Re: Quine and Carnap on ontology -- with Grice thrown in for good measure

Speranza

In "Quine and Carnap on Ontology," Jones writes:

"This is rather rambling, and what I say about Quine is speculative and probably not entirely correct, but I'm posting anyway. After complaining about Quine's "On What There is" being diametrically opposed to Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (and I was thinking of it as the third in a triumvirate of Quinean oppositions to the core of Carnap's philosophy, the other two being the analytic/synthetic distinction and modal logic) the words "Ontological Relativity" popped up in my head, by way of reference to a contribution of Quine's in this area which I have never actually seen."

It is a good keyword: "Ontological Relativity". Thanks for reminding us about it.

Jones:

"I searched my little philosophical library and discovered that I really did not have a copy, and decided to have a look when next I visit the British Library.
(and also to get Code from PGRICE, no longer readable on google books, and the journal in which Grice on Aristotle appears). However, notwithstanding my never having read the paper, just the sight of a few lines of commentary suffices to change my perception of Quine on this topic. It seems that though "On What there is" seems contrary to Carnap, "Ontological Relativity", apart from being naturalistic rather than formalistic, is on the same lines as Carnap, i.e. it is relativistic; ontology is relative to language."

These are good points. From what I recall, this had an influence on Davidson. It is the point about the "Gavagai", etc. that Quine also develops in "Word and object". He was into defending this indeterminacy, as it were, at various levels. Ontological relativity, ontological indeterminacy? The issues are not exactly equivalent, but it may impinge on this: we say 'ontological relativity'. But how much of it is 'epistemic' indeterminacy? For a speaker S, of a language L, the things may be 'absolute' enough. It's only when someone, a metaphysician, say, tries to describe the ontology of L. He finds that various schemes are possibly. He infers, wrongly, that there is 'ontological relativity' involved.

Jones:

"That also makes it broadly similar I would guess, to Grice, for he had a relaxed liberal attitude to ontology, and one might perhaps think he allowed relativity to context not just language (which I'm sure the other two could be stretched to as well). It may be worth exploring this a little further for we are here saying something about absolute metaphysics, i.e. that ontology is not a part of it, ontological claims are supposed to be relative rather than absolute."

----- This reminds of a gem I once read: Warnock, "Metaphysics and Logic" (repr. in Flew). VERY GRICEIAN! (It is an OLD paper, dated 1950s, I think). But Warnock, like Grice, would like to be careful. He considers ONLY, the operator (Ex) and its vernacular counterpart, "some", and he is having in mind Quine. Warnock wants to say that a claim to existence may NOT be present in all 'there is', or (Ex) formulae. "Tigers exist", for example, he finds one of the most otiose thing to say in English. And so on. I discussed that bit when I was into considering the 'seven' formal devices that Grice lists as generating implicatures of note. "Some" being one of them. Note that 'some' (or (Ex)) formulae are not truth-functional. But in the case of these formulae, it is not just the relatively speaking relatively simple point by Quine that it all boils down to what values we accept for 'x'. For our talk (and thus, ontology) of 'there is' is PRETTY COMPLICATED. "There is beauty, and it is in the eye of the beholder". In this case, the values over which 'x' ranges are complex. It is a second-order statement. "There are a few pictures at the Louvre I find PARTICULARLY nice" also involves a second-order, seeing that 'nice' does not work as "dark", or "blue". Dark and blue are ways things are, but 'nice' applies to our perceiving, say, a particularly blue thing as 'attractive' or appealing to us. Aesthetic concepts (like 'nice', then) involve a special ontological framework (Sibley discusses this -- he belonged to the Warnock-Grice school). And so on.

Jones:

""On What there is" is perhaps ambivalent, rather than clearly opposite to the later paper (which I haven't read, still). It certainly seems antithetical to Carnap, because it is about "ontological commitment" and it is easy to think that that is exactly what Carnap denies when he distinguishes between internal and external questions and holds that a positive answer to an internal ontological question should not be confused with assent to the apparently relevant but actually meaningless external question. But if we read it in this way then Quine the logical empiricist almost comes out as a Platonist. My feeling is that the origins of this paper come from his analysis of Russell's "no class theory". Russell introduced the idea of "incomplete symbol" which appears in his theory of descriptions (in "On Denoting") but which applies also to his notation for classes in Principia Mathematica. Quine provides, in his "Set Theory and Its Logic" an analysis of exactly how much mathematics you can achieve by the use of "incomplete symbols" to talk as if classes exist without actually assuming the existence of classes. The disadvantage of this technique if you take it seriously is that, by hypothesis, these things that look like classes as far as the notation is concerned don't actually exist, and therefore are not in the range of bound variables (after all, existence, in modern logic, is just a quantifier, the things which exist are just the things in the range of the existential quantifier). In this context Quine is using the question whether or not you want the "class" to be in the range of quantification as a test for whether it can properly be called a virtual class or incomplete symbol. He is investigating what can be done with few things in the range of quantification."

