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Word and Object (The MIT Press), by Willard Van Orman Quine
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About the Author
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 2000. Considered one the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, he is the author of Mathematical Logic, The Roots of Reference, The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (MIT Press), and many other books.
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Product details
Series: The MIT Press
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; New edition (January 25, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262518317
ISBN-13: 978-0262518314
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
11 customer reviews
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#742,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Very dense and a difficult read. Not much for clear explanation on logic. Meaning in Language by Alan Cruise is a much better refresher.
"Whistling in the dark is not the method of true philosophy" – Quine, *Word and Object*Willard van Orman Quine's 1960 work *Word and Object* is one of the most famous documents of American philosophy. Quine, an Ohio native who studied with Carnap in Vienna and taught mathematical logic and philosophy at Harvard for a half-century, was legendary for being a controversialist who attacked the "analytic-synthetic" distinction and many other philosophical commonplaces; he is also a fine stylist of American prose, one so inimitable as to even discourage quotations. Although he wrote scores of papers and many monograph-length books, *Word and Object* is by far his most noted effort, containing famous remarks on the "indeterminacy of translation" philosophy grad students still joust at today.However famous it and its constituent parts are, I think the general thrust of the book is not well understood, particularly now that it is old enough to be available in a 50th anniversary edition; I am tempted to describe it as a "Jamesian essay on the Tarskian theory of truth", a book which is both "mannered" and searching, even or perhaps especially compared to Quine's programmatic essays. This 250-page book has seven chapters, some of which have attracted more attention than others over the years: I will offer brief remarks on each. [As regards this new edition, I am pleased to see that MIT Press has retained some of the features that made the original edition an *objet d'art* but I feel that both Patricia Churchland's Foreword and Dagfinn Føllesdal's Preface are disrespectful to the book, which is written in a compass wider than its immediate reception or the vicissitudes of Quine's decline in advanced old age.]1. "Language and Truth"The book begins with a discussion of the merest "direction towards the world", in terms of Quine's famous "holism" about what we do and do not know: although he was always quite explicit about a non-dogmatic empiricism where knowledge of the world begins at "retinal impressions" and suchlike, many people unfamiliar with the "Quine-Duhem thesis" would not understand the idea–often couched in the form of the metaphorical parable from Neurath which begins *Word and Object*–that no particular part of our knowledge of the world is immune to revision, even seemingly "self-evident truths" far from the madding crowd of observed physical objects. This chapter tries to justify a basic "objectivism" about reality, a highly sublimated concordance with Tarski's version of the correspondence theory of truth, while avoiding the snares then recently set for "realists" by Wittgenstein in the *Philosophical Investigations*.2. "Translation and Meaning""Translation and Meaning" is the absolutely famous chapter of *Word and Object*, one whose quips still amuse young philosophers and which in the '60s and '70s generated a great deal of discussion about "radical translation" (and then, in the hands of Quine's students Davidson and David Lewis, about the slightly different concept of "radical interpretation"). According to Quine, the only slightly fanciful thought-experiment of a field anthropologist trying to learn a wholly foreign language brings home the point that theory is always underdetermined by the facts: when we hear a "native" exclaim "Gavagai" at the sight of a rabbit, we ultimately have no idea what about the appearing of the rabbit they are remarking upon (for all we know, they have a great enthusiasm for "undetached rabbit parts").3. "The Ontogenesis of Reference"This is the least-well-known of the chapters of the book, and one whose background is not guaranteed to make sense to the contemporary reader: that is to say, Quine's discussion of the topic of reference (in the sense of the "denotation" of a term) is an implicit critique of the then-newly published theory of P.F. Strawson in his *Individuals*. Strawson believed in a "descriptive metaphysics" which justified a theoretical conservatism about physical objects and persons as ground-floor elements of our "conceptual scheme"; Quine was also cognizant of the reality of physical objects and persons, but he wanted to tell a sophisticated behavioristic story about the usefulness of singular terms (using "divided reference") and predicates.4. "Vagaries of Reference"Following Timothy Williamson's book on the topic, "vagueness" became a major topic of research in recent philosophy; Quine–who is honored by contemporary metaphysicians as "one of their own" though it is not exactly clear to me why–was there first, and other parts of referential discourse where "things fall apart" (like "referentially opaque" statements of belief and intention, in which different descriptions of the object of the "propositional attitude" cannot be substituted for each other) are addressed.5. "Regimentation"Modern logic *is* quantificational logic: it did not exist before Frege's introduction of the quantifiers in his 1879 *Begriffsschrift*, and that is because the scope and power of multiply quantified statements was