From a Logical Point of View

"Although Quine doesn’t often describe himself as a pragmatist, he is, in my view, a fully-fledged pragmatist and any attempt to call him a pragmatist in a deeply qualified sense is a mistake. The standard, popular story about the development and founding of pragmatism that gets told is that Dewey dies in 1952, and pragmatism comes to an end a little bit before his death. Pragmatism is America’s philosophy, it is the dominant philosophical orientation in America and elsewhere from the early 1900s up until the end of the World War II, and that’s mainly credited to Dewey and the influence of Dewey’s work. Then, somehow, around the end of the war, for all kinds of interesting reasons, philosophers lose interest in Dewey and become fascinated by some British imports, such as logical empiricism. Pragmatism gets marginalized or dismissed or eclipsed by linguistic analysis, and ordinary language philosophy and the things that are associated with Russell and Moore and Wittgenstein . Pragmatism then lies dormant until the 1980s, when it’s revived by Richard Rorty — notice Rorty, it might seem peculiar to some people, is not on my list. I happen to think that that’s a mistaken understanding of the history and development and fortunes of pragmatism. I think that pragmatism is a philosophical movement that dominates philosophy in America from the early 1900s to the present day, and that Quine sits very prominently in the story. If you understand pragmatism as always having been a set of philosophical disputes among roughly naturalist, empiricist, humanistic philosophers in America, about meaning and value and truth and knowledge and science and enquiry, if you understand that pragmatism has always been a kind of fight, or argument, then I don’t think this kind of Dewey-centric story of how pragmatism developed can quite stand. Yes, that’s a pragmatist or a deeply anti-metaphysical programme. The very thought that there is a separate discipline called metaphysics that somehow underwrites or provides the foundation for empirical knowledge Quine disposes of as James, Peirce and Dewey did. They’re all anti-metaphysicians. Yes, I chose the book particularly for Quine’s two most famous articles. One is called “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and the other is called “On What There Is.” “On What There Is” is a deeply anti-metaphysical essay. In it, Quine is like a guy who is worried about gateway drugs into metaphysics, about metaphysical temptation. He’s concerned with a kind of gateway into metaphysical thinking where one starts puzzling over the kind of sentence that we sometimes call ‘negative existentials,’ for example, “Pegasus does not exist.” Going back to Parmenides and throughout the history of philosophy people have thought a sentence of the sort “Pegasus does not exist” is very, very peculiar because it looks as if it picks out something — Pegasus — and then attributes to that thing the property of non-existence. But how can something that does not exist have any properties? How can you pick out something that doesn’t exist? A lot of philosophers get drawn into metaphysical topics… It’s thinking that there could be things that could not be empirically investigatable, that are not subject to scientific confirmation — like Pegasus. You can’t run an experiment to find out how much Pegasus weighs. Sentences which deny the existence of things commit you, in a funny way, to saying that they do exist, because how else could you talk about them? It’s a standing gateway into metaphysics that Quine wants to put the brakes on. He says, “No. no, no! We’re not going to get messed up with thinking that statements that deny the existence of things commit us to there being those kinds of entities.” What he winds up doing, in a way, is deflating or taking the metaphysical fuel out of our language. In a way, that is the Quinean project, to allow us to speak scientifically in ways that don’t invite metaphysical speculation. So Quine says, “Look, we’re driven to thinking that sentences about Pegasus are strange because we are driven to thinking that the name ‘Pegasus’ has to pick out an entity.” But ‘Pegasus’ is just shorthand for a thing that behaves in a certain way, for the Pegasizer. This is fully in line with the pragmatic maxim, the Peircean idea that the way to understand sentences is to talk about behaviour and activity and action. According to Quine the sentence, “Pegasus does not exist,” is a kind of idiomatic way of expressing the following thought: “Nothing behaves like that, nothing is the Pegasizer, nothing performs those activities, nothing satisfies that description.” Now, when you say the sentence, “Pegasus does not exist” is just a shorthand or colloquial way of saying, “Nothing Pegasizes” the sentence “Nothing Pegasizes” does not seem to invite you, or trick you into thinking you’ve picked out something and then attributed a property to it. It seems to block the metaphysical invitation of the former sentence. And then Quine says, “And by the way, this is what we mean by existence. This is what we mean when we say that things are. What we mean is that we are willing to say that we recognize something as satisfying that description.” Or as Quine emphasizes, in terms of playing a role in our best theories of things. Quine thinks that, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Let me put it another way. Quine thinks that all there is to say about what there is, is to talk about what kinds of things our best theories of the world say there is. If our best theory of the world says that there are atoms, that’s what it means for there to be atoms. If it says there are electrons, that’s all it means for there to be electrons. That’s right, this is a fully pragmatist doctrine. It’s denying that there’s a special area of philosophy called metaphysics that stands above or lords over the sciences. The Quinean view says our philosophical theorizing has to begin with our humanistic activities. Science is one of the really important things that we do, it’s our best tool for understanding who we are and where we are in the world, and whatever metaphysics is — in fact he doesn’t think that there is any reason to call what remains metaphysics — it can’t be understood as something separate from, or that gives marching orders to, science. It’s the other way around. Science, human practices, the practices of human enquiry are where we start and whatever we say under the guise of talking about what there is, that’s always going to take its marching orders from the science. That’s why I think Quine is a fully-fledged, bona fide pragmatist. These are things Peirce could have said."