I thank you for uploading these videos. I belive that hearing the ideas of a particular philosopher directly from that philosopher, is an important experience for every person seriously interested in philosophy.
A.J.Ayer in his book entitled Logical Positivism says that "In the US a number of philosophers like Quine, Nagel, and Nelson Goodman conduct logical analysis in a systematic scientific spirit that is probably closer to the original ideal of the Vienna Circle that anything that is now to be met with elsewhere." In this connection, Ayer lists Quines book, A Logical Point of View as an example that is "especially notable."
@LooksAeterna so to be clear, what you ultimately doubt is the inference from "They allow no place for incursion of influences of outside the physical world"(P2) in conjunction with "There being physical causes, physical explanations in principle for physical events." (P1) to " a person's decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object." (C).
bahramf: Look up, "On the Nature of Moral Values." He wrote very little on ethics aside from that essay. My professor, who studied under Quine, mentioned that his philosophy is primarily epistemologically based. He isn't horrible. His "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" was a rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction which was a major part of epistemological thinking before Quine, that all of the major philosophers had.
lots of Magee and a little bit of Quine! To his great credit, however, Magee is a genius at redigesting and representing things for a TV audience. Anyway, thanks for the video. Very interesting.
Committing himself to the real existence of things like numbers was always one of the more permeable parts of his philosophy and never fit comfortably with his broader naturalist epistemology. Still one of my favorite philosophers of all time.
Although Passmore declared LP dead in 1967, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) paraphrases Mark Twain and says, "reports of its death (LP) are greatly exaggerated". The SEP says that logical empiricism still influences philosophy of science. It also says that LP influences the concept of probability via the objective chance of external events and via widespread acceptance of the Bayesian paradigm.
the choice to adopt one of the other is a pragmatic consideration: "Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity." from "the two dogmas of empiricism". I highly recommend reading this article by the way.
@CathySander: he rejects certain view of logical positivist, but upholds some others, most notably the verification theory of meaning. his holism is inspired by Neurath (who was a positivist). what he dismisses is that there is a clearcut distinction between a concept scheme and world. "Two Dogmas" is directed not against positivism as such but against Caranap in particular. Altogether is not clear whether you can call Quine a positivist, but here surely shares a lot with them
General form of this interview: Magee: What do you think about topic A? Quine: I believe X about topic A. Magee: So, you mean--really--so to say, really and truly, that it is in fact X that you believe about topic A? That, of topic A, you would say "X" if someone were to ask what you believed about it? Quine: That's right.
I think Quine pointed out telling shortcomings of logic which precluded any 'adequate account of logic' Quine's views on logic are curious. Quine was a great logician so presumably he was a lover of logic. And yet his destruction of the analytic/synthetic distinction discredited the realm of the analytic which was the main work area of the logicians, himself included.
Quine is mainly a language philosopher. His problem with the 'why existence' question is not just the science or religious aspects of it, but with the meaning of the question in the language in which the question is expressed. The question may not have a coherent meaning in its language or one may go round and round in the language trying to find answer.
@LooksAeterna ok so, since to avoid further unnecessary misunderstanding i transcribe the relevant passage. "...at the same time the natural scientist, the physicist insists on a closed system. There being physical causes, physical explanations in principle for physical events. They allow no place for incursion of influences of outside the physical world. Given all this, it would seem a person's decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object."
thats how it looks in this video, but his actual reason for calling these sorts of questions pseudo questions is well founded. I won't try to write it here in youtube because its difficult and id probably make a mistake, and also id have to make like 30 posts. but if you are interested in his actual argument regarding these questions you ought to read "on what there is". good luck!
Bryan Magee is just so good at expressing what he means. Quine on the other hand is... it's like... it hurts me trying to listen to him. The odd timed pausing and the vague inexact phrasing - it's totally necessary for Magee to clarify what Quine meant after each sentence. Somebody tell me I'm not taking crazy pills.
I have a deep respect for Quine, and I do recognize that some of his papers are among the most influential works ever written in philosophy, but somehow I find it hard to consider him the greatest philosopher since the 50's. Perhaps it's because of this squinting white-bearded guy called Kripke lurking in the background. When Kripke dies, and all of his unpublished works finally gets released, I'm sure that it's going to have just as massive an impact as "Naming and necessity" did.
@LooksAeterna being connected with stimulations of our sensory organs (not that is connected closely with it, but rather the whole of the currently available theory that mediates the access). in that sense it has is non-empty.
Actually, Quine is a fine prose stylist. Read his paper "On What There Is"; it's a remarkable work of philosophy, clever, funny, and impeccably written.
@LooksAeterna a mixture of holism, dropping an epistemically contentful analytic/synthetic distinction and a mild realism where in play in my arguments though and that is on what quine relies, and that is what why i questioned the epistemic status of (P2). you make it true by convention, in order to do that you need a strong analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine become famous for dropping exactly this. In that case and with holism on bord this principle can only get justification from ultimately
By far the most eminent philosopher appearing on this series and one of the few there to discuss their own ideas but not the best episode. It might have been better to hear McGee to just go on about the ideas of Quine and not bother waiting for approval from the man himself.
