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Dec. 14, 2004 This Christmas Day, pause to revere a man who had no time for religion. His name was Willard Van Orman Quine, and he died four years ago on Christmas Day. He was many things: teacher, writer, mathematician, linguist, et al. Above all, he was the greatest philosopher America has yet produced. That alone deserves respect. Why was Quine so good? The philosophical world Quine inherited was breaking up. Blame it on Descartes. Descartes wanted to create a philosophy built entirely on certainties, so that it would survive any criticism or suspicion. He began with the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”), which seemed to defeat all attacks. After all, doubting the cogito only proved it. On this rock, Descartes wanted to build a philosophical fortress. He tried to build one, and many followers tried as well, but the darned things kept falling down. You’d think that philosophers, as the sages they aspire to be, would quickly notice that fortress building wasn’t working. But they didn’t notice, and generations and centuries passed before Quine mercifully held up his hand and bade them stop. Patton said, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man," and in philosophy, Quine might have said the same. A master of logic, he wrote concisely. Philosophy shouldn't be a difficult subject. What makes it difficult is reading the poor writing of philosophers. Anyone who reads Hegel or Heidegger winds up on the floor, clutching the rug in agony. (An example: “The nothing of Nothingness nothings …” Deep. Get me a noose.) Quine appeared as a welcome relief. Quine never wrote to impress his professional colleagues. He was simply moving on swiftly from one point of reason to the next. Quine wrote simply, because being Quine, he never felt he had to prove anything. He mentioned jargon only when he was busy dismantling it. Believe me, as a philosophy student of many years, I was thankful for that. Quine had a nasty habit of spotting wolves in sheep’s clothing. Too often, to resolve problems, philosophers concoct new vocabulary. They create twisted distinctions and attach odd shades of meanings to familiar words. The audience, eager to return to the saloon, usually nods in agreement. Quine made a career of exposing such frauds, even when the schemes had worked for years. Philosophers once made great noise about the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. To explain: a statement simply attaches a predicate to a subject. More simply, you start with some subject and say something about it. (There. Was that hard?) If you said something new and unexpected about the subject, that was a synthetic statement. If, however, the predicate merely said something you already knew from the subject, that was analytic. An analytic statement, therefore, would be a certainty. Philosophers love certainties, and the hope of certainty is the ultimate flytrap. Quine pounced on analytic statements and dismantled the distinction. Thus unraveled Kant. Next, he dealt with facts. Not with this fact, or with that fact; with facts in general. The most common theory held that a statement is true when it conforms to a fact. So you have two components that need to match: a statement, and a fact. That view held considerable influence until Quine got nasty with the whole idea of facts. What are facts, after all, except linguistic ghosts conjured up to support a theory? The old theory held that if we say ‘Snow is white,’ our statement (the words within the quotes) must conform to a fact, namely, the fact of snow’s whiteness. Quine rightly saw that ‘snow is white’ is true merely if snow is white. Truth simply removes the quotes. We have no need to fantasize about some quasi-real entity or relation called a fact to guarantee truth. A fact is a linguistic device, but it has no weight of its own, and can’t guarantee anything. Quine resisted the yearning to find some absolute truth. Truth doesn’t stand still. Truth is not buried treasure, and science isn’t archeology. Instead, with truth, the game is afoot, Watson. Truth is always moving, if for no other reason that the practice of science depends on language, and language is always shifting. Quine cultivated a love of language. He spoke several, fluently. He also had the good luck to follow the advent of linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein had already thrown off the linguistic blinders, and Quine reaped the benefits. Quine stressed the holistic nature of language. To explain: suppose you were a translator, out in the field with a primitive tribe, trying to learn their language. You go out hunting with them. The hunters come to a clearing, and in the clearing, you see a rabbit. The hunters point to the rabbit and say ‘gavagai.’ You, as a translator, whip out your notebook and write ‘gavagai’ = ‘rabbit.’ But wait. Gavagai could also mean, ‘animal,’ ‘young one,’ ‘furry,’ or it could mean simply ‘lunch.’ As an outsider, you can’t make one-to-one comparisons between languages. You have to live in the language, immersed in it, to correctly understand what the words mean. Language, and therefore science, is drenched in experience. Nothing fixed there. Quine came to see belief not as a fortress of certainties, but as a web of commitments. Of all our beliefs, we hold some more dear than others, for whatever motive or cause. We protect our most cherished beliefs by placing them in the web’s center. Less trusted beliefs hang on the perimeter, and if experience disputes them, we calmly allow them to fall off the web. The closer to the web’s center, however, the more tightly we hold onto beliefs, and the more upset we are to let go of them. It would take a catastrophe to loosen the beliefs at the center, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Indeed, the business of science is to test and challenge all beliefs, starting at the edge and working inward. It may seem strange to pause on Christmas to pay homage to a man who had little patience with religion. As far as Quine was concerned, religion was little more that a cultural fiction. He claimed that it was useful to calm and civilize the masses, but it wasn’t a serious discussion in itself. Now I’m a devout Roman Catholic, and I strongly support religion, but I sympathize with Quine here. To appreciate religion, you have to overlook the tide of silliness that comes along with it. Let’s face it, where religious faith goes, piety and mysticism follows. Nothing wrong with these, but wherever we find piety and mysticism, superstition lurks nearby. Quine had no patience for superstition. Perhaps I’m a little more indulgent of it, but not much. All I’ll say for Quine’s atheism is that no one is perfect, and leave it there. On Christmas Day, take a moment to honor Willard Van Orman Quine. It will be silence well spent. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville is a computer programmer, a happy husband and father of four, and holds several degrees in philosophy. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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