11 ideas
| 21642 | If quantification is all substitutional, there is no ontology [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is meaningless for a theory whose only quantification is substitutionally construed. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.64), quoted by Thomas Hofweber - Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics 03.5.1 n18 | |
| A reaction: Hofweber views it as none the worse for that, since clearly lots of quantification has no ontological commitment at all. But he says it is rightly called 'a nominalists attempt at a free lunch'. |
| 1633 | Absolute ontological questions are meaningless, because the answers are circular definitions [Quine] |
| Full Idea: What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity. A question of the form "What is an F?" can only be answered with "An F is a G", which makes sense relative to the uncritical acceptance of G. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.53) |
| 18964 | Ontology is relative to both a background theory and a translation manual [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is doubly relative. Specifying the universe of a theory makes sense only relative to some background theory, and only relative to some choice of a manual of translation of one theory into another. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.54) | |
| A reaction: People tend to forget about the double nature of Quine's notion of ontological commitment, and usually only talk about the commitment of the theory being employed. Why is the philosophical community not devoting itself to the study of tranlation manuals? |
| 18965 | We know what things are by distinguishing them, so identity is part of ontology [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We cannot know what something is without knowing how it is marked off from other things. Identity is thus of a piece with ontology. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.55) | |
| A reaction: Actually it is failure of identity which seems to raise questions of individuation. If I say 'this apple is [pause] identical to this apple', I don't see how that helps me to individuate apples. |
| 1634 | Two things are relative - the background theory, and translating the object theory into the background theory [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Relativity has two components: to the choice of a background theory, and to the choice of how to translate the object theory into the background theory. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.67) |
| 8470 | Reference is inscrutable, because we cannot choose between theories of numbers [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: For Quine, we cannot sensibly ask which is the real number five, the Frege-Russell set or the Von Neumann one. There is no arithmetical or empirical way of deciding between the two. Reference is inscrutable. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: To generalise from a problem of reference in the highly abstract world of arithmetic, and say that all reference is inscrutable, strikes me as implausible. |
| 18963 | Indeterminacy translating 'rabbit' depends on translating individuation terms [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The indeterminacy between 'rabbit', 'rabbit stage' and the rest depended only on a correlative indeterminacy of translation of the English apparatus of individuation - pronouns, plurals, identity, numerals and so on. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.35) | |
| A reaction: This spells out the problem a little better than in 'Word and Object'. I just don't believe these problems are intractable. Quine is like a child endlessly asking 'why?'. |
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 22974 | Presentists lack the materials for a realist view of change [Price,H] |
| Full Idea: The presentist view seems to have lost the materials for a realist view of passage, change or temporal transition. | |
| From: Huw Price (The Flow of Time [2011], 2) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice point. How can a presentist talk of change if the only component that exists is the present time slice? Price says change can only be a kind of fiction for the presentist. Change in existence and in properties are distinct concepts. |
| 22973 | The present moment, time's direction, and time's dynamic quality seem to be objective facts [Price,H] |
| Full Idea: The flow of time seems to be an objective feature of reality because of 1) the present moment can be objectively distinguished, 2) time has an objective direction, of earlier and later, and 3) there is something objectively dynamic about time. | |
| From: Huw Price (The Flow of Time [2011], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Price sets out to undermine all three of these claims, in implicit defence of a psychological view. I disagree with him. |
| 22975 | We must explain either the existence of a time direction, or our psychological sense of it [Price,H] |
| Full Idea: If the world comes equipped with a time orientation, where does it come from? If it doesn't, what explains our psychological feeling of a direction for time? | |
| From: Huw Price (The Flow of Time [2011], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: The chances of 'explaining' either one look slim to me. That is, the fact would explain our experience, but the experience without the fact looks ridiculous, and I cannot conceive of any time-free entity which could explain the fact. |