@LooksAeterna simpliciter for Quine no matter how hard he denies it there is only mathematics. In the passage you are questioning he doesnt commit himself to the existence of physical entities, he only say that if they (whatever they are) exist and closure holds, mental entities have cannot possible interact with them. So to say in loose terminology this is a functionalist claim. What ever satisfies the properties you expect from physical entities, for his purpose are physical entities.
Oh gee, I just wrote a paper on Quine. TD is supposed to show that there are no analytic truths and the s/y distinction is useless. Interesting.. Quine is one of those philosophers that make me rethink my entire world-view... I mean, most philosophers only make me rethink parts of my theory but people like Quine and Kant, ahh! Not that relevent but.. just my thoughts, I love Quine.
@LooksAeterna an a first note neither (P1) nor (P2) carry with them an ontological commitment to physical objects at all. He rather commits to physical events. So taken thus the inference indeed is not sound, since in (C) he commits to physical object, which didn't appear in the premises. For other work of Quine it is clear though he takes sets of physical events to be his physical objects (that is what i was always trying to point out).
"I will definitely never be able to recommend to follow the extravagant idea that seems to have taken hold of you, which is to fantasize about a universal language." (Francesco Soave, Reflessioni Intorno, 1774)
While rejecting, along with the majority of philosophers and scientist, a mind/body dualism, such as proposed by Descartes and others, Quine seems to hold to a different kind of dualism; what might be termed (although I've never heard it expressed as such) a body/mathematics dualism. Which, it seems to me, he expresses in his comment (paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly), _"I don't hold that there are only physical objects, there are also abstract objects, objects of mathematics that are needed to round out the system of what there is."_ Am I right about this? or can others, maybe more familiar with Quine's philosophy, comment or clarify what Quine was intending to say with this statement. For it seems to me an odd statement, considering Quine's fairly noncontroversial view of mind as a phenomenon arising out of the material, as opposed to something separate and distinct ftom it. The next step, then, in this progression of thought, would seem to be (especially after Russell's, Frege's and other's work on logic and mathematics in the early years of the century), that mathematics arise out of (or is a product or invention of) mind - which, therefore, taking the logic one step back, means that mathematics, in the final analysis, also arises out of the material, as opposed to being something separate or distinct from it. Quine, it seems, would say that man (as mind arising out of the material) discovered mathematics, as opposed to inventing it. Is this still considered a tenable idea in philosophy, science, or, even mathematics? As it seems to involve (imo) an even a bigger leap of faith then holding that everything is material -- considering, for example, much of the work in the field of mathematics that was carried out throughout the century, much of which could be said to argue against mathematics as an independently existing entity somehow "out there" in the world. I'd be interested in hearing others thoughts about this, or if I am maybe wrong in the way I'm viewing Quine's thinking in area.
+rayof 315 You read him correctly. Quine is a realist about abstract objects. See the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Thesis: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Indispensability_argument_for_realism
Immense thanks to flame0430 for making intelligent content available on RUclips. It's nice to hear the great Quine speaking, even if his speech is not as beautiful as his prose.
@LooksAeterna as I stated the exact epistemic status of (P2) is a bit unclear to me, as is by the way your use of the word 'descriptive'. But maybe it is the indeed the same issue. I take (P1) to be a statement of what you call descriptive closure, despite Quine missing out an 'all' in front of "physical events". My understanding of (P1) would then boil down to that possibly we can give 'explanations' to the phenomena in the physical domain restricting our vocabulary to employ
the analytic tradition, generally speaking, seems to believe that what constitutes ontological considerations is the most general from of empirical description, in other words based on strict observation. this is why many of them enter some sort of ontological skepticism. by this token, the ontological character of a song, for example, is reduced to the sound waves or the structure making the experience of listening to the music irrellevant.
Regarding Quine's inference from physical events to physical objects, do physical events presuppose physical objects? For instance, if I talk about an event like an eclipse, does that presuppose objects like the sun and the moon and the earth. Also, is this presupposition like an enthymeme and once it is made explicit, does that make the inference valid?
@LooksAeterna there is surely a trade-off between the technical space RUclips offers and the the space needed to make my case. since i don't want to back the question it is hard to answer this request with a simple statement. Maybe the shorts way to make my case is to criticise your last statement. well, you make sense of the negation operator by switching the truth value, but that doesnt mean that is needs to be necessarily determinate. It can be an intermediate truth value like "perhap",
Quine's difficult speech, though irritating, is a superficial problem. However, the logical errors, as pointed out by ben23 ("so to be clear...") back on pg 9, are very disturbing indeed.
@LooksAeterna to be fair, i personally agree with quine on not seeing the things thus, but if you see them like that tautologies are not empty anymore but can be quite controversial statements after all. it gets relative to interpretations, that i grant easily, but it is not a trivial matter.
@LooksAeterna a fallicous assumption to start here with metaphysics. If you disagree, you owe me an account of what I shall make of existential quantification, and why the standard reading persists in most logic textbooks dealing with classical logic.
