On What There Is

By Willard Van Orman Quine

Finished: 12/14/16

Full Article:  http://math.boisestate.edu/~holmes/Phil209/Quine%20-%20On%20What%20There%20Is.pdf

Review of Metaphysics (1948). Reprinted in 1953 From a Logical Point of View

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three AngloSaxon monosyllables: “What is there?‟ It can be answered, moreover, in a word— “Everything‟—and everyone will accept this answer as true.

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 Occam‟s razor.

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.

When we say of Pegasus that there is no such thing, we are saying, more precisely, that Pegasus does not have the special attribute of actuality.

Despite his espousal of unactualized possibles, he limits the word „existence‟ to actuality—thus preserving an illusion of ontological agreement between himself and us who repudiate the rest of his bloated universe. We have all been prone to say, in our commonsense usage of „exist‟, that Pegasus does not exist, meaning simply that there is no such entity at all. If Pegasus existed he would indeed be in space and time, but only because the word “Pegasus‟ has spatio-temporal connotations, and not because „exists‟ has spatio-temporal connotations.

 Wyman‟s slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements.

 this expansion is simply the old notion that Pegasus, for example, must be because otherwise it would be nonsense to say even that he is not.

The doctrine of the meaninglessness of contradictions runs away back.

the doctrine has no intrinsic appeal; and it has led its devotees to such quixotic extremes as that of challenging the method of proof by reductio ad absurdum—a challenge in which I sense a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine itself.

***   it follows from a discovery in mathematical logic, due to Church [2], that there can be no generally applicable test of contradictoriness.

****  Russell, in his theory of so-called singular descriptions, showed clearly how we might meaningfully use seeming names without supposing that there be the entities allegedly named.

The virtue of this analysis is that the seeming name, a descriptive phrase, is paraphrased in context as a so-called incomplete symbol. No unified expression is offered as an analysis of the descriptive phrase, but the statement as a whole which was the context of that phrase still gets its full quota of meaning—whether true or false.

Where descriptions are concerned, there is no longer any difficulty in affirming or denying being

****  When a statement of being or nonbeing is analyzed by Russell‟s theory of descriptions, it ceases to contain any expression which even purports to name the alleged entity whose being is in question, so that the meaningfulness of the statement no longer can be thought to presuppose that there be such an entity

We need no lon

ger labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant.

An inkling of this might have dawned on Wyman and McX even without benefit of Russell if they had only noticed—as so few of us do—that there is a gulf between meaning and naming even in the case of a singular term which is genuinely a name of an object. The following example from Frege [3] will serve. The phrase „Evening Star‟ names a certain large physical object of spherical form, which is hurtling through space some scores of millions of miles from here. The phrase „Morning Star‟ names the same thing

*******   One‟s ontology is basic to the conceptual scheme by which he interprets all experiences, even the most commonplace ones.

... Judged in another conceptual scheme, an ontological statement which is axiomatic to McX‟s mind may, with equal immediacy and triviality, be adjudged false.

I feel no reluctance toward refusing to admit meanings, for I do not thereby deny that words and statements are meaningful.

The useful ways in which people ordinarily talk or seem to talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy.

We can very easily involve ourselves in ontological commitments by saying, for example, that there is something (bound variable) which red houses and sunsets have in common; or that there is something which is a prime number larger than a million. But, this is, essentially, the only way we can involve ourselves in ontological commitments: by our use of bound variables.

****  Names are, in fact, altogether immaterial to the ontological issue,

...To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.

Pronouns are the basic media of reference; nouns might better have been named propronouns. The variables of quantification, „something‟, „nothing‟, „everything‟, range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be

 a theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true.

The three main mediaeval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Realism, as the word is used in connection with the mediaeval controversy over universals, is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them. Logicism, represented by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church, and Carnap, condones the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately.

Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. Intuitionism, espoused in modern times in one form or another by Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl, and others, countenances the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities only when those entities are capable of being cooked up individually from ingredients specified in advance. As Fraenkel has put it, logicism holds that classes are discovered while intuitionism holds that they are invented

Formalism, associated with the name of Hilbert, echoes intuitionism in deploring the logicist‟s unbridled recourse to universals. But formalism also finds intuitionism unsatisfactory. This could happen for either of two opposite reasons. The formalist might, like the logicist, object to the crippling of classical mathematics; or he might, like the nominalists of old, object to admitting abstract entities at all, even in the restrained sense of mind-made entities. The upshot is the same: the formalist keeps classical mathematics as a play of insignificant notations.

 how are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula “To be is to be the value of a variable”; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. We look to bound variables in connection with ontology not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine, ours or someone else‟s, says there is; and this much is quite properly a problem involving language. But what there is is another question.

****   ontological controversy should tend into controversy over language.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics: we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. Our ontology is determined once we have fixed upon the over-all conceptual scheme which is to accommodate science in the broadest sense

To whatever extent the adoption of any system of scientific theory may be said to be a matter of language, the same—but no more— may be said of the adoption of an ontology. But simplicity, as a guiding principle in constructing conceptual schemes, is not a clear and unambiguous idea; and it is quite capable of presenting a double or multiple standard.

The rule of simplicity is indeed our guiding maxim in assigning sense data to objects:

The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects;

Similarly, from a phenomenalistic point, of view, the conceptual scheme of physical objects is a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

****  A platonistic ontology of this sort is, from the point of view of a strictly physicalistic conceptual scheme, as much a myth as that physicalistic conceptual scheme itself is for phenomenalism. This higher myth is a good and useful one, in turn, in so far as it simplifies our account of physics. Since mathematics is an integral part of this higher myth, the utility of this myth for physical science is evident enough. In speaking of it nevertheless as a myth, I echo that philosophy of mathematics to which I alluded earlier under the name of formalism. But an attitude of formalism may with equal justice be adopted toward the physical conceptual scheme, in turn, by the pure aesthete or phenomenalist. The analogy between the myth of mathematics and the myth of physics is, in some additional and perhaps fortuitous ways, strikingly close.

Consider, for example, the crisis which was precipitated in the foundations of mathematics, at the turn of the century, by the discovery of Russell‟s paradox and other antinomies of set theory. These contradictions had to be obviated by unintuitive, ad hoc devices;[11] our mathematical myth-making became deliberate and evident to all. But what of physics? An antinomy arose between the undular and the corpuscular accounts of light; and if this was not as out-and-out a contradiction as Russell‟s paradox, I suspect that the reason is that physics is not as out-and-out as mathematics. Again, the second great modern crisis in the foundations of mathematics—precipitated in 1931 by Gödel‟s proof [2] that there are bound to be undecidable statements in arithmetic—has its companion piece in physics in Heisenberg‟s indeterminacy principle.

 the question what ontology actually to adopt still stands open, and the obvious counsel is tolerance and an experimental spirit.

***************   From among the various conceptual schemes best suited to these various pursuits, one—the phenomenalistic—claims epistemological priority. Viewed from within the phenomenalistic conceptual scheme, the ontologies of physical objects and mathematical objects are myths. The quality of myth, however, is relative; relative, in this case, to the epistemological point of view. This point of view is one among various, corresponding to one among our various interests and purposes.