Quine’s ‘On What There Is’ Set Within the Context of His General Ontology

A Short Introductory Application of Quinian Ontology

Universal determinism was once widely held to be a scientific truth about physical reality. Yet it is as metaphysical as any metaphysical statement:

Is it scientifically empty speculation to assert that every event has a cause?… and yet it is one that has come to be doubted as a result of the discovery of quantum-mechanical phenomena. (30)

Hume asks us:

How could we observe universal determinism empirically?

He believed that not even a single case of causal determinism or necessity could actually be observed. What result does this empiricist position have for metaphysics? Traditionally metaphysic’s was seen to be about what is necessary, what is knowable a priori, and about things that lack any empirical content. According to what was said above, Quine argues that

we must conclude that metaphysical principles [e.g., universal determinism] are testable after all.[ Alex Rosenberg 30].

The Positivist once said that metaphysical statements were not falsifiable. This isn’t true either. Quine believes otherwise. Interpreting Quine, Alex Rosenberg writes that

falsifiability no longer distinguishes between meaningless metaphysics and factual science [Rosenberg]

Section One

Science and Metaphysics/Observation and Theory

[Pierre Duhem [‘s]…thesis in science.] Logic may dictate that we cannot believe both the theory and the conclusion based on an experiment. But it cannot tell us whether we should abandon the theory or the experiment. The physicist must instead rely on his ‘good sense’. (Sorensen, 141)

The Quinian point we can take from the above is that there is no real difference between science and metaphysics. They are, at their peripheries, closely related. This is why Quine once wrote that some of the entities of science are ‘on a par with the myths of Homer’. The difference is only one of degree. As Alex Rosenberg puts it:

The justification for eliminating or embracing such notions as Driesch’s entelechy is no different in kind from that employed to assess claims about the existence of electrons, magnets, or virons. It differs from them by degree, and a very great degree at that. (31)

Quine believes that everything, in a sense, is metaphysical in some or many ways. Both Driesch’s vitalism and the mechanism that opposed it

are indeed metaphysical theories [Rosenberg]

However, neither

stands apart from ‘real’ science (31).

In fact there is a continuum between metaphysics and science. Rosenberg describes this continuum thus:

For better or worse, [vitalism and mechanism] stand on a continuum from sheer speculation through research programs and grand unifying theory to general theory and special models, all the way across to particular empirical findings. (31)

It is of course the case that if the conclusion of an experiment contradicts the theory itself, then logic will tell us that this is the case; and why this is the case. The contradiction between theory and experimental conclusion will be entirely logical. However, according to Pierre Duhem (who much influenced Quine in his early days), logic cannot tell us to either reject a scientific theory or reject its experimental conclusion. Something other than logic must therefore determine that choice of theory or experimental conclusion. Duhem says that the physicist’s choice between theory and conclusion will more often than not rely on his ‘good sense’. This effectively means that it makes logical sense to accept the theory and its conclusions. But something other than logic must determine the physicist’s choice.

In terms of ontology and logic vis-à-vis science, Quine argues that science doesn’t

meet experience sentence by sentence, but in large blocks of theories and laws, blocks that are themselves divided from others only by constraints of practical manageability (28).

He says that the whole of science ultimately comes into the picture when we meet experience or experiment. We can use a test of Ohm’s law as an example of this. What, exactly, is brought into this experiment? For a start, a host of subsidiary, auxiliary hypotheses. These include:

i)                     Maxwell’s equations

ii)                   Newtonian mechanics

iii)                  The special theory of relativity

The other part of Quine’s theory is the idea that an anomaly in a test or experiment will not tell us which sentence or hypothesis to drop. For example, suppose

that in our test of Ohm’s law the meters do not read as the law predicts (Rosenberg, 28).

We can then ask:

Where does the fault lie?

Observation, or the test itself, will not provide us with the answer. These are some of the possibilities:

i)                     The meters are unreliable

ii)                   Are there relevant intervening forces?

iii)                  Are Newton’s laws or Maxwell’s equations at fault?

iv)                 Is the special theory of relativity, which lies behind iii) at fault?

Of course it would be more reasonable to suspect Ohm’s law than any of the above (except (i)). The fact is, however, that Ohm’s law has not been falsified. In fact

a disconfirmation does not point the finger at one particular statement under  test.

