• What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Ok, so why did Quine object to essences?

    He rejected Aristotelian metaphysics. In general, he rejected the idea that objects have an intrinsic nature, independent of our web of belief. This follows pretty readily from naturalism, with our understanding of the world embedded in science and language. What we might think of as intrinsic to the stuff around us is dependent on the other beliefs we bring with us, and not to some presumed but cryptic intrinsic nature.

    Further than that, for Quine notions of necessity do not concern the way things are in the world but how we talk about the world. For Quine necessity is not a feature of the world but an aspect of the language and beliefs we hold. Essentialism wrongly attributes linguistic or conceptual distinctions to the structure of reality itself. If you don't like the use of "language" here, use "conceptual" instead.

    He rather famously pointed out that there are no objective boundaries between properties that are said to be necessary and those that are not. So what is essential to our ubiquitous tiger is not something about tigers, but the beliefs we bring to the table in dealing with tigers. The arguments will be familiar from his Two Dogmas paper.

    Quine objected to aspects of modal logic, too, mainly on the grounds of the referential opacity of assigning necessity to individuals rather than proposition (de re necessity). Modal logic after Kripke avoids much of that critique.

    What followed was that it didn't much matter what "gavagai" refers to, what the essence of "gavagai" might be, what it is to be a gavagai, so long as you got the stew. It's a pragmatic approach. One cannot be certain as to which name refers to which thing, yet it doesn't make much difference.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ...wouldn't you want to say that there is something called understanding a phenomenon/item/object which is different from doing anything with it or about it? — J
    Isn't learning about tigers doing something? Dragging this thread again back to Quine, it's building a common web of belief.

    I gather this is some blindness on my part. Help me see the duck when I can only see the rabbit.


    Is learning what a tiger is exactly the same as defining the word "tiger"? — J
    Well, how do they differ? And here it will be worth pointing out that "using the word" is a sort of shorthand for any sort of action - following on from the admonition not to look to meaning but to use, it's what we do that counts, not our understanding of various garden paths.

    ..to study a tiger requires a tiger; to study the word "tiger" does not. — J
    I'm not sure about that. Can you be said to understand wth word "tiger" and yet not understand what a tiger is?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪J
    Being of the linguistic persuasion, I again can't help but ask how "how to recognise a tiger" and "what constitutes a tiger" are anything more than questions about how we use the word "tiger".

    Edit: that is, more broadly, how these two questions are asking for more than what we might do about tigers. If you can spot the tiger in the grass, and pick it out from the liger, what more do you need - what help is an essence? We would still know that once we escape the tiger's cage we ought not go back for our hat.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪Janus
    Good reply. The obvious response is that what it is we recognise when we recognise a tiger is, well, the tiger.

    In that way essences are another example of the sort of garden path down which philosophers are so prone to wandering.

    Ah, well, this would have been a much shorter thread if it had stuck to discussing Quine. Essence might be a neat way to keep philosophers away from considering more substantive issues.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    We can all recognize a tiger when we see one, even though we cannot say what the essence of being a tiger is. Perhaps the essence of something, if we are thinking of essence as a kind of defining quality, is more like the 'feeling' of that thing, rather than anything determinate. — Janus
    Then what need have we for essence? What do they do?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Treat this as an invitation to engage with the thread topic on its own terms... — Leontiskos
    Amusing, since this is a thread about Quine, yet you have tried your dammdest to make it a thread about Aristotle. And me.
  • Australian politics
    ↪Wayfarer


    The government will attempt to speak about the cost of living. The opposition will be out to convince us that we live in the sorts of “tough and precarious” times that might require desperate measures. — Ben Smee

    Perhaps the pivot point in the election will be how scared folk are.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Banno do you disagree with that? — frank

    :grin:

    It's complicated.

    I had a go at addressing J.
    ↪above
    . I inadvertently did not add your name until after the post, so you would not have received notification.

