(2009).
Notes
* Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ [Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache, 1932]. First published in Erkenntnis, vol. II. Trans. Arthur Pap, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60–80; abridged.
12 The Problem of Ontology: W. V. O. Quine, On What There Is*
Our final extract, by the American thinker Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, takes a robustly down-to-earth approach to philosophical questions about ontology or being. Quine begins by addressing the ‘Platonic riddle’ of non-being: how can we talk coherently about non-existent entities (like Father Christmas, or the mythical winged horse, Pegasus)? Talking about these beings is surely not the same as talking about nothing, so must we not concede that they have some sort of being?
In responding to this puzzle, Quine avows a ‘taste for desert landscapes’. To avoid cluttering up our ontology with all sorts of dubious entities, like non-existent beings, and merely possible (as opposed to actual) beings, like the ‘possible fat man in the doorway’, Quine follows the lead of Bertrand Russell (see Part III, extract 9, below) and proposes to analyse statements referring to such putative entities by using ‘quantificational words’ or ‘bound variables’ – expressions such as ‘there is something such that …’. So the statement ‘the round square cupola on Berkeley College is wooden’, instead of being taken to refer to some weird non-existent entity, would simply come out as the false assertion ‘there is something such that it is round and it is square and it is atop Berkeley College and it is wooden’.
One great advantage of this approach is that it avoids our being misled by what look like names into supposing that some entity must be being referred to: ‘names are … altogether immaterial to the ontological issue, for [they] can be converted into descriptions’; and by the use of bound variables, ‘descriptions can be eliminated’. Quine’s manoeuvre here exemplifies a characteristic feature of the analytic school of philosophy in the mid to late twentieth century – the tendency to ‘defuse’ portentous metaphysical issues by the use of careful logical and linguistic analysis.
Another significant and influential aspect of Quine’s approach, which emerges towards the end of our extract, is the respect it accords to science as a model for philosophy. Our acceptance of an ontology, Quine argues, is similar to our acceptance of a scientific theory, such as a system of physics: ‘we adopt … the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experiences can be fitted and arranged.’ There are no absolute rules here: what will be the most convenient ontology will depend on our ‘various interests and purposes’. But with simplicity as the watchword, and making sense of ‘raw experiences’ as the basic test, many of the grand metaphysical schemes of earlier philosophers are destined, in the Quinean scheme of things, to lose much of their appeal.
Though Quine’s largely deflationary conception of metaphysics has exerted considerable influence on subsequent philosophizing, the more ambitious traditional idea of the metaphysician as mapping out the ultimate categories of reality has by no means disappeared, and the future of course of metaphysics is hard to predict. What seems clear, in the light of our survey of some of the principal approaches to ‘being and reality’ in the Western tradition, is that future philosophers are unlikely to resist the perennial appeal of raising fundamental general questions about the ultimate nature of the world and our place within it.
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word – ‘Everything’ – and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.
Suppose now that two philosophers, McX and I, differ over ontology. Suppose McX maintains there is something which I maintain there is not. McX can, quite consistently with his own point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to recognize certain entities. I should protest, of course, that he is wrong in his formulation of our disagreement, for I maintain that there are no entities, of the kind which he alleges, for me to recognize; but my finding him wrong in his formulation of our disagreement is unimportant, for I am committed to considering him wrong in his ontology anyway.
When I try to formulate our difference of opinion, on the other hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are some things which McX countenances and I do not, for in admitting that there are such things I should be contradicting my own rejection of them.
It would appear, if this reasoning were sound, that in any ontological dispute the proponent of the negative side suffers the disadvantage of not being able to admit that his opponent disagrees with him.
This is the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato’s beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Ockham’s Razor.1
It is some such line of thought that leads philosophers like McX to impute being where they might otherwise be quite content to recognize that there is nothing. Thus, take Pegasus. If Pegasus were not, McX argues, we should not be talking about anything when we use the word; therefore it would be nonsense to say even that Pegasus is not. Thinking to show thus that the denial of Pegasus cannot be coherently maintained, he concludes that Pegasus is …
[An] overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. [A] slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two things to be alike? Or, finally, is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselves and distinct from one another? These elements are well nigh incorrigible … I feel we’d do better simply to clear [the] slum and be done with it …
Russell, in his theory of so-called singular descriptions,2 showed clearly how we might meaningfully use seeming names without supposing that there be the entities allegedly named. The names to which Russell’s theory directly applies are complex descriptive names such as ‘the author of Waverley’, ‘the present King of France’, ‘the round square cupola on Berkeley College’. Russell analyzes such phrases systematically as fragments of the whole sentences in which they occur. The sentence ‘The author of Waverley was a poet’, for example, is explained as a whole as meaning ‘Someone (better: something) wrote Waverley and was a poet, and nothing else wrote Waverley’. (The point of this added clause is to affirm the uniqueness which is implicit in the word ‘the’, in ‘the author of Waverley’.) The sentence ‘The round square cupola on Berkeley College is pink’ is explained as ‘Something is round and square and is a cupola on Berkeley College and is pink, and nothing else is round and square and a cupola on Berkeley College.’ …
The unanalyzed statement ‘The author