Rosenberg says that

there is no one statement under test, for the entire conjunction of propositions is required for the prediction that fails (29).

In fact we

are free to give up any one of the conjuncts and preserve all the rest (29).

Science, Logic and Ontological Commitment

What is meant by the words ‘ontological structure of reality’? Primarily they are referring to what is the case in - or with – reality; what isn’t the case; what could be the case; and what cannot be the case.

According to Quine, it is science that decides ‘what there is’. This does not automatically mean that all scientists at all times will get the world right. The philosopher’s task, therefore, is to

make explicit what had been tacit, and precise what had been vague.

This simply means that scientists are not, after all, philosophers. They too need to take on board logical and ontological research into what is the case. Scientists are still on the front line when it comes to saying ‘what there is’. It is not the ontological and logical status of our everyday language that is considered by logicians and ontologists, but the scientific theories that posit the objects that are supposed to provide the ‘furniture of the world’. Many scientists are not even concerned with the ‘kinds’ of the objects that they investigate. It is up to the ontologist to determine what belongs to which kind; and even the status and existence of kinds themselves. And if we bring on board kinds, then perhaps we are also committed to their essences. Here too we can say that scientists aren’t concerned with essences either. So there is still much work to do when scientists offer up their various theories. Perhaps scientists are positing too many kinds or too many objects (or perhaps not enough).

In terms of Quine’s position on science and ontology, his ontology, at first, seems unflinchingly strict. There are, he thinks, too many philosophical constructs that do not have satisfactory ‘criteria of identification’: e.g., propositions, concepts, meanings, universals, God, the I, and so on. And no one agrees, for example, on what is the nature or reality of a proposition. (The same is true of an abstract meaning.) Quine also concludes, against the fashion of his day, that possible worlds and possible world scenarios have no ‘criteria of identification’. He says that the possible fat man in the doorway is essentially indistinguishable from the possible bald man in the doorway. If they are the same possible person, then how would or could we decide that? Essentially, because possible worlds are fictions they have no defining criteria of identity. They are useful, but not actual. And just the same has been said, by Quine, about abstract concepts, beliefs, propositional attitudes, meanings, universals, etc.

In addition, by talking about ‘ontological commitment’ Quine went against what many logicians and philosophers thought to be the very essence of logic – its ontological neutrality. Unlike many philosophers and logicians, Quine thought that the applications of logic are of vital importance. More specifically, the use of logic in physics - and also, perhaps, in the other less hard sciences - is vital. This is not a surprise when we bear in mind the view that Quine held that

Philosophy deals, essentially, with the same issues as the hard sciences, if only on a broader and more general scale.

There is no absolute distinction to be made between the hard sciences and philosophy, according to Quine. It should come as no surprise that he thought that philosophical logicians should have certain ontological commitments. Indeed such ontological commitments would be both defined and clarified care-of logic itself. In any case, if logic were truly and absolutely ontologically neutral, what would be the point of it? Even the most formal and abstract logical systems can still be applied to domains outside pure logic. That’s what’s so interesting about pure logic – that something so pure, formal and abstract can have so many applications to things that are far from being pure, formal and abstract.

According to Quine, we must be committed to the existence of those entities that we quantify over. We need to say why it is that we are committed to a specific kind of entity or to an actual individual of some kind. This commitment to various existents is shown in quantificational schema. We begin with a universal or existential quantifier, and follow them with variables. The existents that we are committed to become the

values of the variables.

The very act of using a quantified variable means that we are committed to at least one ‘value’ of the variable.

Quine on Conceptual Schemes

According to Quine, just as concepts are ‘tools’ for making sense of experience (even though they are not always cognitively applied), so too are the larger conglomerates that are conceptual schemes. They too are

tools… for predicting future experiences in the light of past experiences.

In the manner of theories, conceptual schemes are the grids through which we interpret the world. In some cases, if not all, certain experiences could not even be cognised as they are cognised without the help of conceptual schemes. In Quine’s case,

The schemes are used to predict what may happen in the future given certain set conditions.

