Word and Object

"That was a great move. At the time I didn’t know how important it was going to be, but it certainly shaped my life. I arrived at Harvard the year that Word and Object —the first book on my list—came out. Quine taught the book, so I could not have arrived at a better time. My classmates were also extraordinary. They included Thomas Nagel and David Lewis. There I was, a nineteen-year-old sophomore, thinking, ‘Ooh, this is fast. I’m in fast company here.’ I struggled to master the material, but it changed my life. My head is filled with almost entirely happy memories of Ryle. I thought he was a wonderful teacher in a very different way. He never really argued with me. It was like punching a pillow. I didn’t think I was learning anything from him. He wasn’t hammering me with objections the way I expected. I did my dissertation with him. When, on the eve of submitting it, I compared it to an earlier draft, I could see his hand was all over it. He’d had a tremendous influence on my way of thinking, my way of writing, that I had not appreciated. It was almost subliminal, but he set a wonderful example. He hated what I call ‘phisticuffs.’ That’s right, yes. In his book Philosophical Explanation , Bob Nozick says that some philosophers seem to want an argument in which if you accept the premises and don’t accept the conclusion, you die. Their goal is to write the argument that makes their opponents’ heads explode. The alternative is using thinking tools of all kinds: thought experiments or intuition pumps, examples, arguments. You need the arguments. You need to keep everything consistent, but arguments play a background policing role that I think a lot of philosophers don’t fully appreciate. They think that through all the examples and imaginative scenarios they’re going to Euclidize philosophy and thought. The topics that philosophy deals with are not like Euclid’s geometry. There are almost no bright lines, almost no indubitable truths or axioms. You have to learn as a philosopher to expect vagueness at the penumbra on just about every concept. In the end, you have to learn not to be sucked into the phisticuffs involved in counterexample mongering and shoring up the definition. “I wanted to know how the mind works” In my collection of eponymous definitions, The Philosophical Lexicon , one of the earliest terms in it, and one of my favorites, is ‘to chisholm away at a definition’ (after Roderick Chisholm). This is where you start with a definition, and somebody proposes a counterexample, so you tweak your definition to rule out that counterexample. They come up with another counterexample, and you keep revising the definition. Many philosophers used to do business that way, and almost nothing was learned from that. It deserves the oblivion in which it now rests. What you learn is this is not a good way to do philosophy. I think J. L. Austin was a good writer too, but yes, they are few and far between. Both Quine and Ryle. I don’t think either one of them ever wrote a boring sentence. They wrote baffling, sometimes perplexing, initially outrageous sentences. I wanted to know how the mind works. I wanted to know what consciousness and experience are. I discovered that my fellow graduate students in Oxford thought this was an armchair philosophical question, and it isn’t. They were blithely—one might even say proudly—ignorant about the brain and about psychology. I wonder how you think you’re going to know about the mind if you don’t look at the best science. In those days, back in the 60s, the topic of consciousness was forbidden in psychology and neuroscience unless you were an emeritus professor of neurology. Then you got to write a book where you summed up your life’s work and waxed philosophical. Most of that stuff’s dreadful. I was lucky I got into the field at a time when philosophers in general were entirely ignorant of these areas. Even though I was partly ignorant myself and an autodidact, I knew more than they did. I also had the benefit of talking to scientists who were delighted and surprised to find I was a philosopher who actually wanted to learn something. They were used to philosophers who laid down the law and told them what was wrong with their theories. Many analytic philosophers seemed to think that philosophical confusions were only the problems of lay people, that scientists didn’t have philosophical confusions. Scientists are as easily seduced and baffled and dumbfounded by philosophical questions as everybody else. I have taken a lot of time to try to help them out of their philosophical quandaries and show them that their thinking is philosophically naïve. That’s been a large part of my effort over the years. Exactly. Some of my colleagues have been comically arrogant in talking to the scientists they know, and so they come off as fussbudget, know-nothing smarty-pants, and they’re ignored. The contempt in which philosophy is held by many scientists is unsettling. It’s something that I’ve had to deal with my whole professional life. I’ve been lucky to find the scientists who recognized that they had philosophical problems they needed help with. It’s been a great joy to see, in the last few decades, the scientists coming around and saying, ‘Let’s see what these philosophers are doing. They seem to be making some progress here. They seem to be able to help us.’ That’s a very good feeling. I’d put it even more strongly. Even mathematicians need a community of fellow mathematicians. Take Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Even he couldn’t be sure he had proved it until he got the acquiescence of all the other mathematicians who went over it with a fine-toothed comb and fixed some little mistakes that there were in it in the first place. Finally, they agreed. Nobody in the world would know whether Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat’s Last Theorem until that consensus emerged from that community. His book had just been published. It was the chief textbook, along with some work of Carnap’s, and others. In fact, I had a very delicious experience shortly before Quine’s death. I was going through a box of old papers, and I found my spiral-bound notebook of notes from that 1960 course, together with a copy of the syllabus. I decided I would do a seminar, recreating his course almost forty years later. I was having lunch with him at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and I said, ‘I found my old course notes, and I’m going to give a seminar.’ Quine said, ‘Would you like me to come?’ I said, ‘Oh, yes!’ He didn’t come to every meeting, but he came to about half of them. It was an evening seminar. I’d pick him up at his home on Beacon Hill. It was a good time for him to do this because his wife, Marge, was dying. It got him out of the house, and it gave him the chance to get back into action a little bit. It was a moving experience for me. The students lapped it up, but they were unsympathetic, in some ways, to the fact that when they questioned him on certain points, he said what he’d said back in 1960. I said, ‘Yes, he’s an old man and he’s smart enough to realize that he shouldn’t tamper with the thing he worked on at the height of his powers. He shouldn’t betray his own legacy by venturing novel twists or conceding points. He should probably stick to his guns, and that’s what he’s doing, and it’s fun to watch.’ That’s true. I just went through my dog-eared, margin-commented copy that’s over sixty years old, in preparation for this. I find that a lot of his sentences are very arch, and he wanted to show off his linguistic competences and his artistry. There are wonderful turns of phrase and vivid uses of terms. When I went off to graduate school, I thought I was the village anti-Quinian; then I got to Oxford and found out I was the village Quinian. I accepted more of what he believed than anybody else in Oxford, but I had my disagreements with him. This is what makes him one of my heroes, because you need somebody to bounce off. There’s one passage in that book which threw down the gauntlet to me. That’s where he says that Franz Brentano argued that there’s no way of reducing intentional language (intentional language means talk about beliefs and desires and propositions) to the language of the material world. This was the Brentano thesis of the irreducibility of the mental. Quine wrote: “One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano’s, is the second.” Bingo! I went after that. I was saving intentionality, not Brentano’s way—I was just as strong a naturalist as Quine—but Quine and I both agreed there was no reducing intentional language to the language of physics or the mechanistic language of biology. You didn’t have to reduce it; you had to understand it as its own realm and understand the rules under which it operated. It took me a decade to get clear about this. In 1971, I published a paper titled “Intentional Systems, ” and that was the basic move in my career. No. Going through it the other day, I found that Quine had a lot of fish to fry with people working on aspects of logic that loomed very large then and that don’t loom as large now—thanks, in part, to the work of all the books on my list. He had to shock the philosophical world with his amazing doctrine of the indeterminacy of radical translation, which is a key move for Quine. It’s the one that says, ‘If you think there’s an ultimate fact objectively knowable about what something means, you’re wrong. Meaning is always relative to interpretation.’ In principle, you could have two different translations of one language into another, which fit all the facts you can gather scientifically but which differ in the truth values put on them, in some senses. I may be the only person in the world who really accepted, in its strongest form, Quine’s theory of the indeterminacy of radical translation. Donald Davidson, one of his students, accepted a version of it, but it was not as radical as the version that I accepted. Absolutely. I spent years defending the indeterminacy of radical translation and trying to come up with increasingly better examples of what worked and what didn’t, and why. In my early work, there are several papers that look at that: “Brain Writing and Mind Reading,” “Beyond Belief,” and “The Intentional Stance.” Looking through Word and Object a couple of days ago, I came across a nice example. He said, consider the sentence “Neutrinos lack mass.” Now, translate that into a jungle language, like Pirahã (a language spoken by an Amazonian tribe). When you think about what’s involved, you begin to realize what the principle of the indeterminacy of radical translation is. In the real world, we can almost always count on there being a practically best translation. But we should not read that as the discovery of the translation; we should realize that this is just the best. I have my little Quinian crossword puzzle. It’s simply a four-by-four square of words. There are two solutions to the crossword puzzle. It’s incredibly difficult to put together a crossword puzzle that has two good solutions. The question is: which is the right one? I deliberately made it so that neither one of them was clearly better than the other. In normal translation—of bills of lading, newspaper reports, and histories of the Roman Empire—there are too many constraints to come up with two radically different translations that aren’t trivial. It’s important to recognize that. Don’t think of translation finding the inner essence of meaning. Quine called that the museum myth of meaning, and it is a myth. It still has an incredible hold on many of the people that work in the philosophy of language. My friend and former colleague, Mark Richard, has a recent book called Meanings as Species, and it’s lovely. He’s finally seen the evolutionary light. Hail to Mark for doing that. Reading his book, I’m amazed at the effort that’s required of him to get his colleagues in the Propositional Attitudes Task Force world to take him seriously. It’s still entrenched."