I loved your exegesis, and it's most likely right. From what I recall, Quine's PhD at Harvard was v. much into all that, and possibly his first love _was_ Russell.

From what I recall, he does wax anti-Platonic at least at one point in "On what there is" where he refers to the 'beard of Plato' that the razor by Occam is supposed to cut, but I should revise that! --

From what I recall, his example is "Pegasus", and indeed

x pegasises.

comes out as something sensible to say (on occasion). I am told that the logician R. Martin called his cat "Pegasus" just to refute Quine.

---- But surely there are complications with the 'what-there-is' criterion (of x) when it comes, to use Jones's example:

------ classes per se.

and

-- universalia at large. For Quine would admit that 'being Pegasus' is now treated as a 'universal' (a predicate) which ranges over x, y, z. We look at our universe of discouse and we don't see any flying horse, so we conclude that 'nothing pegasises.' We may still, alla Grice in "Reply to Richards", want to consider empty classes ('vacuous names and descriptions'). Recall the subtleties brought by Grice in "Vacuous Names" that Jones has admirably identified and expanded on in his pdf document. "There is Pegasus". "Something is a flying horse". "There exists a flying horse", and so on. (Grice deals with these in term of syntactic scope distinctions, but various other approaches are conceivable, and Jones have dealt with some of them).

Jones:

"Quine conducts this analysis in the context of set theory, and its relevance to Principia Mathematica remains to be established. It is now generally accepted that Russell's no-class theory does not eliminate classes in the way that they would be eliminated if only virtual classes were admitted in set theory. This is because Russell's theory of types does have a complete hierachy of types of propositional functions, which, apart from not being extensional, are logically similar to sets. Russell's incomplete symbols in this case allow classes to be eliminated in favour of propositional functions, rather than eliminated altogether. So Russell's ontology is almost as rich as Zermelo set theory, but it just happens that the things in it are mostly functions not sets. The effect is that the limitations Quine illustrates on what can be done with virtual classes in set theory do not apply to their use in Russell's theory of types. Russell's ontological parsimony (at roundabout the time of Principia) was not limited to the "no class" theory. He followed up with his philosophy of logical atomism, which is more explicitly metaphysical."

I loved that! On top of that, he was an empiricist to the backbone, as I recall. And one which ended up influencing Oxford more than its share. Since Ayer was in love with the empiricism of Russell (what _things_ are 'sense data'? and G. A. Paul, one of Grice's group, and his reply to: "Is there a problem about sense data?").

Jones:

"As well as the distinction between real classes and virtual classes, Russell talks about logical fictions."

I think he was quoting Bentham?

"When he considers how to apply modern logic to science a key idea is the idea of a "logical construction"."

A lovely keyword that reappears in Grice, via Broad. Since Grice is defending, strongly, a 'logical construction' (versus pure ego, or disguised description) approach to "I" statement ("Personal identity"). What kind of metaphysics is implied, Grice asks, when one says,

"I was hit by a cricket ball."

What does "I" stand for? What is the value of x

(Ex) x was hit by a cricket ball.

He ends up suggesting that "I" refers to mnemonic states in chains of them, alla Locke. This is pure empiricism, in that he does not consider the extension of the _body_ -- just the memories of a thinking subject. He was possibly right. He does note that "I" sometimes seems to refer to just "my body" ("I fell from the stairs"), and so on. He wrote this in 1941, and one of his moving examples (!) was: "I will be fighting soon", where "I" is like a 'combo', he feels, of mind-AND-body (or soul, if you must). And so on.

Jones:

"So the idea is that complex objects are logical constructions from atomic entities of some kind (perhaps material atoms, perhaps sense data)."

Perhaps sense data, indeed. J. O. Urmson, one in Grice's group, was fascinated with this. He wrote a little book which was published by the OUP, "Philosophical analysis between the two wars", which is all about atomism. From what I recall, he seems to have seen Russell's empiricism of sense-data as fluent and sophisticated enough, while it was _Witters_'s (or Wittgenstein's) atomism he found pretty simplistic. He had a good example or two there. The atomism of:

"He took off his trousers and went to bed" p & q
"He went to bed and took off his trousers"

They depict the same state of affairs. The 'atoms' are just two, and the 'and then'-implicature of temporal succession is always cancellable ("But I do not mean to imply he did that in that order".) I was always fascinated by that example in that, in the original Urmson context (Grice will go on to use the same example, in "Presupposition and conversational implicature", but not in the WoW reprint) Urmson cares to consider the metaphysical implications. He then expands it to "if".