The scheme, therefore, makes sense of - or interprets - what we see today. From that interpretation we can predict the course of future events given the same or similar conditions. It is even the case that physical objects are qualified physical objects because of the contribution of the conceptual scheme with which we interpret them. If we had another scheme, we may talk about, say, ‘space-time points’ or ‘physical processes’ (as in Whitehead, etc.) instead of our original choice. Because we require conceptual schemes to make sense of the world, whatever we interpret or explain will be nothing but ‘cultural posits’ that are, according to Quine,

comparable… to the god’s of Homer.

This means, on a semi-Kantian reading, that we never see the world, or the things in the world, as they are ‘in themselves’. As the physicist Steven Hawking says (to paraphrase):

The only reality we can cognise, experience or see is the reality as cognised, experienced or seen through, in my case, mathematical models.

Here Hawking is referring to recondite areas of physics, whereas Quine is saying the same about physical objects of the most mundane type. They are simply ‘posits’ because we could quite easily choose a different conceptual scheme through which we explain and interpret what we now call ‘physical objects’.

Section Two

Meaning, Reference and Existence

It is probably one of the most important philosophical mistakes of the non-philosopher

to suppose that abstract nouns name entities.

Very many philosophers have also made this mistake. Take the abstract nouns ‘truth’, ‘liberty’ ‘knowledge’, ‘freedom’, ‘sentence’, etc. Many people, including many philosophers, believe that these abstract nouns name specific entities. However, even if they do not name specific entities, usually abstract in nature, this is by no means to assert that such abstract nouns cannot be meaningfully used in our languages. There are many such words that do not name a referent: e.g., ‘all’, ‘or’, ‘the’, ‘if’, ‘a’ and so on. These logical connectives and particles clearly have a use and they can be said to have meanings. But why can’t the popular abstract nouns have a use and a meaning even though they do not name abstract entities of any description? We would still know what people mean by such words even if they do not name or refer to abstract or concrete entities. Or, alternatively, we can say, along with Quine, that these abstract nouns have “significance” rather than meaning. They are significant, for various reasons, to their users. They do not thereby have abstract meanings or any kind of meanings. What Quine means is that these words do indeed mean something to people - they are significant to these people; but they do not thereby have abstract meanings simpliciter. Of course not even a traditional defender of abstract meanings would accept the view that genuine meanings only have a meaning to particular persons at particular times. Abstract meanings exist regardless of persons and situations. They are genuine, determinate and fixed.  “Significant” meanings would not have these necessary attributes.

Quine, in his paper ‘What There Is’, also discusses what he calls the

old Platonic riddle of non-being

(Quine calls it “Plato’s beard”.) The position is that if we talk about something, it must exist. Even if we talk about something that does not exist, it must in some way have being; otherwise

what is it that there is not?

Of course it depends here on what is meant by “exist” and by ‘being’. Traditionally there have been different kinds or grades of existence or being; so the problem is more difficult than it initially looks. Even if we accept wholly mental existence, or non-spatiotemporal existence, what kind of existence or being would the round-square have? Even that thing, according to Meinong, has some kind of existence. Quine does not tackle the issue of modes of existence, but that of meaning and reference.

Quine tackles the case of Pegasus. McX (Quine’s fictional adversary) says that if

Pegasus were not…we should not be talking about anything when we use the word.

Indeed it would even be

nonsense to say that Pegasus is not.

This is why some semanticists think that the locution

God does not exist.

is as meaningless, or as equally meaningless, as

God exists.

McX would argue:

Who or what is this God who does not exist?

This was the problem Russell attempted to solve in his paper, ‘Existence and Description’. The problem can be called the Problem of Empty Reference.

Quine himself refers to Russell’s famous take on the problem; and he largely endorses it. Russell attempted to solve this problem by getting rid of proper names. Thus

The author of Waverley was a poet.

became

Someone (better: something) wrote Waverley and was a poet, and nothing else wrote Waverley [Russell, 1918].

The second example is the logical grammar behind the surface or everyday grammar of the original example. We can ask here if version two is a translation, a version or simply an alternative. I would say that the second example is an alternative rather than a logically precise version or translation. It may well be philosophically problematic as it stands, but that doesn’t make the alternative a translation or version. When someone utters the first example he doesn’t “really mean” the second example. He may be making philosophical mistakes in the first example, but that doesn’t make the second example a version or translation. For example, the idea of

nothing else wrote Waverley

may be farther from the mind of the utterer of the first example as anything could be. The second example is more of an imposition than a version or translation.

