Willard Van Orman Quine's Philosophical Development in the 1930s and 1940s

As analytic philosophy is becoming increasingly aware of and interested in its own history, the study of that field is broadening to include, not just its earliest beginnings, but also the mid-twentieth century. One of the towering figures of this epoch is W.V. Quine (1908-2000), champion of naturalism in philosophy of science, pioneer of mathematical logic, trying to unite an austerely physicalist theory of the world with the truths of mathematics, psychology, and linguistics. Quine's posthumous papers, notes, and drafts revealing the development of his views in the forties have recently begun to be published, as well as careful philosophical studies of, for instance, the evolution of his key doctrine that mathematical and logical truth are continuous with, not divorced from, the truths of natural science. But one central text has remained unexplored: Quine's Portuguese-language book on logic, his 'farewell for now' to the discipline as he embarked on an assignment in the Navy in WWII. Anglophone philosophers have neglected this book because they could not read it. Jointly with colleagues, I have completed the first full English translation of this book. In this accompanying paper I draw out the main philosophical contributions Quine made in the book, placing them in their historical context and relating them to Quine's overall philosophical development during the period. Besides significant developments in the evolution of Quine's views on meaning and analyticity, I argue, this book is also driven by Quine's indebtedness to Russell and Whitehead, Tarski, and Frege, and contains crucial developments in his thinking on philosophy of logic and ontology. This includes early versions of some arguments from 'On What There Is', four-dimensionalism, and virtual set theory

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Metaontology

The Ontological Question 'What exists?' dates back over two thousand five hundred years to the dawn of Western philosophy, and attempts to answer it define the province of ontology. The history of the Western philosophical tradition itself has been one of the differentiation and separation of the various sciences from the primordial stuff of ancient philosophy. Physics was first to break away from the tutelage of philosophy and established its independence in the seventeenth century. The other sciences followed suit fairly rapidly, with perhaps psychology being the last to separate. The results for modern philosophy - of this breakup of what was once a great empire over human reason - have been mixed. An inevitable result has been that questions considered in ancient times to belong to philosophy have fallen within the ambit of other disciplines. So speculations about the material composition and genesis of the universe that interested Thales, Heraclitus and Leucippus, are continued by contemporary cosmologists in well equipped research laboratories, and not by philosophers. However ontology, unlike cosmology, has not broken away from its parent discipline and the Ontological Question as to what exists is still argued by philosophers today. That ontology has failed to make the separation that cosmology has, is a reflection on the weakness of the methodology for settling ontological arguments. Unlike their great Rationalist predecessors, most modern philosophers do not believe that logic alone is sufficient to provide an answer as to what is. But neither do observation or experiment, in any direct way, seem to help us in deciding, for example, whether sets or intentions should be admitted to exist or not. In consequence, the status of ontology as an area of serious study has to depend on the devising of a methodology within which the Ontological Question can be tackled. The pursuit of such a methodology is the concern of metaontology and is also the concern of this thesis

Propositions

This encyclopedia article explores the basics of what philosophers mean by the word 'proposition.' The term 'proposition' has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truth-value, the objects of belief and other "propositional attitudes" (i.e., what is believed, doubted, etc.), the referents of that-clauses, and the meanings of sentences

Naturalising the a priori: reliabilism and experience-independent knowledge

The thesis defends the view that the concept of a priori knowledge can be naturalised without sacrificing the core aspects of the traditional conception of apriority. I proceed by arguing for three related claims.The first claim is that the adoption of naturalism in philosophy is not automatically inconsistent with belief in the existence of a priori knowledge. A widespread view to the contrary has come about through the joint influence of Quine and the logical empiricists. I hold that by rejecting a key assumption made by the logical empiricists (the assumption that apriority can be explained only by appeal to the concept of analyticity), we can develop an account of naturalism in philosophy which does not automatically rule out the possibility of a priori knowledge, and which retains Quine's proposals that philosophy be seen as continuous with the enterprise of natural science, and that the theory of knowledge be developed within the conceptual framework of psychology.The first attempt to provide a theory of a priori knowledge within such a framework was made by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher's strategy involves giving an account of the idea of "experience-independence" independently of the theory of knowledge in general (he assumes that an appropriate account of the latter will be reliabilist). Later authors in the tradition Kitcher inaugurated have followed him on this, while criticising him for adopting too strong a notion of experience-independence. The second claim I make is in qualified agreement with this: it is that only a weak notion of experienceindependence will give a viable account of a priori knowledge, but that the reasons why this is so have been obscured by Kitcher's segregation of the issues. Strong reasons for adopting a weak notion are provided by consideration of the theory of knowledge, but these same reasons also highlight severe problems for the project of providing a naturalistic theory of knowledge in general.The third claim is that a plausible naturalistic theory of knowledge in general can be given, and that it provides an appropriate framework within which to give an account of minimally experience-independent knowledge.I conclude with a consideration of some of the problems that an account of minimal a priori knowledge will have to address

