The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (73 page)

27
Cf. n. 20.

28
See also Wittgenstein (
1961
), 6.34ff., for something interestingly akin to it in the early Wittgenstein.

29
Cf. Wittgenstein (
1978
), Pt I, §4.

30
See §1 of that chapter for testimony to the high regard in which Quine held Carnap himself.

31
See e.g. Hempel (
1959
) and Schlick (
1959b
). Carl Hempel himself subsequently has second thoughts about this idea: see Hempel (
1951
).

32
For a suggestion that any differences between Carnap and Quine on this issue are due to Quine’s having transposed the Humean empiricism into an epistemological key, if not back into a psychological key (see n. 2), see Friedman (
2006
), p. 48.

33
It can also be found in Pierre Duhem, again as Quine notes: see Quine (
1961b
), n. 17. For two of Duhem’s own statements of the doctrine, see Duhem (
1991
), pp. 183 and 258.

34
Carnap too attributes the view to Duhem, and to Poincaré. For further discussion of the relations between Carnap and Quine, see Hookway(
1988
),
Ch. 2
, §§3–5; Isaacson (
2004
); Friedman (
2006
); and Creath (
2007
).

35
This translation differs from that given in ‘Elimination’. It is far preferable: it is both more accurate and a clearer indication of Heidegger’s thinking.

36
‘
Das Nicht … nichtet
.’ Here I am adopting the popular rendering of Heidegger’s neologism ‘
nichtet
’, which is translated in Heidegger (
1993a
) as ‘nihilates’ (p. 103) and in ‘Elimination’ as ‘nothings’ (p. 69). For discussion, see the entry on ‘Nothing and Negation’ in Inwood (
1999a
) and (
1999b
).

37
Cf. again the well-known passage from Carroll (
1982
) cited in
Ch. 7
, n. 64.

38
For a full and historically fascinating discussion of Carnap
vis
à
vis
Heidegger, see Friedman (
2000
). See also, for something much more compendious, Friedman (
2002
). For a sympathetic treatment of what Heidegger is doing that draws comparisons between Frege and Heidegger, see Witherspoon (
2002
). (There will be an indirect recurrence of these comparisons in
Ch. 20
, §§5 and 6, in connection with Derrida.)

39
This material in Heidegger, to which incidentally we shall return in
Ch. 18
, §§6 and 7, may appear to be of just the sort that would likewise arouse opposition in Wittgenstein – in both his early and his later phases. In fact we find a curious but revealing open-mindedness on Wittgenstein’s part. In notes dictated to Friedrich Waismann he says, ‘If we want to deal with a proposition such as “The nothing noths”…, then to do it justice we must ask ourselves: what did the author have in mind with this proposition? Where did he get this proposition from?’ – and he then goes on to consider possible motivations for saying such a thing (Wittgenstein and Waismann (2003), pp. 69–75). Elsewhere in connection with Heidegger he comments, in a way that reminds us of his own ambivalent attitude towards nonsense, ‘Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language…. This … is
ethics
…. [The] inclination, the running up against something,
indicates something
’ (Wittgenstein (
1979b
), pp. 68–69, emphasis in original). For discussion, see Baker (
2004d
), esp. pp. 207ff. And see again Witherspoon (
2002
), mentioned in the previous note.

40
Of the five philosophers whom Carnap singles out as adopting systems of metaphysics on this conception, two are from Part One of this book – Fichte and Hegel – and two are from Part Three – Bergson and Heidegger. (The fifth is Schelling.)

41
See e.g. Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §500. And see further Diamond (
1991c
), esp. pp. 106–107, which contain further pertinent quotations from the later work.

42
The early Wittgenstein would demur at this point (even if he were prepared to equate the non-analytically true with the empirically true). He would invoke his sign/symbol distinction and, in line with the point that I made earlier in the main text, count the second of these kinds of nonsense as a species of the first. (See
Ch. 9
, §2.)

43
The claim is analytic because ‘words’, in this context, are being identified, not purely orthographically or phonemically, but in part by how they function. In Wittgensteinian terms they are being construed, not as signs, but as symbols (
Ch. 9
, §2).

44
Wittgenstein notes a similar phenomenon in Wittgenstein (
1969
) where he writes, ‘The characteristic of a metaphysical question [is] that we express an unclarity about the grammar of words in the
form
of a scientific question’ (p. 35, emphasis in original). The difference is that Wittgenstein thinks that this already betokens confusion on our part and that what we are engaged in does (therefore) count as metaphysics.

45
Here Carnap is presupposing a manifestly inadequate account of what it is for a book to treat of Africa, but we can prescind from that.