Quine goes into a little detail about why Russell substituted the second example for the first. As I said, it was primarily an attempt to get rid of names. What we have in the second example is a substitution of variables of quantification for the original names. The quantifiers in the second example are “something” and “nothing” (others include “everything”). These quantifiers aren’t names. They don’t work like names. What they do is

refer to entities generally.

How did this help Russell and Quine? If you do not name a specific thing, then you are not ontologically committed to that thing’s existence.

the author of Waverley

is a definite description of a specific individual. On the other hand, “something” is not, and is therefore not existentially committed. In other words, we are talking about some thing, not a specific thing named either by a definite description or a proper name.

The problem is more pronounced when someone makes an utterance about someone’s or something’s non-existence. Again, to what or whom is he referring if that person or thing doesn’t exist?  We have two examples of the locution again:

The author of Waverley is not.

becomes

Either each thing failed to write or two or more things wrote Waverley.

In the above example the quantifier is more convoluted in expression. Instead of the quantifier “everything” we have “each thing” (the universal quantifier). Here we don’t talk about a specific entity (i.e. the author of Waverley), but to “each thing” or to “two or more things”. As Quine puts it, the second version

contains no expression purporting to name the author of Waverley.

Later in the paper Quine recapitulates on these issues. Again he stresses the need to erase names. What do we use to refer to entities? We use variables. More precisely (as Quine puts it):

to be assumed as an entity is…to be reckoned as the value of a variable.

And, again, the point of variables is that they are non-specific. They do not name particulars. As Quine points out, variables are therefore like pronouns (e.g., “it”, “this”, “that”).

What’s the point of these logical substitutions to the originals? It is to stop us naming non-existents and thus escaping from Plato’s beard.

(The reasons for this approach cannot be gone into here, and I suggest that the reader consult Russell’s original paper.)

Unactualised Possibles and Existence

Perhaps Pegasus's ontological status is slightly larger (if that's the right way of putting it) than its Greek mythic basis. For a start, many people who know something about Pegasus will not know the Greek myth or myths about Pegasus. Some people may not even know that their Pegasus was originally created or invented by the ancient Greeks (it could be a character in a contemporary kids' cartoon). Despite that, it could be said that if the Pegasus-idea strays too far from its Greek basis then it will no longer be Pegasus; just as if when the "God of the philosophers" strayed too far from the Judaic-Christian God he may no longer have been the Judaic-Christian God.  (How many feathers does Pegasus have on its wings?)

Perhaps Pegasus has some kind of ontological status over and above its Greek basis. The question is: What kind?

Yes, the ontological status of Pegasus is not deemed to be the same as that which monotheists ascribe to God. But there is a least one possible similarity. Pegasus and God could both be non-spatiotemporal. Despite that, if mental imagery is necessary for Pegasus (though perhaps not for God), and the mind and brain are identical (not many believe that nowadays), or, alternatively, the mind is reducible to the brain, then perhaps Pegasus, or the "Pegasus-idea", is not (entirely) non-spatiotemporal.

As for God's ontological status and its textual basis (vis-à-vis Pegasus). I talked about the identity conditions of Pegasus. (Again, is Pegasus white all over, or has it got a black underbelly?) And someone could write:

God, according to the Tanakh, has the identity condition of non-spatiotemporal existence.

(But is "existence" a predicate?) Pegasus, on the other hand, was thought to have spatiotemporal existence (though the Greeks wouldn't have put it that way).

Again:

What is it, then, that an atheist denies, when he denies God existence?

Here, the questions is referring again to what Quine called that

old Platonic riddle of non-being…nicknamed ‘Plato's beard’

Are we referring to the idea that if you talk or think about something you thereby somehow bring it into existence? That's one ironic way of putting it. The atheist denies God's existence. But, again,

what is it that there is not?

Quine called the believer in Pegasus "McX". And McX asked us:

If Pegasus [and God] were not…we should not be talking about anything when we use the word[s]; therefore it would be nonsense to say even that Pegasus [and God were] not.

