pg. 45)
He continues in the same essay, “How then can there be no sense in saying what the objects of a theory are? My answer is simply that we cannot require theories to be fully interpreted, except in a relative sense, if anything is to count as a theory. In specifying a theory we must indeed fully specify, in our own words, what sentences are to comprise the theory, and what things are to be taken as values of the variables, and what things are to be taken as satisfying the predicate letters, insofar we do fully interpret the theory, RELATIVE to our own words and relative to our overall home theory which lies behind them. But this fixes the objects of the described theory only relative to those of the home theory, and these can, at will, be questioned in turn.” (Pg. 51)
He adds, “Ontological relativity is not to be clarified by any distinction between kinds of universal predication---unfactual and factual, external and internal. It is not a question of universal predication. When questions regarding the ontology of the theory are meaningless absolutely, and become meaningful relative to a background theory, this is not in general because the background theory has a wider universe.” (Pg. 53)
He says about Hume, “he did succeed in construing some singular statements about bodies as indubitable truths… But general statements, also singular statements about the future, gained no increment of certainty by being construed as about impressions. On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament.” (Pg. 72)
He asserts, “Induction itself is essentially only more of the same: animal expectation or habit formation. And the ostensive learning of words is an implicit case of induction. Implicitly the learner of ‘yellow’ is working inductively toward a general law of English verbal behavior, though a law that he will never try to state; he is working up to where he can in general judge when an English speaker would assent to ‘yellow’ and when not. Not only is ostensive learning a case of induction, it is a curiously comfortable case of induction, a game of chance with loaded dice.” (Pg. 125)
These essays are a highly interesting collection , that will be of great interest to anyone studying Quine, or modern logical philosophy.
October 15, 2022
Great book that compares well to Kripke's 'Naming and Necessity'.
April 3, 2007
Four stars because it informed my thesis so. Probably not for everyone, but very interesting.
August 12, 2007
YES GAVAGAI!!!!!
March 31, 2008
Excellent. Many of my current academic and personal curiosities began with this book.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews