Hilary Putnam on Quine & Ontology

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Hilary Putnam on Quine & Ontology

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Күн бұрын

In American Philosopher #31, Hilary Putnam explains and critiques two aspects of W.V.O. Quine's view on ontology as well as a similar view held by G.E. Moore in ethics.
Interview, music, and video by Phillip McReynolds

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@DanaGarrett 11 жыл бұрын

Great synopsis of Quine's thought. I agree with with Putnam. Ontological commitments to abstract, causally-inert (perfect expression) entities are too much to chew. Still, Quine had such a singular and great mind. Some of his books were so compelling I reread them.

@ZKris-rm6cw 3 жыл бұрын

Dis man is a real good professor. He make complicated things simple.

@americanphilosopher 11 жыл бұрын

Agreed! The Web of Belief, in particular made a tremendous difference to me and clearly shows Quine's pragmatist influences/tendencies which came to him by way of C.I. Lewis, I suppose.

@alik6111 10 күн бұрын

I think Carnap

@longcastle4863 2 жыл бұрын

Really wish people would give date and circumstances of the original program in the description when releasing these. Putnam died, btw, in 2016

@cihant5438 6 жыл бұрын

The man can tell a good story ..

@ast453000 4 жыл бұрын

low laughter from Plato's grave

@sebastianquilt 5 ай бұрын

Quine was bar-none the best writer of philosophy in the English language since Russell. The web of belief and the Pursuit of Truth and Theories and Things were amazing.

@MrPtrlix 8 жыл бұрын

As far as I understand Quine, his ontology is also different from other traditional approaches to ontology in that for Quine, existing objects do not have to exist. I don't mean that their existence is not necessary but contingent, or that they may not have existed in another possible world: but that if we wish them to stop existing, they merely can. Moreover, this applies both to physical and non-physical objects. We say, for example, that numbers and sub-atomic quarks exist. (I'm not up to date with physics, but I think subatomic particles are not yet diretcly observed, but only postulated to explain the observed data). Quine argues that the moment we stop using mathematics or physics, these entities cease to exist.

@IanJMartel 7 жыл бұрын

Quine does not say that existing objects do not have to exist (he avoids modal notions like necessity), or that we can wish them out of existence. One of Quine's favorite maxims is "to call a posit a posit is not to patronize it." When he calls electrons posits, he doesn't mean to say that they don't *really* exist. They do exist, according to our best physical theories, and our best physical theories are the best we have to go on in adjudicating questions about reality. His approach to ontology is different from traditional ones in at least two respects: (1) he has a very thin notion of ontological commitment, where you commit yourself to the existence of an object by using a term in natural language or by using a variable in quantification theory, and (2) he thought the sciences were the tribunal that should judge ontological questions. According to him, scientific theories are in principle translatable into quantification theory, and the values of the variables in the resulting translation gives you your ontology. This was his picture of a scientifically respectable way of doing ontology, which does involve mathematics and physics, but he would never argue that entities cease to exist when we stop using mathematics and physics.

@Google_Censored_Commenter 2 жыл бұрын

@@IanJMartel It seems to me that Quine commits himself to way too much. At least as you described it here, simply inventing a language or symbol to describe something, must necessitate that you posit the "existence" (however defined) of that thing. But why would that be so? How can we meaningfully talk of fictions, then, if we're forced to in some respect ontologically accept they "exist"? It doesn't seem to me that Quine can ever avoid positing the existence of fictional objects or entities besides arbitrarily deciding they "don't count". And if that's a valid strategy, why should I accept numbers and mathematical symbols ontologically exist, and not just posit they "don't count"?

@adaptercrash 2 жыл бұрын

And also if we keep using those binary functions those entities will cease to exist, what is meaningful well I couldn't believe I was 21, you have to. Or if you believe your 18 when your 12, that's a fictional form of ontological formation, then existence is posited before it actually happens, your arbitrarily deciding in a transcdental form of existence, and you can control them, they don't seem to like that.

@thejimmymeister 11 ай бұрын

@@Google_Censored_Commenter Without numbers, the best scientific theories (in Quine's sense) are impossible. Without Ebenezer Scrooge or the jabberwock, they are still possible. That's why Quine is justified in accepting numbers but not the jabberwock. If you want to argue against Quine that we shouldn't accept numbers as existent, then you should show that "the best scientific theories" either aren't what Quine thought they were (i.e. they aren't the mathematically expressible theories of physics) or aren't the proper guide for ontology. In other words, it's not enough to say that numbers "don't count;" you must also say what does count and _why_ it is what counts. (Quine doesn't arbitrarily discount certain things but does so according to an explanation of why other things do count.) (It also seems very plausible to me that we could meaningfully talk of fictions if forced to accept that they exist _as concepts_ . Quine, though, doesn't need to take this route because fictional objects like Scrooge aren't used in our best scientific theories for describing the world.)

@Google_Censored_Commenter 11 ай бұрын

@@thejimmymeister The crucial thing you're missing, (and perhaps Quine) is that scientific theories are just that, theories. Constructs of the mind, fictions, to be frank. Even if we grant that the only way to explain what we observe is through these fictional scientific theories, so what? That is not evidence that the theories, and what they contain, must be real like the phenomena they describe. The only way you can arrive at this conclusion, is if you somehow prove that existence requires explanation, and not just any explanation, an explanation that humans can interpret and understand. There's multiple layers of special pleading involved in that, and so it can be discarded on that basis alone, if you ask me. Thankfully most philosophers aren't platonists like Quine anymore, so this doesn't need to concern us. As an empiricist, I'll implore that we stick to what we can observe. And we don't observe theories, or models, or numbers, or logic, or anything else we deem as "necessary" for one purpose or another, so we ought not posit they exist. No matter how necessary your mind demands it must be, if you haven't observed it, you can't claim it's real. And if we wanna be really strict, we can't even claim observation is sufficient, since we can never access things in themselves, as Hume and Kant have demonstrated.

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

All that exists is physical objects, but we have metaphors for certain parts of those objects, such as mind being the patterns in the brain, and emotions being part of minds, etc. which do real work irrespective of the disconnect from the complexity of their physical substrate.

@hkumar7340 3 жыл бұрын

That is, mind and emotions as epiphenomena -- property dualism?

@oioi9372 9 ай бұрын

Really?😂 And how the hell to you think that makes any sense if your conclusion was anticipated by the premise that all is physical? What is the definition of physical?

@havenbastion 9 ай бұрын

@@hkumar7340 They're emergent - a new metaphor for a higher complexity understanding. Mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain just as chemistry is a higher order understanding of physics.

@michaelpark5439 8 жыл бұрын

So Putnam argues that abstract nonphysical thought and objects do not exist. I'm interested in his argument.

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

All "things" exist, at least as concepts. Whether they have a measurable physical correlate is a separate question.

@Electrosalas 6 жыл бұрын

the positivists were right in saying that there are some pseudo questions in philosophy ¿¿??

@hkumar7340 3 жыл бұрын

The very fact that, many decades after the heyday of the positivists (or logical empiricists, if you prefer), you have to ask the question: were they right in saying that some philosophical questions are pseudo questions? What does that tell you? Those questions are still around, aren't they? Why do they keep bothering us if they are obviously just pseudo questions?

@Dystisis 2 жыл бұрын

@@hkumar7340 Well, if they were genuine questions they would have answers and could be answered definitively. The fact that they keep bothering us does not mean they have sense. It is always unclear what philosophical questions ask about, or ask for. Still, they are genuine in the sense of being important to us.

@hkumar7340 2 жыл бұрын

@@Dystisis Not all genuine questions need to have an answer that homo sapiens are able to figure out. We human beings are under the impression that our brains are capable of answering any and all questions. For almost one century, we have been attempting to understand why subatomic particles behave as if they know what we have in mind. We haven't gotten anywhere with that quest. The wise ones among us accept the truth: there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy. A little humility never hurts.

@childintime6453 10 ай бұрын

@@hkumar7340what Carnap and others called pseudo questions during their time were around for centuries. The fact that they still bother some 'wise' people isn't a really an argument for anything

@hkumar7340 10 ай бұрын

@@childintime6453 For many centuries, even millennia, before the 20th century there were these crazy individuals who knew, just knew, that human beings could fly like birds. Many of them had tragic stories to tell of the consequences of their aviation experiments. I am sure that some of these tragic figures were pointed to as cautionary tales for the later nut jobs who wanted to take to the air themselves. Then came the Wright Brothers. And here we are, all flying from city to city, country to country, continent to continent. Persistence pays, sometimes in ways that no one could have foreseen. Just because some questions don't yield to our exploration 'immediately' doesn't mean that we just give up. Right?

@tibbinsobserver6693 7 жыл бұрын

Causally inert objects? Like elementary particles?!

@McRingil 4 жыл бұрын

Maybe triangles

@MrBigMentula 4 жыл бұрын

Nope. According to quine there are only sets; but van Inwagen would say there are state of affairs or properties. These are causally inert objects from perspective of contemporary metaphysics.

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

Whether an object is inert is one of many of the set of attributes and boundary conditions which define all things. An object is inert if it fails to have causal impact, but since everything effects everything around it and nothing is static, that only means effects relative to human intents, or at least within a human scale of (potential) understanding.

@pectenmaximus231 2 жыл бұрын

I believe ‘causally inert’ is in company with: unmoved movers/a priori/‘givens’/first principles/axioms/etc.

@mitchellkato1436 6 жыл бұрын

Putnam said there are "numbers and sets". I don't know the whole story. The mathematicians wanted to reduce everything into logic. They found that to be not possible. We need in addition this thing called "set theory"(and its axiom) because of Russell's paradox. I guess when Putnam says "numbers and sets", by "sets" he meant axiomatic sets.

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

Math is a language and like all languages is descriptive. In particular, math is descriptive of the relationships of quantity - idealized entities *to the extent they are separated by explicit boundary conditions (where one thing ends and another begins).

@mitchellkato1436 3 жыл бұрын

@@havenbastion mathematics and natural language are different. mathematics is exact and descriptive. natural language apart being descriptive also contains performative.

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

@@mitchellkato1436 I concur. I would say that performative speech is related to intent but the effect is always to convey information about the world, such as "I want you to feel x" or "i want you to know that i know x", or whatever. This is descriptive of the speaker's internal state. I see performative package as just a subset, still with the same communicative point of describing our experience of the universe.

@mitchellkato1436 3 жыл бұрын

@@havenbastion granted, the correspondence of language and the world is the Aristotle's project, the modern finds language as tools.

@cherubsasquatch2987 4 жыл бұрын

Why does everything that exists exist? Cuz it exists...micdrop

@havenbastion 3 жыл бұрын

Your logic is impeccable. Impeccably what, i'll defer. ;)

@sasanovakovic 10 жыл бұрын

I’m not sure this is right interpretation of Quine since Quine was not „metaphysician“ or "ontologist" at all. His philosophical concerns were in the field of language analysis and logic, not in metaphysics. In "On what there is" Quine explicitly stated that he is not talking of what there really is (in metaphysical sense) but rather what our language says there is. He says the former is the “other question”, that is, the question of metaphysics. Consequently he doesn’t make equitation mark between language and metaphysics. And this is precisely the line that divides logic and semantic analysis of language from metaphysical concerns or level of investigation.

@Moiez101 10 жыл бұрын

but yeh inadvertently does metaphysics by making distinctions and clarifications. anytime you say anything about the way the world is.....you're doing ontology whether you like it or not.

@doktorarslanagic 10 жыл бұрын

i never really understood that "line". if you want to philosophize about the world, how can you divide the world like that, how can you be so clear on that epistemological "line"? you investigate language by abstracting it from the world and you expect you can just put it back in its place when it's all polished and ready. i'm not saying there are no purely formal questions about language, but i think that the problems that arise in the purely formal analyses of language precisely point to the lack of metaphysical foundations. for example, you said yourself that semantic analysis falls to the "non-metaphysical" side of that line. but how can you talk about semantics or meaning if you haven't answered the question "what is there outside of language?". that question must be, obviously, answered inside of a language (which makes the analyses really helpful), but that answer might not concern the nature of language directly.

@StephenYuan 7 жыл бұрын

Putnam's interpretation is correct. Quine was a "reluctant platonist". Look it up in the stanford encyclopedia.

@mitchellkato1436 5 жыл бұрын

I don't know what metaphysics is any more. something that we can have a belief?

@McRingil 4 жыл бұрын

@@mitchellkato1436 the study of what really exists, of being

@saimbhat6243 3 ай бұрын

Hillary putnum is possibly the most uninteresting thinker of the recent past. "Had a bad influence on metaphysics"!? Well so what? You don't like it?

@quantumfineartsandfossils2152 2 жыл бұрын

yes this is what I tried to explain to Sean carroll you see both you just have to see both or all choices regardless of which choice you (& others.. ) are either forced to take or if you can fulfill the ideal with resources including other conscious moral ethical individuals as recourses because memory does not escape it is just we have never accessed it before but it is all still there you need more freedom not less to access it to bootstrap a white hole in order to live in a Feynman diagrammatical 'world ' of a Klein bottle tori of consciousness (to stretch space time to exist in the future) work creates space space ( to stretch space time to exist in the future) is the boundary you should not break( looking at the present the now = the future ) for assimilation in an inter- dimensional topology as a paper says tachyons not photons might be animating the conscious dream state abuse conflates itself with work because it 'achieves the same things'n "getting stuff & sex" = economics but is a disease it is not the most effective way to get the space to create the stuff & the sex you cannot diversify consciousness if it cannot propagate its informational structure & this mostly depends on as he says making sure you are not only on one side of the paradox which is what I tried to explain to Sean Carroll ( be blocked me lol these are his friends instagram.com/p/CfsN61CrYlu/?) lol this is his wife blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/dear-guardian-youve-been-played/ lol )

@quantumfineartsandfossils2152 2 жыл бұрын

holy fuck this is all I think about analyze naturally since birth fuckign genius "committed myself to abstract entities" YES PLEASE SAVE ME FROM THEM PLEASE SAVE US!!!! #surveillancegeneratedsearchengines

@springinfialta106 3 жыл бұрын

Quine, Wittgenstein, etc. are all essentially anti-philosophers and yet philosophers drool over them. Where does this self-loathing come from?

@springinfialta106 3 жыл бұрын

@@phillipmcreynolds7203 Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply. It seems that there is a growing sense in the scientific community, especially among physicists and neurobiologists, that philosophers have nothing to add to the search for knowledge in these areas. Yes, a particular philosopher might also have a PhD in physics or one of the neuro sciences, but he/she is necessarily going to be less well-versed than someone who focused entirely on the science. The belief among scientists seems to be that the only real contribution that philosophers historically made was in advancing logic and helping people to understand how to state thing clearly without equivocation. These skills are skills that scientists believe they either have developed from their scientific studies, or can easily pick up. Therefore philosophers are superfluous, or as Feynman said "Birds don't need ornithologists." Those philosophers who claim that metaphysics is bunk and that the only role for philosophers is to aid in clarifying the work of scientists have thus led philosophers into to field where they are now unwanted. I think this is the reason why metaphysical philosophy has seen a reemergence. The scientists might not want philosophers in their laboratories, but God doesn't seem to mind philosophers mucking about in his territory.

@joshscott6914 Жыл бұрын

Antiphilosophy IS philosophy.

@hss12661 9 ай бұрын

@@springinfialta106 Neither Wittgenstein nor Quine think that the purpose of the philosopher is to "clarify" anything, I'm not sure where you've got that impression from. And I'm not sure why anyone should think that philosophers have anything to say about physics or neurobiology in general so, if these remarks genuinely come from physicists or neurobiologists, I don't think they have any significance, just like Feynmann's unintelligent remarks about mathemathics (and philosophy alike, although I agree with him that philosophy of science is somewhat superfluous for the scientist, thus "sociology of science" would be a better name). I think calling Quine an anti-philosopher is like calling Einstein an anti-physicist because he has overthrown Newtonian mechanics.

@mitchellkato1436 5 жыл бұрын

Putnam is Quine's colleague?? I think Quine's scientific behaviorism is much more influencial than Putnam.

@cherubsasquatch2987 4 жыл бұрын

Jesus Christ died and rose to justify you before Him, a Holy God

@pretendgallery6760 4 жыл бұрын

lol