    The upshot is that you and @J are both right, but somewhat at cross-purposes.

    In possible world semantics, "Socrates" just refers to Socrates, and how it refers is not part of the discussion. To that way of thinking, it is indeed possible that Socrates was a robot. That's your point.

    But Kripke has an additional theory, not part of possible world semantics but a supplement to it, which holds that a name refers in virtue of a causal chain from speaker to referent. On that account, Kripke might well argue that since the name "Socrates" is causally linked to Socrates, if the thing we now call "Socrates" turned out to be a robot, that would not be a fact about Socrates, but about something else - the robot. This I take it is what J has in mind.

    It's parallel to asking "What if Socrates had different parents?". On the one hand we may be asking what the world would be like if the chap Plato wrote about had had different parents - perhaps he would have been a painter instead of a sculptor, and not learned to be such an arse. Or we might be asking if that chap, who was indeed a philosopher, may have been mistaken as to who his parents were. We can ask either, but need to keep in mind that they are different questions.

    Hope that clarifies it. It's pretty similar to what you said
    ↪here
    .
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪J
    Cheers. It may be at p.93 here. There seems to be a small industry in reinterpreting Lock in modern modal terms. I'll have a look.


    I'd like to express my admiration for your even-handedness.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Much of the work done by essences in mediaeval philosophy is now done using other mechanisms. While they are still discussed, they are far from central. That Quine rejects essentialism does not count agains Quine now, in the way it may have in the fourteenth century.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Obviously, if you assume that nothing is essential, nothing will be essential. How is that a problem for essences? — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Well, it makes sense. We can get by without essences. Hence, as it were, essences are not essential...

    And recall that my conclusion was not, as you reported, to "dispatched any notion of essence" but to show that they are problematic. :brow:

    That's only problematic for essential properties in that it simply assumes they don't exist. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    What it shows is that we can make reference to Socrates without relying on some set of properties that fix the referent. We can reject the descriptivist theory of reference.

    We do not need essences in order to fix the referent of a name.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    I don't think Kripke would agree — J

    Probably not. Kripke would presumably say something like that the name "Socrates" is joined by a causal chain to that individual, and part of that chain was his being born to a certain woman. On that account there may indeed be a contradiction in supposing that Socrates may have been a robot, since he was born of a woman.

    Such considerations are apart from the logic of modality, in which the domain is stipulated.

    There's a subtle point here, around whether when we say "Socrates", we are just stipulating that individual, or whether we are thereby participating in a broader, communal exercise. For me, either is possible, and they are of equal standing, and perhaps not problematic so long as we track which of these two games we are playing.

    So if Socrates - that very individual - were a robot, then we would have to change a whole lot of other things we had assumed about him - including, presumably, that he was born of woman.

    It's interesting how this parallels Quine's holism. If Socrates turned out to be a robot, then a large number of other entries in out web of belief would have to be changed.

    @frank
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    One wouldn't need to believe in essences to believe there are distinct sorts of things? That's all an essence is. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    No. One would not have to be an essentialist to agree that a robot is not a man. Socrates may have been a man. Socrates may have been a robot. Both those sentences are about Socrates. That very individual.

    It is indeed possible for the very same individual to have different properties in different possible worlds. That's how modal talk is usually understood. We can consider a possible world in which Socrates - that very individual - was a robot.

    What is not possible is that Socrates be both man and not-man in the very same possible world.

    If all properties are accidental, then we may still refer to "the same individual" across any possible world by stipulation. What if Socrates, that very individual, were a robot?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪frank
    Yeah, talk of essences is interesting. It's apparent that essentialism requires a distinctly divergent view of many of the details of how the world works. In particular, it seems to have appeal for those of a theistic bent. Perhaps a tiger is a tiger if god says so. But I don't know what god says, so it's no for me. I'll go with naturalism, like Quine.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪J
    Quite right, as an explication of Kripke's causal views. There was another thread on Kripke's Identity and Necessity, an early paper.

