Quine's Philosophy: An Introduction

W. V. Quine is a curious case. Despite being among the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century, card-carrying proponents of Quinean doctrines are hard to find these days. His so-called ‘criterion of ontological commitment’ is widely endorsed—but Quine himself regarded this as a truism rather than an interesting philosophical thesis. Many chiefly associate him with the rejection of analyticity, propositions, and modal logic. Since today's journals brim with animated discussions of these topics, it is tempting to suspect that Quine's misgivings were based on doctrines that have hence been refuted, such as behaviourism, or a lack of engagement with new developments in logic.

But Quine is far from obsolete. His negative arguments are part of a positive vision for philosophy that is still powerful, attractive, and worth engaging with. Appreciating this, however, requires dodging considerable obstacles. Quine is a systematic philosopher who wrote an enormous amount. Understanding his papers often seems to require a prior understanding of what Quine is about, and so it can be difficult to find an entry point. Many contemporary readers are bound to react with puzzlement to being told that ‘for artificial languages and semantical rules, we look naturally to the writings of Carnap’ (Quine 1951: 32), for this is no longer as natural as it was in 1951. The fact that two of Quine's most widely read papers—‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ and ‘On What There Is’—were written before he had fully developed and articulated his naturalistic approach to philosophy further complicates the matter.

Quine-novices thus need some guidance. And Gary Kemp's excellent Quine: An Introduction, the updated version of his 2006 Guide for the Perplexed, is here to help. On just over 180 readable pages Kemp covers the historical context of Quine's work (chapters 1–2), his critique of analyticity and meaning (chapters 2–3), and the naturalisation of epistemology (chapter 4). Chapters 5–6 then deal with ontology, including abstract and mental entities. The final chapter 7 collects outstanding problems, compares Quine's approach with mainstream analytic philosophy, and discusses how Quine's linguistic behaviourism relates to Chomskyan linguistics, hinting at a reconciliation of these apparently clashing projects.

Kemp aims to explain Quine to undergraduates and amateurs, but he also wants to offer insights to those ‘higher up the food chain’. In this, he succeeds. I will illustrate this by showing how, by moving natural misconceptions out of the way, Kemp frequently leads us to aspects of Quine's philosophy that are crucial but underdeveloped. This approach is doubly valuable. Beginners get a good sense of how the various strands of Quine's philosophy hang together. And the more experienced might want to get to work to fill the lacunas that emerge.

In a famous passage from ‘Two Dogmas’, Quine writes that the ‘totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs […] is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges’ (Quine 1951: 39). The metaphor of a web in which some beliefs are ‘centrally located’ whereas others are at the ‘periphery’ has been suggestive and influential. But what is the web of belief, understood non-metaphorically? One might envisage ‘statements as abstract objects standing in ethereal relations called logical consequence’, but Kemp emphasises that this would be a big mistake (p. 30). Instead, we are dealing with ‘a web of first-order verbal dispositions, with the second-order ones holding them together’ (p. 31). An example will help. For the web of belief of a speaker to contain the statements A and B, they need to be disposed to assent to A and B. These are the first-order dispositions. Furthermore, the acceptance of A and B might not be independent of each other. If the speaker takes A to entail B, they will have the second-order disposition to assent to B if they also assent to A. Conversely, they will be disposed to give up A if they come to reject B.

It is crucial to keep in mind that Quine construes language as ‘a complex set of verbal dispositions’. Kemp shows that, without this assumption, one cannot make sense of the revisability of logic (p. 30). But the central role dispositions turn out to play for Quine is bound to raise some eyebrows. Dispositions are a modal notion. Quine is said to be against modality. So how can he rely on them? As Kemp explains, there is a sense in which Quine does reject dispositions: An ‘ideal language for a theory of reality’ will not contain the dispositional idiom. But it is nevertheless fine to use the idiom heuristically. Dispositions are ultimately physical states that can in principle be described using purely physical predicates. Since, in practice, we are rarely ever able to give such physical descriptions, disposition terms are a useful placeholder for them (pp. 126–129).

Kemp notes that this treatment of dispositions is ‘suggestive but not worked out in much detail’ (p. 128). And this is arguably a gap friends of Quine's views should look into. If dispositions are to play such a central role in Quine's picture of language, then their own status had better be rock solid.

In ‘The Scope and Language of Science’, Quine poses the following questions: ‘Whence the strength of our notion an external world? […] Whence the idea that language is descriptive in a way that other quiverings of irritable protoplasm are not?’ (Quine 1957: 3). His attempt to give a naturalistic answer to these Kantian questions about objectivity is among the most interesting and original parts of Quine's work. Once again, however, there is a danger of fatally misconstruing the project. It is often thought that the reference relation must play a key explanatory role in accounting for how language hooks up with the world, because it is what relates words to objects. The title of Quine's most important book is Word and Object. This might suggest that he agreed with the aforementioned assumption about the explanatory role of reference. But nothing could be further from the truth. As Kemp repeatedly emphasises, for Quine ‘the connection between language and reality is not the relation of reference’ (p. 72, see also p. 87).

How else is contact with reality made then? Quine sides with Frege and (the later) Wittgenstein in giving whole sentences explanatory priority. In his naturalistic setting, the ultimate explanation is provided by a ‘causal relation between stimulations and observation sentences’ (p. 72). Many distinctly Quinean doctrines only make sense because of this starting point. Take ontological relativity: the view that there is no fact of the matter about what the ontology of our best theory is (pp. 117–8). Given an ‘objects first’ view of the language-world relation, this doctrine would arguably be incoherent. If words are connected to specific objects by means of the reference relation, then the ontology of our best theory must presumably consist of these very objects – and so there would be no wiggle-room left for any relativity.

In The Roots of Reference, Quine sketches a genealogical account of how the distinction between names and predicates, and with it the very notions of object and reference, might have emerged. Kemp notes that it has received little critical attention (p. 89). This is unfortunate given how remote—and potentially illuminating—Quine's take on reference is from other work in this area. Another mission for those who want to carry the Quinean banner has thus been revealed.

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