Quine makes the simple point that Pegasus is only a mental entity (if multi-instantiable!). Many people think that God is not a mental entity. (And far fewer people think that Pegasus is not - simply? - a mental entity.) God is simply non-spatiotemporal. Wyman (another fictional character of Quine), on the other hand, says that Pegasus is an "unactualised possible". Pegasus

does not have the special attribute of actuality.

Quine thought that he could spot a problem with Wyman's possibilia. Wyman's sophisticated ontology of Pegasus doesn't square with everyone else's ontology of Pegasus. If Pegasus existed

he would be in space and time.

(unlike God.) This isn't because existence entails spatio-temporality; only that being a winged horse does. The sophisticated possible ontologist, Wyman (is he bald or longhaired?), has, as it were, invented or created his own version of Pegasus (i.e., Pegasus²). It is an "unactualised possible". (Like a David Lewis possible world in which David Lewis², his "counterpart", doesn't believe in possible worlds.) This is an argument against Wyman's Pegasus² being the same as Pegasus, not an argument about the impossibility of non-spatiotemporal existence. According to Quine, the cube root of 27

is not a spatio-temporal kind of thing.

However Pegasus is not like the cube root of 27 - it is a mental entity. As you can see, Quine is a self-confessed Platonist when it comes to numbers (plus sets etc.). He is not a Platonist when it comes to Pegasus.

Talking about God doesn't bring God into existence. It may bring into existence a mental entity that is thought to represent something non-mental. But monotheists aren't talking about a mental entity or mental image when they talk about God. An atheist doesn't bring the Jewish God into existence, though he may bring a mental image or entity into existence. Alternatively, he might have already acquired that mental entity or image (or ‘meme’, according to Richard Dawkins).

To get back to Quine. He thought that we mustn't confuse

the alleged named object [i.e., God] with the meaning of the word [i.e., 'God'].

We mustn't conclude that God

must be in order that the word {'God'] have meaning.

We can, after all, talk about

the round square cupola on Berkeley College

or the apple with a sense of humour. More seriously, we can use the words, say, “truth" and "meaning" without committing ourselves to other people's concepts of truth and meaning. In fact we can use these words and still believe that they are essentially vacuous (if instrumentally/pragmatically useful and convenient).

Pegasus, according to Quine’s Wyman and later to Saul Kripke [1971], can possibly exist, but it has not yet been “actualised”. When we say that

Pegasus does not exist.

all we are saying is that Pegasus has not been “actualised”. Kripke highlights this point. To say that Pegasus has not been “actualised” is roughly equivalent to saying that

Jane is not white.

That is, in both instances there is something that could possibly exist, whether or not they are “actualised” (i.e., a white Jane). Kripke accepts that “actuality” is synonymous with “existence”. Therefore Pegasus does not exist – surely?

Quine concedes that Pegasus may be what is called a “mental entity”. But people aren’t referring to a mental entity

when they deny Pegasus[ 545].

The idea of a church and the church itself are two different things. The church is a physical object. The idea of the church is mental. Pegasus must be a physical entity because this is what people thought it was in the past. Pegasus is “spatio-temporal”. But being a spatio-temporal thing is not required for something to exist. Numbers are not spatio-temporal and yet, according to Quine, they exist. Kripke uses the word “subsistence” for something that is not as yet “actualised” but still “possible”. Something “subsides” if it could exist and is a fictional or mental possibility.

Sense, Reference and Meanings

Quine follows this account of Russell with an account of what Frege called “sense and reference”. What is the meaning of a proper name? In Quine and Frege’s case, what are the meanings of the names “Morning Star” and the “Evening Star”? The references, that is, the stars themselves, can’t be the meanings of the two proper names because they both refer to the same thing, viz., the planet Venus. This distinction between meaning and reference had already been well made before Quine, but he uses it to get back to the Pegasus problem he tackled earlier in the paper. The reason why McX made his mistake about thinking that names must refer is that he

confused the alleged named object Pegasus with the meaning of the word ‘Pegasus’.