    I don't think we have much chance of progressing that, given the rejection of formal logic amongst some contributors.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪Moliere
    Yep. The Kripke threads were very helpful in articulating this.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    The propaganda campaign is well established by now. — Leontiskos
    It's been pointed out previously and by others that you tend to misrepresent folk and then critique what you want to see rather than what has been said. You are doing it again.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    SEP is correct here: — Leontiskos

    Indeed, and you might take a look at the associated sub-article, which addresses this issue in detail and concludes
    Hence, it is not uncommon to acknowledge today that a speaker can use a word to express just the appropriate content even though that speaker “does not understand what he himself means when he utters his word” — Stipulating Identity Trans-world, Without Qualitative Criteria for a Designatum to Satisfy
    Which is not very far at all from Quine's claim.

    It's what we do,
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Looking at possible worlds is fine. Suppose we have one where Socrates is a man and one where Socrates is a robot disguised as a man. The essentialist says that these two aren't identical to each other in the sense that they aren't the same sort of thing, even if they both bug the Greeks and get forced to drink hemlock. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Quite odd. One does not have to be an essentialist to agree that these aren't the same sort of thing. In one possible world, Socrates - that very individual - is a man, while in another he may be a robot. These sentences are both about Socrates. That is, they are both about the very same individual.

    The alternative would be to reject transworld identification, which I supose is what you are doing. But I hadn't taken you as a friend of David Lewis and counterpart theory. Certainly his views on God would not suit you.

    Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. — frank
    Yep. I think this the least problematic way to understand possible worlds.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Banno reduces all of philosophy to a few idiosyncratic decades in the 20th century and reads everything through that narrow, parochial lens. — Leontiskos

    There are those amongst us who do much the same thing, but from a mediaeval perspective. Which to prefer?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Have you guys read Kripke? — J
    :rofl:
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens

    No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape."     — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Rather famously, Quine rejected the idea that we could not question analytic propositions. So for him perhaps even that a triangle has three sides might be subject to revision. Certainly that the angles of a triangle add to 180º has been questioned.

    But if it is a misunderstanding, show how, and set out for us what an essence is. So fat all we seem to have is that an essence of a thing is what it is...

    And while we are here, the idea that Socrates might have not been human is played out in the writings of Donnellan and Kripke, in their rejection of the description theory of meaning. Basic stuff that follows from Kripke's account of an individual being the same in other possible worlds, the basis of the possible world semantics that underpins modal logic.

    Socrates might have been an alien. That individual, Socrates, might have had all manor of different properties.

    @frank
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Let me ask, when we read a book about botany do we only learn about word use, theories, and models, or do we learn about plants? — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Why not both?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    @Frank,

    Banno is not a good person to ask about this. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Hmm.

    He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    That's not so. What I said was
    Therefore the notion of essence is problematic. — Banno
    And clearly it is.

    And later I offered
    I had in mind Fine's rejection of Quine's holism. Kripke's origin essentialism works well. One might make sense of essences by using Searle's status functions; something along the lines of Fine's argument but using "counts as..." to set up what Fine calls a definite. — Banno
    by way of showing a path for making sense of essences.

    I starter and ran a thread about FIne's view of essences, and several threads on Kripke, whom I studied while at Uni; a long time ago, and no doubt things have moved on.

    Quine's conclusion is at odds with a great deal of contemporary and historical thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Often the mark of a good piece of thinking is found in the conversation about how it might be wrong. Quine made a deep impression in philosophy, but I do not agree with all that he said. The criticisms of Quine here somewhat misrepresent his view. I'd like to clear a few of those errors up.

