Abstract
In his “Wissenschaftslogik: The Role of Logic in the Philosophy of Science,” Michael Friedman argues that Carnap’s philosophy of science “is fundamentally anti-metaphysical—he aims to use the tools of mathematical logic to dissolve rather [than] solve traditional philosophical problems—and it is precisely this point that is missed by his logically-minded contemporaries such as Hempel and Quine” (385). In this paper, I take issue with this claim, arguing that Quine, too, is a part of this anti-metaphysical tradition. I begin in section I with Russell’s account of scientific philosophy, focusing on its critique of metaphysics and its reliance on logical constructions. I then argue that each of Carnap and Quine take up this call to scientific philosophizing but that they both find Russell’s account of logic wanting. In section II, I first provide an account of Carnap’s critique of metaphysics and its reliance on developments in logic. This is followed by a discussion of his appeal to the analytic/synthetic distinction so as to improve upon Russell’s account of logic. Section III follows this same structure but focuses on Quine. In the end, though, Quine turns not to the analytic/synthetic distinction but to holism to provide an account of logic suitable to scientific philosophy. Carnap had claimed to be “more Russellian than Russell,” and in this final move by Quine I argue that he is “being more Carnapian than Carnap.” I conclude by showing how, contrary to Friedman’s view, Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction does not yield a return to the kind metaphysics that he, Carnap, and Russell all objected to.
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Notes
Friedman does not provide a precise characterization of anti-metaphysics in his (2008) but focuses primarily on Carnap’s rejection of ontological questions as an expression of his anti-metaphysical attitude. In his (2012), Friedman characterizes the rejection of metaphysics more broadly in being a rejection of the idea that philosophy stands outside the sciences. Carnap himself provides something more like this latter characterization of metaphysics in his additional remarks to his (1932), describing metaphysics as “the field of alleged knowledge of the essence of things which transcends the realm of empirically founded, inductive science” (80). I take it that this is roughly the notion of metaphysics that Russell and Quine also object to. In moving from Russell to Carnap to Quine, we see not so much a disagreement over whether traditional metaphysics should be rejected but rather an attempt by the later philosopher to expose where his predecessor had failed to be sufficiently rigorous in his rejection of such metaphysics. We will see that ontology, however, is a central place of divergence among them. Carnap is steadfast in his rejection of ontological concerns as part of metaphysics whereas both Russell and Quine think that ontological questions can be made into scientific questions. There are, of course, divergences the latter two as well, in particular over what sort of ontology meets standards of rigor and clarity found within the sciences.
This again runs contrary to Friedman’s view that what distinguishes Carnap from both Quine and Russell is that only Carnap uses modern mathematical logic to eliminate metaphysical claims from philosophy. Friedman explicitly includes Russell among those who have brought modern logic to bear on traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics; for example in the omitted portion of the quote from p. 395 above. I do not entirely disagree with this view of Russell, but it also neglects the strong anti-metaphysical attitude that also runs through Russell’s philosophy.
This movement extends well beyond just the early analytic tradition and would certainly exclude some early analytic philosophers. For an overview of the scientific philosophy movement, see, for example, Richardson’s (1997). Among the key traits he identifies for this movement are a turning away from metaphysics and towards epistemology; a reestablishment of cooperation between philosophy and the sciences; and a critical attitude towards more metaphysical approaches to philosophy. I think Russell, Carnap, and Quine all exemplify these traits, but it is the last that I will focus on in this paper.
There are three main texts where Russell puts forward his urging of scientific philosophy, all from 1914: “On Scientific Method in Philosophy,” “On the Relation of Sense-data to Physics,” and Our Knowledge of the External World. I focus mainly on the last of these because it is a text that we know both Carnap and Quine read. This has generally been my method throughout. Although I have sometimes appealed to texts that I do not know for certain whether both of Carnap and Quine read it, I have only done so though when Russell perhaps expresses a view particularly clearly here that is also contained in a work that we do know that Carnap and Quine both read.
For this view, see for example (1914a, 27).
He makes this point explicit on p. 19 and elaborates on it further in his second lecture, discussed below.
Russell already suggests the view here in his (1903), for example, in his discussion of the definition of the cardinal numbers in Sect. 108, and also in his discussion of the definition of the real numbers in Sect. 270. I highlight his discussion from (1919) because both Carnap and Quine cite it specifically as inspiring their anti-metaphysical aims in treating both mathematics and the sciences as primarily structural.
I have tried to show in this discussion only that Russell conceives of his project as anti-metaphysical, at least with regard to the metaphysical approaches of past philosophers. His own approach could also be described as metaphysical with its commitment, for example, to sense data. Russell views such metaphysics, however, as coming from within science. We will see in section II that this does not go far enough for Carnap. Quine will see Carnap as going too far, and much like Russell, will not attempt to banish ontology from philosophy. In this sense, Quine may have more affinity with Russell with regard to what a properly scientific philosophy looks like.
Of course, this too might be questioned. The classic attack on sense data theory is in Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”.
Creath has emphasized that acquaintance seems very much like the appeal to Kantian intuition that Russell sought to do away with; see his “Carnap, Quine, and the Rejection of Intuition”.
He is particularly clear in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy that logic is otherwise a substantive science like the empirical sciences: “[L]ogic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features” (169). Although he is not as clear about it in Our Knowledge of the External World, this seems to be his view here as well; see, for example, p. 66.
Again, on this point, see Creath (1990).
Carnap had already read Principia Mathematica in 1919.
See, for example, Friedman’s (1999, Chs. 5 and 6) and Richardson’s (1998). Pincock expresses some reservations about these readings. His (2002) makes the case that Russell was still an important influence for Carnap’s Aufbau, even if not in the traditionally conceived way. For a sympathetic account of Quine’s response to the Aufbau, see Hylton’s (2013).