46
See n. 64 of the previous chapter for the definition of a ‘real’ number.

47
Cf. Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §402.

48
The distinction between the material mode and the formal mode looks as though it might serve as a ‘bail-out’ for some of our earlier protagonists. In particular, it looks as though it might serve to show that Frege had no need to admit the nonsensicality of his apparent talk about the
Bedeutungen
of predicates (
Ch. 8
, §7) nor the early Wittgenstein the nonsensicality of his apparent talk about internal properties (
Ch. 9
, §5). In each case cannot the talk in question be exposed as misleading talk in the material mode and its true sense thereby be revealed, in Frege’s case by showing that it is really talk about predicates themselves and in Wittgenstein’s case by showing that it is really talk about the properties of associated symbols? In Wittgenstein’s case, Carnap thinks, it can (
Logical Syntax
, esp. pp. 282–283 and 295–296). But, as he makes clear, this is scarcely a bail-out for Wittgenstein, who, given the role played in his thinking by the nonsensicality of the remarks in question, could not readily have accommodated the suggestion that they in fact made sense. There is in any case the point that I made in
Ch. 9
, n. 27, that some of Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s problems are replicated in talk about linguistic items.

Elsewhere Carnap invokes his distinction in further departures from his two predecessors. Thus in
Philosophy
he considers the identity statement that Frege made famous: ‘The evening star and the morning star are the same thing.’ And he defends the view which Frege himself originally held and subsequently retracted, that this is really a statement about the two names involved, misleadingly expressed in the material mode (p. 66; and see above,
Ch. 8
, §4, esp. n. 39). Again, in
Logical Syntax
he lists some sentences from Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
which he takes to be in the material mode and gives their formal mode translations – notably, ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’ (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 1.1), which he translates as, ‘Science is a system of sentences, not of names’ (p. 303). But he does so as a prelude to urging that Wittgenstein himself is not always in command of his own language and that other sentences in his book, including many of those in the late 6s that purport to deal with ‘what is higher’, are likewise in the material mode – to whatever extent they are in any proper mode at all – though they lack any satisfactory translation. (Not, of course, that Wittgenstein need disagree.)

49
This is significant for me in that it is the first point in this narrative at which we find the triad of answers that I myself would give. For a somewhat more conservative approach to the Novelty Question, from a broadly similar point of view, see Ayer (
1969
).

50
In
Ch. 1
, §3, I referred to what Simon Blackburn calls ‘quasi-realism’. A quasi-realist recognizes the same variety of functions that statements can serve but differs from a logical positivist in holding that a statement can serve one of these functions and still express a truth or a falsehood: see Blackburn (
1984
),
Ch. 5
, §6, and
Ch. 6
, and Blackburn (
1993a
). (Cf. also n. 21 of the previous chapter.) I mention this because it is important to appreciate that the logical positivist account of truth and falsity is by no means uncontentious: see further the next section.

51
Ironically, if my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
is correct (
Ch. 9
, §§6–8), then this question is especially pertinent to that work. I say ‘ironically’, because the
Tractatus
is far from being one of Carnap’s principal targets. On the contrary, it is a work he greatly admires, though not on the grounds that this question suggests make it admirable: see e.g.
Logical Syntax
, p. 282. (And see again n. 26.)

52
Ayer also sometimes calls it ‘the principle of verification’ (see e.g. ibid.). In Ayer (
1971
), p. 7, he gives a different formulation of the principle, and, as I observed in n. 5, goes on to discuss some complications that these formulations glide over; but the differences between the formulations, and for that matter the complications, are for current purposes immaterial.

53
He is wrong about this because the
Tractatus
is not concerned with the verification principle at all: see §3(d), and see again
Ch. 9
, n. 20.

54
That Carnap is concerned with a
limitation
to what we can make sense of, not (just) with its essence, is interestingly highlighted in ‘Elimination’, pp. 72–73.

55
Ayer partially concedes this point in Ayer (
1992
), p. 150.

56
Quasi-realists, among others, disagree: see above, n. 50. For a sample of the debate, see Hooker (
1996
).

57
This is not to mention all those from Part Three of my book with whom he must enter into debate.

58
This is interestingly reminiscent of the Fichtean idea that metaphysics is grounded in a practical choice that we are forced to make between different systems of thought (
Ch. 6
, §2).

Chapter 12 Quine The
Ne Plus Ultra
of Naturalism

1. Introduction

From Carnap we proceed naturally to Quine. We can get a good sense of the extraordinarily high esteem in which Quine held Carnap from the homage to Carnap that Quine delivered at a memorial meeting shortly after Carnap’s death. In that homage Quine said:

Carnap is a towering figure. I see him as the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930s onwards…. Some philosophers would assign this role rather to Wittgenstein; but many see the scene as I do. (‘Carnap’, p. 40
¹
)

Much of Quine’s own work can be seen as a direct response to Carnap’s. There were parts that he thoroughly espoused and parts that he just as thoroughly opposed, but all of it had a deep and lasting influence on his philosophical thinking.

W.V. Quine (1908–2000) had, to an extent that I think is unrivalled in the analytic tradition, a profound synoptic vision. And an integral part of
that vision was the empiricism that had likewise been an integral part of Carnap’s logical positivism. It is here in fact that we find the greatest continuity between the two thinkers. But while Quine accepted the empiricism itself, he rejected the various crucial modifications that it had undergone in Carnap’s hands. To understand the role that it played in his own thinking we must first place it in the context of two other ‘isms’ that he famously embraced: naturalism and physicalism.

2. Quine: Empiricist, Naturalist, Physicalist

In this section I shall comment on each of the three ‘isms’ in turn. In the next section I shall relate them to one another.
²