@LooksAeterna all your problem with Quine seem to follow from his conception of ontology which is sketched to roughly in here to get the clue. For him for an object to exist, it must be possible to state identity conditions; conditions by which an object can uniquely identified, or by which it can be clearly state whether there is one or more of those things. Mental entities lack these conditions according to him, while for physical object and set they can be stated
Quine was a bad as Descartes: Why arbitrarily choose to stop quining at any given point? Doubt all the way down, until their is nothing left. At least that way you'll be consistent.
But as much as I think Quine is wrong, I don't think he's an idiot. He is not the world's best communicator. His books come across much clearer...but in my videos I always take the moment here and there to point out where i think he's wrong ;)
@LooksAeterna now some though about the quantum case. all lot depends on you attitude about vagueness. but in all cases if start like that, the question arises whether there is any non vague statement at all. As you stated earlier the concept of a physical particle gets into trouble by the results of last century physics (that is no trouble for quine, but for some other less naturalist philosophers). given that and that no clear cut sucessor at all, vaguess on the physical state persists and
To quote the great logician, Dr Hao Wang (Kurt Gödel's confidant) in his book, Beyond Reductionism (pg 8): [Quine and Carnap's philosophies] "fail to give an adequate account of logic (or of mathematics ). This , in my opinion , discredits their views in a basic way in the light of the fact that logic is so central for both of them ." ...And he spends most of his book developing this point. I highly recommend it!
@LooksAeterna add the notion of ontological commitment then the adoption of this conceptional scheme renders the argument sound. I doubt are satisfied with this though, but that is how i would understand him
@LooksAeterna if on the other hand we believe that some notion of particle can be saved, E- Process (the schrödinger evolution) doesnt give us a clear cut answer to where the particle is. Most physicist don't interpret this as an epistemological deficit but as more less metaphysical. if one opts for this option, then there is no fact of the matter where that particle is and this makes bivalence false again, for empirical reasons.
@LooksAeterna ok start with application of occam's razor first. it was. I employed it in a context where there are two rival conceptual schemes: one including physical objects as god's dreams and one where physical object are like the plain positis of physics (what ever they are thus). By your assumption both scheme or if you prefer theories satisfy closure. so they don't differ in the relevant outcomes,
@LooksAeterna now i see what you are on about. conditional on the acceptance of a physical conceptual scheme closure implies, that only physical entities can interact. given that system is thus closed, it is not possible for non-physical entities to interact or change the course of events. acceptence of this forces you to accept some kind of supervenience hypothesis about higher-order events or entities. I would say this is a rather trivial logical inference after all.
@LooksAeterna yep, i think we are through with argument as it occurred in this interview. it would be possible to carry on, since I think he brand of physicalism can be made intelligible. the price for this is quite high since you loose lot of everyday speech like talk of agency and propositional attitudes go over board.
@LooksAeterna well, might be that i didnt answer you initial question, the reason basically that this not even a question Quine has raised or even tried to answer. no matter whether there is a complete physics or not mental entities fail Quines standards of ontology and they play no reasonable role in total science. that is his claim although not made precise here. If clearcut empirical sense could be made of those entities, he would accept them.
As for Magee; he is a very clear interviewer. But he has an urgency to paraphrase everything the interviewed guest says in an exceedingly obvious manner. Ultimately it makes him sound like he's trying to prove himself as a paradigm of clarity, and thus of comprehension with respect to the views being discussed.
@LooksAeterna " Is that an underhanded way of smuggling realism into his philosophy or was that just the proverbial momentary lapse of reason in the limelight ?" There is a certain temptation in me to say that is the second, since by all written evidence of Quine you hardly ever find a statement like (C) and it is not totally unlikely that Magee's questions, that are inspired by another tradition in philosophy, move him to be not cautious enough in his formulations.
@LooksAeterna but without a doubt, one can doubt closure after all, since at least for me it is unclear what the epistemic status of this hypothesis amounts to.
Rational discussion of the existence or nonexistence of immaterial entities is evidently not possible by our intellects since such discussions always degenerate into paradoxes, contradictions, and inconsistencies.
@watayapupuya i was just asking for theory that has not at least been made more intelligible by recent generations of philosophers. If I go through Aristotle's Metaphysic I find a lot of gibberish that is not really made to work with the knowledge we gain on science recently. What is done today is mostly clearing up, what we cannot make sense off with the old blokes. Although concede that Rorty and Searle really don't make the best impression on current day philosophy.
@LooksAeterna the things is about physical entities sense can be made by natural science. Quine strictly follows the best available theory in the special science. that is part of his strict scientific naturalism. though the adoption of abstract entities such as classes makes him a platonist in that field, so he is not materialist in the strict sense. he rather looks out for the minimal ontology (that can be made sense of) necessary to do all of science (and science in a very global sense).
It would seem that empiricism is necessary but not sufficient for the appreciation of an art. This may be why there is no consensus among philosophers as to the role of empiricism in aesthetic experience.
(C) even contains modal vocabulary that Quine would dismiss with awe and even does so later on in this broadcast. the notions of persons and decisions are even less clear, even for non-Quinians. Not to speak of what activity of a physical object is to mean. I take all these as evidence from him to having failed at his choice of words.
I think one reason for Quine's difficulty in speaking is that he is having to instantly simplify very complicated philosophy into a sort of Cliff Notes version for a TV show. This is not an easy thing to do, and in addition he is having to simplify in a manner dictated by the host and not himself.
@LooksAeterna the observational data would be just the same. in those case a pragmatically minded philosopher of science like Quine would prefer the simpler theory (that one with less ontological commitments). And i would say this is perfectly legitimate, since you don't posit any unwarranted entities, but get rid of those that do not do any work in the topic at issue. Yet occam's razor doesn't play any decisive role in our exchange, i just think you missunderstood my use.
@LooksAeterna so back to the real issue. I think the disagreement between you and my Quine, falls back to the discussion of identity criteria that legitimate for Quine the reification of physical entities. as i said one possibility to find those in the presumed interaction. given that closure pretty much looks like who i stated it. Yet as you rightly point out this is only thus according some conceptual scheme you chosen before hand.
@LooksAeterna physical terms plus mathematics. All the relevant interactions can be captured in those restricted terms. interpreting it thus, (P2) becomes a principle of economy for language. Since we can get around with a purely physical language, there is no need to add terms of a fundamentally different nature and in fact it should be avoided. This doesn't forbid to form new terms and expressions within this language to get abreavintions,
You might want to revisit your statement that philosophers aren't stylists. Among some of the greatest stylists of all time rank Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. On the other hand, great thinkers can indeed be poor writers--case and point is Kant, whose majestic thought is certainly not reflected in his bad, very bad actually, prose.
@LooksAeterna actually, if taken at face value Quine is not even a materialist. as a result of his ontological relativity all science is in principle translatable qua proxy functions to set theory. thus actually he is himself committed to an ontology consisting only numbers and thus would rightly be called a pythagorean.
Correct, then again I found that his account for the reason dualism appeared tenable to most people was very weak; not to mention that the premiss itself is quite dubious (most adept scholars on the history of philosophy will decidedly reject that such a dualist picture was predominant before Descartes). That being said, Quine's appeal to the 'primitive' stage of science as explanatory was a materialist cliché at its worst.
Quine, an idiot? HA! If you don't think he's being philosophical enough, you should check out his "Word and Object," a revolutionary book in philosophy of language. In it presents his ideas on meaning, radical translation, linguistic behaviourism, reference, etc. Also see his most famous article, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
@LooksAeterna in other regard as fundamental decision between an idealism or a realism, OR is blunt surely. But yet pragmatism would advise us to not get too early into that question, also since ultimately and that could very well be a Quinian Theorem, those questions aren't determinate in the sense, that we can find a suitable answer. I think those that things weren't at issue in the god's dream vs. plain scheme case, although i expect you to disagree on this.
@LooksAeterna "Not really, it only expresses something about what can be said about the world." I wont take a stance that disagrees with that ultimately, but one can definitely ask why can it legitimately (ignoring vagueness for a moment) something about the work. A natural answer would be that the world is the that way. If it weren't we would use a different logic, maybe one with an additional truth value. that is to my mind a fairly realist reading of logic after all in metaphysical sense.
@LooksAeterna Ok i think we agree that OR doesnt settle the metaphysical debate being idealism and realism and i never intended it for that purpose. My sole claim was, that even in the god's dream world the problem whether there are other minds despite god's just arises again. In fact I would state that wouldnt even count as a version of mentalism at all, but as stated would be a (slightly unorthodox) physicalism. Outside a Quinian framwork one might refute some versions of aprioi physicalisms
@ben23m "(P2) thus always "holds" tautologically and really means nothing." ehm that is an interesting thought, but with Quine I beg to disagree. "p or non-p" is tautology of classical logic. yet it carries with it realist assumptions about how the world is (for some logicians a reason to reject it even). even further in quantum mechanics there are certain statement p for which the tautology doesn't hold. So one could argue that logic, has empirical content
Too many people judge a person's intellignece or intellectual contribution to a field by his speaking ability. Quine is a giant in philosophy.
compared to an ant.
I thank you for uploading these videos. I belive that hearing the ideas of a particular philosopher directly from that philosopher, is an important experience for every person seriously interested in philosophy.
he is obviously a man and is. but that is the limit of my certainty.
A.J.Ayer in his book entitled Logical Positivism says that "In the US a number of philosophers like Quine, Nagel, and Nelson Goodman conduct logical analysis in a systematic scientific spirit that is probably closer to the original ideal of the Vienna Circle that anything that is now to be met with elsewhere." In this connection, Ayer lists Quines book, A Logical Point of View as an example that is "especially notable."
There's much in Quine that I find dubious, but you have to admit that he is a total badass.
@LooksAeterna so to be clear, what you ultimately doubt is the inference from "They allow no place for incursion of influences of outside the physical world"(P2) in conjunction with "There being physical causes, physical explanations in principle for physical events." (P1) to " a person's decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object." (C).
bahramf: Look up, "On the Nature of Moral Values." He wrote very little on ethics aside from that essay. My professor, who studied under Quine, mentioned that his philosophy is primarily epistemologically based. He isn't horrible. His "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" was a rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction which was a major part of epistemological thinking before Quine, that all of the major philosophers had.
lots of Magee and a little bit of Quine! To his great credit, however, Magee is a genius at redigesting and representing things for a TV audience. Anyway, thanks for the video. Very interesting.
Committing himself to the real existence of things like numbers was always one of the more permeable parts of his philosophy and never fit comfortably with his broader naturalist epistemology.
Still one of my favorite philosophers of all time.
You might want to check out Quine's book "Philosophy of Logic" as well.
Although Passmore declared LP dead in 1967, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) paraphrases Mark Twain and says, "reports of its death (LP) are greatly exaggerated". The SEP says that logical empiricism still influences philosophy of science. It also says that LP influences the concept of probability via the objective chance of external events and via widespread acceptance of the Bayesian paradigm.
the choice to adopt one of the other is a pragmatic consideration: "Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity." from "the two dogmas of empiricism". I highly recommend reading this article by the way.
@CathySander: he rejects certain view of logical positivist, but upholds some others, most notably the verification theory of meaning. his holism is inspired by Neurath (who was a positivist). what he dismisses is that there is a clearcut distinction between a concept scheme and world. "Two Dogmas" is directed not against positivism as such but against Caranap in particular. Altogether is not clear whether you can call Quine a positivist, but here surely shares a lot with them
General form of this interview:
Magee: What do you think about topic A?
Quine: I believe X about topic A.
Magee: So, you mean--really--so to say, really and truly, that it is in fact X that you believe about topic A? That, of topic A, you would say "X" if someone were to ask what you believed about it?
Quine: That's right.
I think Quine pointed out telling shortcomings of logic which precluded any 'adequate account of logic'
Quine's views on logic are curious. Quine was a great logician so presumably he was a lover of logic. And yet his destruction of the analytic/synthetic distinction discredited the realm of the analytic which was the main work area of the logicians, himself included.
Quine is mainly a language philosopher. His problem with the 'why existence' question is not just the science or religious aspects of it, but with the meaning of the question in the language in which the question is expressed. The question may not have a coherent meaning in its language or one may go round and round in the language trying to find answer.
magee is such a smoother talker!,
i'd hate to have this guy as a lecturer for too long!~
@LooksAeterna ok so, since to avoid further unnecessary misunderstanding i transcribe the relevant passage.
"...at the same time the natural scientist, the physicist insists on a closed system. There being physical causes, physical explanations in principle for physical events. They allow no place for incursion of influences of outside the physical world. Given all this, it would seem a person's decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object."
thats how it looks in this video, but his actual reason for calling these sorts of questions pseudo questions is well founded. I won't try to write it here in youtube because its difficult and id probably make a mistake, and also id have to make like 30 posts. but if you are interested in his actual argument regarding these questions you ought to read "on what there is". good luck!
Bryan Magee is just so good at expressing what he means. Quine on the other hand is... it's like... it hurts me trying to listen to him. The odd timed pausing and the vague inexact phrasing - it's totally necessary for Magee to clarify what Quine meant after each sentence. Somebody tell me I'm not taking crazy pills.
I have a deep respect for Quine, and I do recognize that some of his papers are among the most influential works ever written in philosophy, but somehow I find it hard to consider him the greatest philosopher since the 50's. Perhaps it's because of this squinting white-bearded guy called Kripke lurking in the background. When Kripke dies, and all of his unpublished works finally gets released, I'm sure that it's going to have just as massive an impact as "Naming and necessity" did.
@LooksAeterna being connected with stimulations of our sensory organs (not that is connected closely with it, but rather the whole of the currently available theory that mediates the access). in that sense it has is non-empty.
Actually, Quine is a fine prose stylist. Read his paper "On What There Is"; it's a remarkable work of philosophy, clever, funny, and impeccably written.
@LooksAeterna a mixture of holism, dropping an epistemically contentful analytic/synthetic distinction and a mild realism where in play in my arguments though and that is on what quine relies, and that is what why i questioned the epistemic status of (P2). you make it true by convention, in order to do that you need a strong analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine become famous for dropping exactly this. In that case and with holism on bord this principle can only get justification from ultimately
By far the most eminent philosopher appearing on this series and one of the few there to discuss their own ideas but not the best episode. It might have been better to hear McGee to just go on about the ideas of Quine and not bother waiting for approval from the man himself.
flame0430
your videos are the best on youtube
@LooksAeterna simpliciter for Quine no matter how hard he denies it there is only mathematics. In the passage you are questioning he doesnt commit himself to the existence of physical entities, he only say that if they (whatever they are) exist and closure holds, mental entities have cannot possible interact with them. So to say in loose terminology this is a functionalist claim. What ever satisfies the properties you expect from physical entities, for his purpose are physical entities.
Oh gee, I just wrote a paper on Quine. TD is supposed to show that there are no analytic truths and the s/y distinction is useless.
Interesting.. Quine is one of those philosophers that make me rethink my entire world-view... I mean, most philosophers only make me rethink parts of my theory but people like Quine and Kant, ahh!
Not that relevent but.. just my thoughts, I love Quine.
@LooksAeterna an a first note neither (P1) nor (P2) carry with them an ontological commitment to physical objects at all. He rather commits to physical events. So taken thus the inference indeed is not sound, since in (C) he commits to physical object, which didn't appear in the premises. For other work of Quine it is clear though he takes sets of physical events to be his physical objects (that is what i was always trying to point out).
i just want to say i voted poor by mistake...
it is absolutely great interview!
sorry
"I will definitely never be able to recommend to follow the extravagant idea that seems to have taken hold of you, which is to fantasize about a universal language." (Francesco Soave, Reflessioni Intorno, 1774)
While rejecting, along with the majority of philosophers and scientist, a mind/body dualism, such as proposed by Descartes and others, Quine seems to hold to a different kind of dualism; what might be termed (although I've never heard it expressed as such) a body/mathematics dualism. Which, it seems to me, he expresses in his comment (paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly), _"I don't hold that there are only physical objects, there are also abstract objects, objects of mathematics that are needed to round out the system of what there is."_ Am I right about this? or can others, maybe more familiar with Quine's philosophy, comment or clarify what Quine was intending to say with this statement.
For it seems to me an odd statement, considering Quine's fairly noncontroversial view of mind as a phenomenon arising out of the material, as opposed to something separate and distinct ftom it. The next step, then, in this progression of thought, would seem to be (especially after Russell's, Frege's and other's work on logic and mathematics in the early years of the century), that mathematics arise out of (or is a product or invention of) mind - which, therefore, taking the logic one step back, means that mathematics, in the final analysis, also arises out of the material, as opposed to being something separate or distinct from it.
Quine, it seems, would say that man (as mind arising out of the material) discovered mathematics, as opposed to inventing it. Is this still considered a tenable idea in philosophy, science, or, even mathematics? As it seems to involve (imo) an even a bigger leap of faith then holding that everything is material -- considering, for example, much of the work in the field of mathematics that was carried out throughout the century, much of which could be said to argue against mathematics as an independently existing entity somehow "out there" in the world.
I'd be interested in hearing others thoughts about this, or if I am maybe wrong in the way I'm viewing Quine's thinking in area.
+rayof 315 You read him correctly. Quine is a realist about abstract objects. See the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Thesis: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Indispensability_argument_for_realism
I always much regretted it that the Unabomber, one of his notable students indeed, never sent HIM a postal parcel...
Immense thanks to flame0430 for making intelligent content available on RUclips.
It's nice to hear the great Quine speaking, even if his speech is not as beautiful as his prose.
@LooksAeterna
I agree with you. I can not see how he could come to this argument.
The way he speaks reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson
The opening theme always reminds me of Spongebob.
How old are you now?
@LooksAeterna as I stated the exact epistemic status of (P2) is a bit unclear to me, as is by the way your use of the word 'descriptive'. But maybe it is the indeed the same issue.
I take (P1) to be a statement of what you call descriptive closure, despite Quine missing out an 'all' in front of "physical events". My understanding of (P1) would then boil down to that possibly we can give 'explanations' to the phenomena in the physical domain restricting our vocabulary to employ
the analytic tradition, generally speaking, seems to believe that what constitutes ontological considerations is the most general from of empirical description, in other words based on strict observation. this is why many of them enter some sort of ontological skepticism.
by this token, the ontological character of a song, for example, is reduced to the sound waves or the structure making the experience of listening to the music irrellevant.
I'd like to second that - thank you
Regarding Quine's inference from physical events to physical objects, do physical events presuppose physical objects? For instance, if I talk about an event like an eclipse, does that presuppose objects like the sun and the moon and the earth. Also, is this presupposition like an enthymeme and once it is made explicit, does that make the inference valid?
@LooksAeterna there is surely a trade-off between the technical space RUclips offers and the the space needed to make my case. since i don't want to back the question it is hard to answer this request with a simple statement. Maybe the shorts way to make my case is to criticise your last statement. well, you make sense of the negation operator by switching the truth value, but that doesnt mean that is needs to be necessarily determinate. It can be an intermediate truth value like "perhap",
this needs more likes :)
Quine's difficult speech, though irritating, is a superficial problem. However, the logical errors, as pointed out by ben23 ("so to be clear...") back on pg 9, are very disturbing indeed.
@LooksAeterna to be fair, i personally agree with quine on not seeing the things thus, but if you see them like that tautologies are not empty anymore but can be quite controversial statements after all. it gets relative to interpretations, that i grant easily, but it is not a trivial matter.
With Quine, Logical Positivism lives. (I don't know if that is good or bad)
@LooksAeterna a fallicous assumption to start here with metaphysics. If you disagree, you owe me an account of what I shall make of existential quantification, and why the standard reading persists in most logic textbooks dealing with classical logic.
@LooksAeterna all your problem with Quine seem to follow from his conception of ontology which is sketched to roughly in here to get the clue. For him for an object to exist, it must be possible to state identity conditions; conditions by which an object can uniquely identified, or by which it can be clearly state whether there is one or more of those things. Mental entities lack these conditions according to him, while for physical object and set they can be stated
Actually, Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism was one of the death knells of logical positivism.
Quine was a bad as Descartes: Why arbitrarily choose to stop quining at any given point? Doubt all the way down, until their is nothing left. At least that way you'll be consistent.
What do his speech patterns have to do with his elucidations surrounding the Web of Knowledge,or synonymy????