    For Quine, there are no discrete wholes out in the world to refer to. And what we have as evidence from the senses is based on the behaviorist notion of stimuli. We have energy interacting with nerves in a reductive physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    This is roughly correct. Quine adopted a naturalist approach. He certainly is not alone in treating wholes as conceptual constructions, his rejection of what Sellers would call "the myth of the given". He does make use of behaviour; so in the Gavagai fable he is asking how we might translate "gavagai" based only on the behaviour of the community. But it is an error to say he relies on stimuli. We are, after all, talking about a philosopher who was most central involved in the dethroning of logical empiricism. He very much uses linguistic and behavioural responses to emphasis the wholistic nature of our briefs. That's kinda his thing. Quine would have outright rejected any association with "mereological nihilism grounded in corpuscular physicalism". Associating him with such a notion is a symptom of not having grasped his approach.

    I addressed the place of language in categorising discreet individuals earlier. (I'll drop "discreet wholes" since it is liable to cause confusion with Quine's holism) Is a liger a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both? Seems to me that this is not asking something about ligers, but about how we might best use the words "liger", "tiger" and "lion". But if that's so, then asking if a liger is a tiger is not asking about essences of "tigerness", but about word use. What counts as a rabbit or a lion is as much about the community of language users, or if Tim prefers, the "form of life", as it is about rabbits and lions. Quine was a part of the discussion that brought this idea to the fore.

    Saying that an essence is "what it is" must strike one as incomplete. A tiger is "what it is" – a tiger? But that tells us next to nothing. As with "the idea that there is something that makes different types of things different types of things" – well, ok, but what? a different set of properties? a difference in definition? Or a difference in word use?

    Sometimes it appears that there is not a "something that makes it what it is", famously in the cases of games and families set out by Wittgenstein.

    And the point made by both Quine and Wittgenstein is that even if we cannot set out "what it is that makes it what it is" (a phrasing surely only to be found in the mouth of a philosopher), we can nevertheless make use of the words, and good, competent use as well.

    If essence is sometimes taken to be a "magical spirit power inside things" it might be becasue those who advocate essentialism do not set out what it is...
    It's rather difficult to form an opinion concerning essence while what an essence is remains obscure. — Banno

    So if your aim is to preserve your essentialism, then yes, Banno is not a good person to ask about this. He is, after all, just a troll. And proud of it.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal? — frank
    I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪Leontiskos
    :roll:

    Ok.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪Leontiskos
    I really do not think you have understood Quine. Hence your insistence on attacking me rather than addressing the issues raised.

    But maybe we can get some content here. Let's go back to the bit you raised today - Humpty Dumpty. You used the phrase "immediate signification", which is from Lock, the notion being that the meaning of a word is the idea it represents in the mind of the speaker - is that something you might defend?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    You still haven't managed to address the central issue raised <here> — Leontiskos
    "If Quine is right, then how could we be confident"? See
    ↪Banno
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ...they do not manage to account in any way for speakers' intentions — Leontiskos
    The Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning? No, it's not very popular.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Yes, indeed! — Janus

    I'm puzzled as to what a liger is. Is it a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both?

    Seems to me that this is not asking something about ligers, but about how we might best use the words "liger", "tiger" and "lion".

    But if that's so, then asking if a liger is a tiger is not asking about essences of tigerness, but about word use.

    Any thoughts?
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    However, if we take Quine seriously then we never need any particular belief to make sense of anything. There are always alternative explanations open to us to make any belief work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yep.

    That's part of what makes Quine interesting. It's the whole web of belief that provides the explanation, not any individual belief.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    But you both seemed to affirm that, for reference, underdetemination means there is no fact of the matter. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Well, it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't matter if there is a fact of the matter... provided you get your rabbit stew.

    Yet if underdetemination (given what Quine allows as evidence) means there is no fact of the matter, then there is no fact of the matter about a vast number of things: — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Yes. There would still however be beliefs with differing strengths.

    That is not to say that rabbit=gavagai is not truth-apt; but that the truth value is inferred and allocated as a part of our web of belief.

    For Quine, any of our beliefs can be modified, but not all of them. Not unlike Wittgenstein's view on doubt form On Certainty.