He didn’t distinguish reference from meaning (as in the Morning Star example). McX thought that the meaning of the name ‘Pegasus’ must be the thing, Pegasus. But, as Frege showed, if the reference were identical with the meaning, the planet Venus wouldn’t or couldn’t have two names. And it follows that we can now talk about all sorts of non-existents without committing ourselves to their existence. If reference is not identical with meaning or sense, then a name can have meaning without it having a specific reference -at least a spatiotemporal reference. And that’s what Pegasus is meant to be: a spatiotemporal winged horse; not an idea in one or many minds or an abstract object.

Quine separates meaning and reference, but what has he to say about meanings themselves? This is where Quine is much more original and less Fregean.

Quine’s position on meaning or meanings is quite radical (or at least it was in 1948). To put it quite plainly: Quine rejects meanings; or at least he rejects meanings as characterised traditionally. However, in order to stop people getting too outraged, he almost immediately says:

 …[I do not] thereby deny that words and statements are meaningful.

At a prima facie level, this statement appears to contradict Quine’s aforementioned position. Quine goes on to clarify his position on meanings. Quine agrees with all of us that certain locutions are either meaningful or meaningless. This is not because these locutions express pre-existing entities that we call “meanings”. Meanings are not Platonic entities in a/the Third Realm. They are not mental entities in the mind. They are not abstract objects of any description. And neither are they mental images. But what is there left for meaning to be?

Quine clarifies his position in the following manner. He accepts that two locutions can have the same meaning. However, they don’t do so because both locutions match, as it were, a pre-existing abstract meaning that is somehow expressed by the two locutions. Why does Quine think they have the same meaning? It is simply the case of language referring to language, as it were, rather than language referring to abstract entities (or even denotata). Both locutions have the same meaning if they can be expressed by a third version that expresses more or less the same thing (usually “in a clearer language than the original”). The meaning of a sentence is given by another sentence, rather than by it matching up to an abstract entity we call a “meaning”. If the meaning were an abstract entity, how could a locution match it at all? How can a contingent verbal locution possibly match something that is possibly a timeless non-linguistic thing? How do you match two completely unlike things? Quine calls these different linguistic versions of the same meaning “synonyms”. Just as single words can have their synonyms, so too can whole sentences and even, perhaps, collections of sentences.

Section Three

The Epistemology of What There Is

Towards the end of ‘On What There Is’ Quine gets away from ontology and enters the realm of epistemology.

How do we describe and know what there is?

Quine’s principle answer is: through conceptual schemes. But there are alternative conceptual schemes. However, according to Quine they are not all mutually exclusive. There is no one way of describing or knowing the world truly, as the metaphysical realists may well think.

The two conceptual schemes Quine discusses are that of the physicalist and that of the phenomenalist. Simplistically speaking the physicalist offers us a world of external objects. The phenomenalist, on the other hand, offers us a world of, amongst other things, a round sensum rather than the external object we call a “penny”. According to Quine, both conceptual schemes have their advantages. Quine is very easy-going about conceptual schemes…well, up to a point! The phenomenalist offers us a world of

scattered sense events

rather than one of objects qua objects. When we see a penny as a penny, rather than a round sensum, we are effectively

simplifying our over-all reports.

Again, we assign

sense data to objects

to simplify things.

Despite the fact that I said earlier that Quine does not see these particular conceptual schemes as mutually exclusive, Quine does think that they are in a sense in competition with one another. Although our examples are in competition, they both have their advantages, according to Quine. Each “deserves to be developed”. It depends on what we want from our conceptual schemes. In fact Quine describes the phenomenalist conceptual scheme as an epistemological enterprise and the physicalist conceptual scheme as a physical (or scientific) one.

References and Further Reading

Kripke, S – (1971) ‘Identity and Necessity’, in Identity and Individuation, ed. By M.K. Munitz, New York   University Press

Lewis, D – (1968) ‘Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic’, in The Journal of Philosophy, 65, 5.

Quine, W.V.O – (1948) ‘On What There Is’, from the Review of Metaphysics 2/1

                        -   (1953) ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in his From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press

           - (1969) Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press

Rosenberg, A – (1985) Chapter One of The Structure of Biological Science, Cambridge University Press

Russell, B – (1918) ‘Existence and Description’, in The Monist

Sorensen, R.A – (2002) ‘Philosophical Implications of Logical Paradoxes’, in A Companion to Philosophical Logic, ed. by D. Jacquette, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.