Van is the man!
But as much as I think Quine is wrong, I don't think he's an idiot. He is not the world's best communicator. His books come across much clearer...but in my videos I always take the moment here and there to point out where i think he's wrong ;)
@LooksAeterna now some though about the quantum case. all lot depends on you attitude about vagueness. but in all cases if start like that, the question arises whether there is any non vague statement at all. As you stated earlier the concept of a physical particle gets into trouble by the results of last century physics (that is no trouble for quine, but for some other less naturalist philosophers). given that and that no clear cut sucessor at all, vaguess on the physical state persists and
To quote the great logician, Dr Hao Wang (Kurt Gödel's confidant) in his book, Beyond Reductionism (pg 8):
[Quine and Carnap's philosophies] "fail to give an adequate account of logic (or of mathematics ). This , in my opinion , discredits their views in a basic way in the light of the fact that logic is so central for both of them ."
...And he spends most of his book developing this point. I highly recommend it!
@LooksAeterna Rejecting the existence of minds contradicts accepting the existence of mathematical entities?
@LooksAeterna add the notion of ontological commitment then the adoption of this conceptional scheme renders the argument sound.
I doubt are satisfied with this though, but that is how i would understand him
@LooksAeterna if on the other hand we believe that some notion of particle can be saved, E- Process (the schrödinger evolution) doesnt give us a clear cut answer to where the particle is. Most physicist don't interpret this as an epistemological deficit but as more less metaphysical. if one opts for this option, then there is no fact of the matter where that particle is and this makes bivalence false again, for empirical reasons.
@LooksAeterna ok start with application of occam's razor first. it was. I employed it in a context where there are two rival conceptual schemes: one including physical objects as god's dreams and one where physical object are like the plain positis of physics (what ever they are thus). By your assumption both scheme or if you prefer theories satisfy closure. so they don't differ in the relevant outcomes,
Can someone traduce this interview please?
I speak spanish and its difficult to understand.
Thanks!
@LooksAeterna now i see what you are on about. conditional on the acceptance of a physical conceptual scheme closure implies, that only physical entities can interact. given that system is thus closed, it is not possible for non-physical entities to interact or change the course of events. acceptence of this forces you to accept some kind of supervenience hypothesis about higher-order events or entities. I would say this is a rather trivial logical inference after all.
what someone please explain Quines position on competing conceptual schemes
thanks :D
@LooksAeterna yep, i think we are through with argument as it occurred in this interview. it would be possible to carry on, since I think he brand of physicalism can be made intelligible. the price for this is quite high since you loose lot of everyday speech like talk of agency and propositional attitudes go over board.
@LooksAeterna well, might be that i didnt answer you initial question, the reason basically that this not even a question Quine has raised or even tried to answer. no matter whether there is a complete physics or not mental entities fail Quines standards of ontology and they play no reasonable role in total science. that is his claim although not made precise here. If clearcut empirical sense could be made of those entities, he would accept them.
There is one part I did not understand. Why does Quine reject mind/body dualism? Can someone explain that to me. Thanks!!!
As for Magee; he is a very clear interviewer. But he has an urgency to paraphrase everything the interviewed guest says in an exceedingly obvious manner. Ultimately it makes him sound like he's trying to prove himself as a paradigm of clarity, and thus of comprehension with respect to the views being discussed.
try wikipedia, if it's too easy try the stanfrd encyclopedia of philosophy
@LooksAeterna " Is that an underhanded way of smuggling realism into his philosophy or was that just the proverbial momentary lapse of reason in the limelight ?"
There is a certain temptation in me to say that is the second, since by all written evidence of Quine you hardly ever find a statement like (C) and it is not totally unlikely that Magee's questions, that are inspired by another tradition in philosophy, move him to be not cautious enough in his formulations.
Could someone explain why he says Chomsky isn't 'strictly speaking' a philosopher?
@LooksAeterna maybe, but i am not sure at the moment.
@LooksAeterna but without a doubt, one can doubt closure after all, since at least for me it is unclear what the epistemic status of this hypothesis amounts to.
Rational discussion of the existence or nonexistence of immaterial entities is evidently not possible by our intellects since such discussions always degenerate into paradoxes, contradictions, and inconsistencies.
"What is truth," said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer. (Francis Bacon, Essays, 'On Truth') (Bernard Webb, formerly Thinkingbeingone)
@watayapupuya i was just asking for theory that has not at least been made more intelligible by recent generations of philosophers. If I go through Aristotle's Metaphysic I find a lot of gibberish that is not really made to work with the knowledge we gain on science recently. What is done today is mostly clearing up, what we cannot make sense off with the old blokes.
Although concede that Rorty and Searle really don't make the best impression on current day philosophy.
@LooksAeterna the things is about physical entities sense can be made by natural science. Quine strictly follows the best available theory in the special science. that is part of his strict scientific naturalism. though the adoption of abstract entities such as classes makes him a platonist in that field, so he is not materialist in the strict sense. he rather looks out for the minimal ontology (that can be made sense of) necessary to do all of science (and science in a very global sense).