    Now there are all sorts of problems with Quine's view. But it is useful to have a better idea of what he was saying than just "because we have different words that we use for the same thing that there is no one referent for a specific thing".
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    That's not really addressing the question though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    :rofl:

    (sorry... had to post that. I'll read the rest of your response now).
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Notice the difference to Putnam, who seems to have suggested that since we couldn't refer with certainty, there was nothing to refer to. There is doubtless more to his ideas, but that basic inference may be a step too far. Again, it does not matter that we are certain of what "gavagai" refers to, for it to have a place in the language community.

    Notice also how Quine's view meshes with the idea of looking to use rather that fixing meaning. There is much overlap here with Wittgenstein. Neither give much credence to the need for deterministic, essentialist or intrinsic meaning.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Let's consider how Quine might have addressed induction.

    Induction is deductively invalid. That the sun has risen every day for eons simply does not imply that it will rise tomorrow.

    But our understanding of the sun rising is based on far more than just this simple inductive inference. It is also based on our understanding of the shape of the Earth, the movement of objects in the solar system and physics and astronomy generally.

    For the sun not to come up tomorrow, the number of our beliefs that would have to be incorrect is quite large.

    So while induction is not deductively valid, for Quine an inductive inference would be worth considering as true on the basis of it's place within our web of belief.

    Similarly, our supposition that "gavagai" means rabbit might be worth considering on the basis of our other beliefs about the community we are interpreting.

    We need to take care here. There need be no truth to the matter of what it is that "gavagai" refers to, but there might well be. If the men go off hunting gavagai and return with rabbits, and if they offer you gavagai and hand you rabbit stew, that may well suffice.

    What's novel here is that Quine noticed how a fixed referent was not needed for "gavagai" to have a place in the doings of the community.

    And, as for essences, one does not need to have at hand an "essence of gavagai" in order to make a comprehensive use of the term. The essence of gavagai is irrelevant.

    This is a very different approach to that being taken by some folk hereabouts.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    Sure... — Leontiskos
    So after all that wind, you agree with what was said.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    ↪Janus
    It's rather difficult to form an opinion concerning essence while what an essence is remains obscure.
  • p and "I think p"
    a larger point — Wayfarer
    This?
    In the Fregean framework, first-person thoughts are problematical because they involve a self-referential aspect that cannot be ‘disquoted’ or fully expressed from a third-person perspective. This means that while we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement like “my hand hurts,” we cannot adequately convey the subjective experience it conveys in a third-person proposition. The term ‘undisquotable’ highlights the idea that first-person thoughts maintain an intrinsic self-reference that eludes complete external articulation or understanding. — Wayfarer
    So the claim is that we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement: He said "my hand hurts". And we can turn this into a disquotation: He said that his hand hurts. Or, in Davidson's account: His hand hurts. He said that. Or if you want it in the third person, RussellA said that his hand hurts. And for Davidson, "my hand hurts" might be parsed as RussellA's hand hurts. RussellA said that.

    What is it that is in the first person but not in the second or third? What does "first-person thoughts are problematical because they involve a self-referential aspect that cannot be ‘disquoted’ or fully expressed from a third-person perspective" say except that first person accounts are in the first person, while third person accounts are in the third person?

    All very obtuse.

    <"My hand hurts", uttered by RussellA, will be true if and only if RussellA said that he his hand hurts>, appears to give a third person account of what was said that has the same truth functionality. Perhaps it does not "covey the pain", but neither does "my hand hurts".
  • p and "I think p"
    I believe it was you who first first introduced 'my hand hurts' — Wayfarer
    But
    Let Think1 = I think "my hand hurts" — RussellA
    precedes mine. Never mind. It seems that the problem is not first person/third person but puting pain into an expression - "conveying" a pain as you put it.
  • p and "I think p"
    ↪J
    Ok. Happy to drop pursuing this.
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