finally enough to formalize nearly all of mathematical reasoning. Not every linguistic phenomenon yields as easily to axiomatization as "ring theory", though, and in this chapter Quine spends a great deal of time on "indexicality" (statements tied to particular times and places) and "vacuous terms" like Pegasus, things we can "talk about" even if they have never existed. (Following the work of Kripke and Kaplan at the beginning of the '70s discussion of these topics took a definitive turn away from Quine's views, and this is the least relevant of the chapters.)6. "Flight from Intension"Quine, early and late, was an enemy of "modal logic"–the study of necessity and possibility as precisely codified in "operators" usually rendered as a diamond and a box–and here he marshals all his criticisms of the new-fangled reasoning; finally, at the end of the chapter he moves from "intensional" to "intentional" issues, this being the idiom for discussing conscious mental states introduced into modern philosophy by Franz Brentano, and claims (in a move which proved fateful for the "eliminative materialists" about the mind) that statements of belief and desire can in no way be coherently systematized in any "psychology".7. "Ontic Decision"The final chapter picks up the issues of "theory choice" which began the book, now with a full armamentarium of metalinguistic analysis to turn upon them. Quine's essential attitude to the question of "abstract objects" like numbers was one of pragmatism: those that caused scientific theory to better cohere better be included as acceptable "posits", those like "sakes" that mattered not at all ought to be "deprecated". The book closes with Quine's famous criticism-homage to Carnap's strategy of semantic ascent, and the final paragraph begins thusly: "The philosopher's task differs from the others', then, in detail; but in no such drastic way as those suppose who imagine for the philosopher a vantage point outside the conceptual scheme that he takes in charge. There is no such cosmic exile."
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician who taught at Harvard University, and wrote many books such as From a Logical Point of View: Logici-Philosophical Essays,The Web of Belief, etc.He wrote in the Preface to this 1960 book, “Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when. Hence there is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men’s dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations. An effect or recognizing this limitation is that the enterprise of translation is found to be involved in a certain systematic indeterminacy… The indeterminacy of translation invests even the question what objects to construe a term as true of. Studies of the semantics of reference consequently turn out to make sense only when directed upon substantially our language, from within. But we do remain free to reflect, thus parochially, on the development and structure of our own referential apparatus…†(Pg. ix)He points out, “We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence and leave a description of the conceptual world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he would have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man’s net contribution to the difference. This difference marks the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty---the domain within which he can revise theory while saving the data.†(Pg. 5)He explains, “The philosophical doctrine of the infallibility of observation sentences is sustained under our version. For there is scope for error and dispute only insofar as the connections with experience whereby sentences are appraised are multifarious and indirect, mediated through time by theory in conflicting ways; there is none insofar as verdicts to a sentence are directly keyed to present stimulation… Our version of observation sentences departs from a philosophical tradition in allowing the sentences to be about ordinary things instead of requiring them to report sense data…†(Pg. 44)He argues, “There are philosophers who stoutly maintain that ‘exists’ said of numbers, classes, and the like and ‘exists’ said of material objects are two usages of an ambiguous term ‘exists.’ What mainly baffles me is the stoutness of their maintenance. What can they possibly count as evidence? Why not view ‘true’ as unambiguous but very general, and recognize the difference true logical laws and true confessions as a difference merely between logical laws and confessions? And correspondingly for existence?†(Pg. 131)He suggests, “The primary distinction of eternal sentences is that they are the repository of truth itself, so and of all science. Insofar as a sentence can be said simply to be true, and not just true now or in this month, it is an eternal sentence. When our objective is an austere canonical form for the system of the world, we are not to rest with the renunciation of propositional attitudes and the subjunctive conditional; we must renounce also the indicator words and other sources of truth-value fluctuation.†(Pg. 227-228)He states, “This construction is paradigmatic of what we are most typically up to when in a philosophical spirit we offer an ‘analysis’ or ‘explication’ of some hitherto inadequately formulated ‘idea’ or expression. We do not claim synonomy. We do not claim to make clear and explicit what the users of the unclear expression had unconsciously in mind all along. We do not expose hidden meanings, as the words ‘analysis’ and ‘explication’ would suggest; we supply lacks. We fix on the particular functions of the unclear expression that make it worth troubling about, and then devise a substitute, clear and couched in terms of our liking, that fills those functions. Beyond those conditions of partial agreement, dictated by our interests and purposes, any traits of the explicans come under the head of ‘don’t cares.’†(Pg. 258-259)This is one of Quine’s most widely-discussed works, and will be of keen interest to students of analytical philosophy.
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