What sort of metaphysics, or ontology, is the one that one commits when one uses "if". He, like Grice, and zillions, think 'if' is only truth-functional. So the 'atom' "p" and the atom "q" then get combined. But Strawson and zillion others would disagree and allow for a different metaphysics, where the 'atoms' are not just truth-functionally correlated. There is an element of 'inferrability' that Strawson suggests is _entailed_ (or strictly, 'conventionally implicated') by "if p, q", that is NOT implicated by truth-functional equivalences of this. And so on.

Jones:

"These logical constructions yield logical fictions, but this does not mean that we do not need to have them in the range of the quantifiers. So incomplete symbols might possibly count as logical fictions, but they don't by any means exhaust the logical fictions, many of which (like propositional functions in general) are in the range of quantifiers. If we read Quine here as criticising Russell's beliefs about what can be achieved with incomplete symbols, then the criticism fails in two ways. Firstly because what you can do with incomplete symbols is not independent of context, Russell could manage without classes in the context of his type theory, even though Quine could not in a first order set theory (because he has no alternative ontology). Secondly, we may observe that Russell no more than Carnap believes that the range of the quantifiers has the metaphysical significance which Quine seems to suggest. Russell is happy to quantify over logical fictions, and presumably does not think that logical fictions are "real". Carnap goes one step further in denying that the metaphysical question is meaningful (let alone relevant)."

This above was excellent. The way Jones identified the main issues and provided questions to them.

Jones goes on:

"Carnap's step here is widely misunderstood, but I think should be regarded as possibly his most important contribution to metaphysics, for I know of no previous philosopher who considered it metaphysical even to allow that the questions (e.g. absolute, external. questions about existence) have an answer. This connects us with Carnap's "Principle of Tolerance". In "On What there Is", the alleged ontological commitment involved (let us suppose) in the use of a language, means that someone can be accused of inconsistency for using two languages whose ontological commitments are incompatible. It is this kind of accusation of inconsistency which, according to Carnap, provoked his principle of tolerance. As a graduate student he recalls discussions with friends in which he would use (say) materialistic or idealistic language depending on who he was talking to. He was then criticised by some for inconsistency. The idea is that you either are a materialist or an idealist. Whichever you are you must not use the language of the other, for that entails assent to multiple incompatible metaphysical ontologies."

I liked that. From what I recall, it had an influence in the USA (and Dummett!) via Sellars, and other empiricists. For indeed, are we being phenomenalist or physicalist in our language of choice? Grice would think that the 'syntax of illusion' (his phrase, but others as well) is more complex than that. It seems that the language (and syntax) not of 'material-object' (physicalism) but of sense data (idealism) is pretty complex. Grice was fascinated by ways one level (or stratum, to use Waissman's wording) entails the other.

"The pillar box seems red to me."

"It looks to me as if the pillar box is red."

and so on.

What would be a PHYSICALIST claim at this point? Grice is a Lockean, so

'x is red'

would not count, since we are having secondary qualities involved. So, it seems that the 'implicatures' of tolerance are many and varied.

--- (Dummett, in Truth and Other Enigmas, which includes some early pieces, elaborates on physicalism vs. phenomenalism in terms of the language of perception, and such).

---

Jones:

"Carnap's principle of tolerance is just the rejection of this point of view, the relativisation of metaphysics (which of course, once relativised may no longer be called metaphysics, and of course is not counted as metaphysics by Carnap, because it is just a working out of the semantics of the language and hence of necessity de dicto rather than de re). As to "The City of Eternal Truth", where are these to be found in ontology. After all this relativisation what room do we have for ontological absolutes, are there any necessary truths in ontology?
Well, the obvious candidates is questions of consistency.
Even if any ontology were possible, not every description of an ontology is consistent.
The natural context in which the most difficult questions of this kind are addressed is set theory, where the relative consistency of large cardinals is considered.
This is just the preferred language in which such questions are considered, and questions about the consistency of arbitrary logical systems (and their underlying ontologies) are generally answered by reduction to set theory.
If we argue that such questions are "absolute" in some sense, does that make them metaphysics rather than just logic?"

No, just logic!

This reminds me of Daniel Vanderveken and John Searle. I was, elsewhere, discussing their book and we found that Vanderveken just applied set-theory to all the machinations (if that's the word) by Searle. The result is a success! So, indeed, set-theory is all that a philosopher needs, sometime! And so on. But more later, I hope. Cheers.