It would seem that empiricism is necessary but not sufficient for the appreciation of an art. This may be why there is no consensus among philosophers as to the role of empiricism in aesthetic experience.
mmmmm!!!!
(mind the intonation, which, alas, you cannot hear in this medium, and that Quine thought we couldn't hear either - but we know better)
Video of Quine? It's a cream dream.
Thanks for the upload!!!
(C) even contains modal vocabulary that Quine would dismiss with awe and even does so later on in this broadcast. the notions of persons and decisions are even less clear, even for non-Quinians. Not to speak of what activity of a physical object is to mean.
I take all these as evidence from him to having failed at his choice of words.
@Enfiteuta
I concur! ;-)
I think one reason for Quine's difficulty in speaking is that he is having to instantly simplify very complicated philosophy into a sort of Cliff Notes version for a TV show. This is not an easy thing to do, and in addition he is having to simplify in a manner dictated by the host and not himself.
@LooksAeterna the observational data would be just the same. in those case a pragmatically minded philosopher of science like Quine would prefer the simpler theory (that one with less ontological commitments). And i would say this is perfectly legitimate, since you don't posit any unwarranted entities, but get rid of those that do not do any work in the topic at issue. Yet occam's razor doesn't play any decisive role in our exchange, i just think you missunderstood my use.
o ponerles subtítulos en inglés.
Or can someone put the subtitutles in english to read?
@LooksAeterna so back to the real issue. I think the disagreement between you and my Quine, falls back to the discussion of identity criteria that legitimate for Quine the reification of physical entities. as i said one possibility to find those in the presumed interaction. given that closure pretty much looks like who i stated it. Yet as you rightly point out this is only thus according some conceptual scheme you chosen before hand.
@Thinkingbeingone
so, most adequate intellects.
@LooksAeterna physical terms plus mathematics. All the relevant interactions can be captured in those restricted terms. interpreting it thus, (P2) becomes a principle of economy for language. Since we can get around with a purely physical language, there is no need to add terms of a fundamentally different nature and in fact it should be avoided. This doesn't forbid to form new terms and expressions within this language to get abreavintions,
You might want to revisit your statement that philosophers aren't stylists. Among some of the greatest stylists of all time rank Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. On the other hand, great thinkers can indeed be poor writers--case and point is Kant, whose majestic thought is certainly not reflected in his bad, very bad actually, prose.
@LooksAeterna actually, if taken at face value Quine is not even a materialist. as a result of his ontological relativity all science is in principle translatable qua proxy functions to set theory. thus actually he is himself committed to an ontology consisting only numbers and thus would rightly be called a pythagorean.
all i wanted to know was why he was saying strictly speaking he wasn't one, there must be a reason
He doesn't seem particularly comfortable; he keeps looking into the camera.
Correct, then again I found that his account for the reason dualism appeared tenable to most people was very weak; not to mention that the premiss itself is quite dubious (most adept scholars on the history of philosophy will decidedly reject that such a dualist picture was predominant before Descartes). That being said, Quine's appeal to the 'primitive' stage of science as explanatory was a materialist cliché at its worst.
I share Quine's position of treat Why questions as meaningless as far as science is concerned
get that man a lozenge!!
Quine, an idiot? HA!
If you don't think he's being philosophical enough, you should check out his "Word and Object," a revolutionary book in philosophy of language. In it presents his ideas on meaning, radical translation, linguistic behaviourism, reference, etc.
Also see his most famous article, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
@LooksAeterna in other regard as fundamental decision between an idealism or a realism, OR is blunt surely. But yet pragmatism would advise us to not get too early into that question, also since ultimately and that could very well be a Quinian Theorem, those questions aren't determinate in the sense, that we can find a suitable answer. I think those that things weren't at issue in the god's dream vs. plain scheme case, although i expect you to disagree on this.
Strange. I never thought Quine would sound so un persuasive in person. There's a wide gap between his argumentative prowess in writing and in speech.
@LooksAeterna "Not really, it only expresses something about what can be said about the world."
I wont take a stance that disagrees with that ultimately, but one can definitely ask why can it legitimately (ignoring vagueness for a moment) something about the work. A natural answer would be that the world is the that way. If it weren't we would use a different logic, maybe one with an additional truth value. that is to my mind a fairly realist reading of logic after all in metaphysical sense.
@LooksAeterna Ok i think we agree that OR doesnt settle the metaphysical debate being idealism and realism and i never intended it for that purpose. My sole claim was, that even in the god's dream world the problem whether there are other minds despite god's just arises again. In fact I would state that wouldnt even count as a version of mentalism at all, but as stated would be a (slightly unorthodox) physicalism. Outside a Quinian framwork one might refute some versions of aprioi physicalisms
Excising? Or obviating?
Is the distinction too subtle for you?
No, he wasn't. He wrote the paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" [I think] to refute some of the claims of the logical positivists.
@ben23m "(P2) thus always "holds" tautologically and really means nothing."
ehm that is an interesting thought, but with Quine I beg to disagree. "p or non-p" is tautology of classical logic. yet it carries with it realist assumptions about how the world is (for some logicians a reason to reject it even). even further in quantum mechanics there are certain statement p for which the tautology doesn't hold. So one could argue that logic, has empirical content