Carnap expresses this concern specifically about Russell’s philosophical motivations, (1928, Sect. 176), but see also the two sections following this for how he does see realism in relation to what he describes as “construction theory”.
He explicitly cites Russell’s (1919) as emphasizing the importance of structure to science (Sect. 12).
Carnap observes that the outcome of Russell and Whitehead’s derivation of mathematics from logic is to have shown “that mathematics … is concerned with nothing but structure statements” (1928, Sect. 12).
In Sect. 14, Carnap provides a detailed example of how this might work with regard to identifying stations on a railroad map, which are initially presented only as unidentified points connecting the various railroad lines.
I should note that Carnap ultimately says that it is improper to speak even of the constructional essence. Within the constructional system we can still not ask after the object but only after which sentence containing the object sign are true.
Other examples are identity, the self, and causality. Carnap terms all of these “problems of essence.” The discussion of all of them takes place in part 5, “Clarification of Some Philosophical Problems on the Basis of Construction Theory”.
Carnap adopts the maxim as a motto opening the first chapter of his book.
The first point was that Carnap felt that Russell had violated his own maxim by not constructing the heteropsychological realm.
For more on this, see Friedman’s excellent paper, “The Aufbau and the Rejection of Metaphysics”.
Although in his intellectual autobiography he does suggest that tolerance was always at least a part of his philosophical outlook, even if not always a part of his logical outlook (17–18).
For a particularly clear later account of this view see his 1950 “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”.
While the details of Quine’s anti-metaphysics change in important ways over the course of his philosophy, his critical attitude remains constant. We see this view, for example, in his (1936, 102), then, at the height of the debate over analyticity, in his (1951c, 204) and (1954, 401; here, specifically praising Carnap on this point), and finally in his (1992b, 405–406).
At least when the appropriate typing restrictions are in place.
Unlike Russell, Quine interprets the propositional functions extensionally, so basically as classes.
I take it that otherwise we would have a system lacking in sufficient logical depth so as to be able to show the kinds of logical structure involved in mathematics and the sciences. We would have only truth-functional logic.
Quine appeals to these proxy functions in a number of his writings, perhaps most famously in “Ontological Relativity” (55–62). He explicitly draws the structuralist conclusion from them in his 1981 “Things and Their Place in Theories,” though this essay is based on a number of earlier works. The example of “spatio-temporal complement of” appears in various places including From Stimulus to Science (71–72).
In (1981b), he says that the proxy functions bring us “to something strange and different without doing violence to any evidence” (21).
Quine does not require that explications be given as logical constructions, though I take it that this will be the most rigorous form of explication. Carnap’s view here on this is much the same; see Gustafsson (2014, 513–514).
Of course this does not mean that we have no guidance as to where to make revisions to our scientific theory. As Quine goes on to remark, considerations such as conservatism and simplicity come into play in making such decisions. For more on this point, see Matthew Carlson’s (2015) “Logic and the Structure of the Web of Belief”.
This does not make Quine a pragmatist in the sense of the pragmatist school. This is only the sort of pragmatism Quine describes at the end of “Two Dogmas:” “Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leave off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism” (1951b, 46). He later remarked on this that it has led him to be misconstrued as a pragmatist. Quine “was merely taking the word from Carnap and handing it back: in whatever sense the framework for science is pragmatic, so is the rest of science” (1991, 397).
The quote from Quine is from his introduction to “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” (20).
In both his (2012) and (2006), Friedman takes Quine, and particularly his foray into nominalism, as the target of much of Carnap’s (1950) “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”.
This need not be the empiricism of the British empiricists, which Friedman says Quine is committed to and that he also says Quine mistakenly attributes to Carnap (2006, see, for example, 41–43). It need only be the minimal empiricist assumption that Quine lays out in his Pursuit of Truth “that our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors” (19). Neither Quine nor Carnap think that anything like mystical intuition or acquaintance, telepathy, or clairvoyance give us information about the world, though Quine, at least, is explicit, given the fallible and corrigible nature of science, that these could become options in the future course of science (1992a, 21).
For more on this reading of Quine, see Lugg’s (2012).
In earlier versions of this paper, I had not realized that Quine himself describes his critical attitude towards the analytic/synthetic distinction as being more Carnapian than Carnap. I only meant to play on Carnap’s claim of being more Russellian than Russell. I thank Gary Ebbs for pointing this out to me. Quine’s full comment is also interesting in that he says that his criticism emerges from a perspective that he and Carnap shared, a point I have been trying to make throughout this paper: “Why was I doubtful [about analyticity]? Well, it was really, it seems to me the sort of attitude, the sort of discipline that Carnap shared and that I owed, certainly, in part to Carnap’s influence: I was just being more Carnapian than Carnap in being critical in this question” (1994, 154).
In his (2014, 156), Hylton describes Quine’s view as metaphysics naturalized.
A rejection of metaphysical claims as meaningless seems also to be in the spirit of how Quine describes his own adoption of Wittgenstein’s method of philosophy as dissolving rather than solving philosophical problems, or of showing certain problems “to be in a sense unreal; viz., in the sense of proceeding only from needless usages” (1960, 260).
He attributes this view to Richard Schuldenfrei in his “Quine in Perspective,” Journal of Philosophy 69, (1972), 5–16.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2014 joint meeting of the American Philosophical Association and the Association for Symbolic Logic and at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy. I thank audiences at those events for their comments, especially Erich Reck and Paul Roth. I also thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. And as always, I thank Haewon and John.
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Morris, S. Scientific Philosophy and the Critique of Metaphysics from Russell to Carnap to Quine. Erkenn 85, 773–799 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0049-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0049-x