Abstract
According to a growing consensus in the secondary literature on Quine, the judgment Quine makes in favor of the nominalism outlined in “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism” (Goodman and Quine (1947)) is in tension with the naturalism he later adopts. In this paper, I show the consensus view is mistaken by showing that Quine’s judgment is rooted in a naturalistic standard of clarity. Moreover, I argue that Quine late in his career is committed to accepting one plausible reading of his judgment in 1947. In making these arguments, I draw attention to a version of naturalism that misreadings of Quine have prevented philosophers from appreciating, and thereby articulate and clarify a version of naturalism I recommend philosophers investigate today.
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Notes
See, for example, Quine (1939a). In Quine (1939a), he says: “nominalism can be formulated thus: it is possible to set up a nominalistic language in which all of natural science can be expressed” (1939a, p. 708). I take this formulation to be a consequence of the more neutral formulation I provide plus Quine’s recommendation to formulate what we take to be true in a language that can meet the purposes of natural science.
Quine accepts other positions one might call “nominalism” throughout his career; see Parsons (2014). I also will not discuss the finitism Quine, Tarski, and Carnap pursued, as documented in Frost-Arnold (2013), since my aim is to clarify Quine’s remarks about nominalism in “Steps” and (1946) that have led many authors to judge his views are un-naturalistic.
Frost-Arnold comes to the same conclusions in (2013, p. 34).
Here and in “Steps” I do not read Quine as using “a posteriori consideration” in the philosophical sense of a consideration justified by sensory experience. Quine is saying that our experience in working in set theory shows that the paradoxes of set theory require artificial solutions; hence, our experience with set theory provides a consideration in favor of rejecting Platonism. He thus uses “a posteriori consideration” in the sense of a consideration arising from our experience with something, in an ordinary sense of ‘experience’. Another reason to doubt he uses it in a philosophical sense is that Quine would have realized that paradoxes of set theory and their solutions would according to philosophical tradition be a priori, not a posteriori.
Because Quine only seriously investigates physical versions of nominalism, I will not go into what reasons, if any, Quine gave in favor of mental versions of nominalism.
“We settled for a formalistic account of mathematics, but still had the problem of making do with an inscriptional proof theory in a presumably finite universe” (1986, p. 26).
See also (1960 pp. 3–4).
As quoted above, Quine says that “if clarity can be ascribed to things as well as to words, then bodies are things at their clearest.” While his claim here is conditional, his claim on the next page that they are “the paradigmatic objects, clearer and more perspicuous than others” shows that he is endorsing the clarity of things.
See Quine (1981a, p. 15).
Ebbs notes this passage in (2016, p. 35).
I am now in a position to interpret Quine’s remark in Quine (1960) that “For consistency with my general attitude early and late, [the opening sentence of “Steps”—“We do not believe in abstract entities”] needs demotion to the status of a mere statement of conditions for the construction at hand.” (p. 243, fn. 5). His attitude “early and late” was that nominalism had some reason in favor of it given the Predictive Constraint is met; by (1977), one such reason is provided by the standard of clarity. Accepting such a view does not require failing to believe in abstract objects, since the Predictive Constraint must be met. I suggest he is saying in (1960) that he would re-write “Steps” in a more cautious way that talks about reasons one might give to accept the nominalism they outline. That is how he writes the 1946 lecture—he talks about the prejudices of “the nominalist” and how “the nominalist” must meet the Predictive Constraint. However, as his letter to Carnap in 1947, his 1937 lecture, and Quine (1977) show, that does not mean he does not hold the Modest Clarity View “early and late.”
See e.g. Carnap (1937).
In his 1947 letter to Carnap quoted above, he says: “As you know, I am not satisfied that a clear general distinction has yet been drawn between analytic and synthetic” Quine and Carnap (1990, p. 409).
See Hylton (2014) for examples. Hylton there argues that Quine has no philosophically interesting explication of ‘nonsense’ or ‘meaningless’. Whether or not Hylton is right, Hylton would agree with me that Quine sometimes says that a word or sentence not translatable into a language for science is meaningless with respect to that language—see Hylton (2014, p. 128).
Ebbs also notes this passage in (2016, p. 33).
See (1997, p. 65).
See (1997, pp. 205–238).
This shows that a simpler version of Parsons’ argument is plausible. Setting aside his views on Quine’s desire to explain the meaning of mathematics, Parsons could be read simply as arguing as follows: given the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction, the standards we can use to justify accepting abstract objects are no different from the standards we can use to justify accepting any other kind of object; thus, Quine’s rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction entails rejecting his view in “Steps.” This argument is plausible if we read Quine’s view in “Steps” as the Sufficient Clarity View, since it seems to require Quine to ignore the role that other standards applicable throughout the sciences play. As the next paragraph above shows, I do not think this shows the Sufficient Clarity View is un-naturalistic. Moreover, one cannot run the same argument against the Modest Clarity View, since Quine thinks the standard of clarity also provides us some reason to accept certain theories in all the sciences.
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Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at the 2017 Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy conference in Calgary, Alberta. I thank Vera Flocke, Peter Hylton, and Sander Verhaegh for their comments. I also thank David Fisher, Timothy Perrine, Joan Weiner, and anonymous referees for their comments on drafts of this paper. Special thanks go to Gary Ebbs, whose advice on drafts of this paper and encouragement during the writing process were invaluable.
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Smith, J.A. Quine’s Intuition: Why Quine’s Early Nominalism is Naturalistic. Erkenn 85, 1199–1218 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0073-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0073-x