Classic Quine
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Saturday, January 27, 2007 at 6:03 PM
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2 Comments |
Quine was surely one of our best writers. And in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series book On Quine, Nelson and Nelson pick out this choice selection of phrases that came from his pen:
We sit and think, but do we sit and believe? The White Queen, indeed, professed to do so. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as manay as six impossible things before breakfast." But it will be agreed that the White Queen was atypical. ("Quiddities")
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word, 'Everything.' ("On What There Is")
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space. ("Two Dogmas")
I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric air waves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil. ("The Scope and Language of Science")
According to physics, my desk is, for all its seeming fixity and solidity, a swarm of vibrating molecules... no glimpse is to be had of separate molecules of the desk; they are, we are told, too small. ("Posits and Reality")
One can find in these paragraphs the seeds of style that would blossom in the works of Quine's successors. I have in mind Quine's sly wit, his preference for the compact sentence in an active voice, and the imaginative illustrations he draws on. Not all of us will succeed in writing with such skill and panache. But we can (and I will) try so to do.
2 Comments:
Noumena at 6:00 PM said... Quine was certainly an excellent writer from a rhetorical or purely aesthetic perspective. But in terms of clarity or perspicacity, he leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. You saw a little example of that today in the exchange between PvI and myself over radical translation. It took people thirty years to understand the intended point of the `gavagai' thought experiment, and nearly fifty years later we still aren't entirely sure what the argument is supposed to be. And Quine was around for most of that time, `explaining' the thought experiment. He was certainly a witty and clever writer, but he's also certainly willing to sacrifice clarity and precision for the sake of a moderately clever witticism.
Incidentally, it's Hankinson Nelson and Nelson. Book publishers have yet to fully grasp the intricacies of last names in this, the third wave of feminism.
Andrew Bailey at 6:57 PM said... That's right, Dan. Finding the *argument* in Quine is perhaps the most frustrating part of reading him.
Incidentally, Scott Soames gives as good a shot at any at pinning down Quine's argument from radical translation. It's in his history of analytic philosophy anthology (second volume, I believe). On Soames' reading, the argument has the virtue of being valid, and the vice of having (what seem to me to be) obviously false premises.