A consideration of two attacks upon the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this essay is to reply to the attacks upon the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction made by Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and by White in "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism". This essay attempts to show not only that these attacks are ill-conceived, but also that Carnap's semantic methods can be used to explain analytically in natural languages. The two attacks are, in effect, attacks upon the conception of the analytic as being definitely different from the synthetic. Quine's attack is directed primarily at three of Carnap's basic concepts -- state-description, explication, and semantic rule. These he regards as separate attempts to explain analytically. White attacks the claim that some natural language has the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction of an artificial language. He does this by considering primarily two imagined experiments [TRUNCATED

On abstraction in a Carnapian system

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) rejects two philosophical distinctions that have been made and admitted by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), namely the object-concept and the sense-reference distinctions. In the analytic tradition and upon these distinctions, a family of analytic systems have been constructed and developed (which we call Fregean systems), within which a number of notions have been employed including the notion of abstraction. It has been claimed (by Neo- Fregeans) that the Fregean notion of abstraction has been captured by what is commonly known as the “principle of abstraction”. The goal of this dissertation is to present the notion of Carnapian abstraction, in particular, and the Carnapian system, in general, in distinction to the Fregean counterparts. We will argue that the admission and rejection of these distinctions will entail fundamentally different analytic systems. Hence, we will show how each system undertakes a different notion of abstraction. Abstraction in a Fregean system will be characterized as a mind-independent process subject to its own rules, whereas in a Carnapian system, abstraction will be characterized as a defined process of distancing from meaning in a linguistic framework. We will conclude that the Carnapian system has advantages over the Fregean one (among which is its simplicity), and that its technical aspect is yet to be developed.Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) rejette deux distinctions philosophiques conçues par Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) : la distinction objet-concept et la distinction sens-référence. Dans la tradition analytique et parmi ces distinctions, une famille de systèmes analytiques a été construite et développée (appelée les « systèmes frégéen »), dans lesquels plusieurs notions ont été employées, incluant la notion d’abstraction. En fait, les néo- frégéen ont déclaré que la notion d’abstraction de Frege est capturée par ce qu’on appelle le « principe d’abstraction ». Le but de cette dissertation est de présenter la notion d’abstraction de Carnap en particulier et le système de Carnap en général, en comparaison aux notions de Frege. Nous allons argumenter que l’admission et le rejet de ces distinctions entraîneront des systèmes analytiques fondamentalement différents. Ainsi, nous allons démontrer comment chaque système utilise différentes notions d’abstraction. L’abstraction dans un système frégéen sera caractérisée comme un processus indépendant qui est confiné à ses propres règles, tandis que dans un système carnapien, l’abstraction sera caractérisée comme un processus défini d’éloignement du sens. Nous arriverons à la conclusion que le système carnapien a plus d’avantages que celui de Frege (comme la simplicité du système) et que son aspect technique a besoin d’être développé davantage

Property Theories

Revised and reprinted; originally in Dov Gabbay & Franz Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Volume IV. Kluwer 133-251. -- Two sorts of property theory are distinguished, those dealing with intensional contexts property abstracts (infinitive and gerundive phrases) and proposition abstracts (‘that’-clauses) and those dealing with predication (or instantiation) relations. The first is deemed to be epistemologically more primary, for “the argument from intensional logic” is perhaps the best argument for the existence of properties. This argument is presented in the course of discussing generality, quantifying-in, learnability, referential semantics, nominalism, conceptualism, realism, type-freedom, the first-order/higher-order controversy, names, indexicals, descriptions, Mates’ puzzle, and the paradox of analysis. Two first-order intensional logics are then formulated. Finally, fixed-point type-free theories of predication are discussed, especially their relation to the question whether properties may be identified with propositional functions