A Previously Unpublished Letter from Quine to Benardete (Philosophy, Poetry, Ontology, and Wisdom)

A bit of evidence in support of which result the analytical philosopher can ruefully supply on his own, simply by recalling that in his eagerness to travel light he has been prone to regard wisdom as just another piece of excess baggage impeding the progress of traditional philosophy that he has long since dumped by the wayside.6 [6 See in this connection Quine's mention of wisdom in Theories and Things(1981: 193)]

 Quinean poetics reopens this whole issue of wisdom, in connection with the vexed question of what the putative wisdom of the poet might be supposed to consist in, but no longer on the level of airy generality, where it has languished hitherto. Not that the philosopher can expect to be easily credited as a disinterested arbiter of his quarrel with the poet. But if the suspicion of parties is inevitably very strong here, it may yet be overcome by the following line of reflection. Having jettisoned all claims to wisdom and quite ungrudgingly ("with good riddance too"), the analytical philosopher is quite prepared to certify those of the poet, not least because he can always slyly add, "If it is in the pages of the poet that wisdom is to be found, it takes the philosopher to find it!" A fair enough division of the spoils as far as poet and philosopher are concerned, though I fear that some literary critics, even among those who have themselves been happily poaching on philosophy in recent decades, may not be quite so sanguine when (turnabout is fair play) philosophers return the compliment. Which is not to say that the Quinean exegete expects to address the poetic text directly, without the mediation of the literary critic.

Simply as a methodological point, a Quinean gloss will characteristically have a meta-meta-linguistic character, being itself parasitic on the first-order gloss of the critic. So much for ruffled feathers! There is enough anxiety to go around (inevitable, perhaps, when interdisciplinary studies get down to business), for even the poet, while flattered by so much attention, will not be free of it, as he unpacks this figure of parasites preying on parasites.---José A. Benardete  "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach." Poetics Today (Summer, 1996), pp. 129-156

I was delighted with the wit, ingenuity, and erudition that into "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach." What with my intentness on the ontic demands of science and the joy of meeting them as frugally as may be, I never entertained quality instances sive abstract abstract particulars. They are gratuitous for science, and science owes much of its beauty and efficiency to economy of thought and objects. But poetry has its beauty too, or can have, and economy is merely one among the wellsprings of its beauty. To each its own, therefore, and vive le sport. It is refreshing to see my familiar devices in strange applications.

Let me clarify the history of my ontology....Quine to J. Benardete, October 14, 1996.

A few weeks ago, at Dailynous there was a discussion about an old article by Quine in Newsday 1979. One of the commentators noted that Quine's piece had been reprinted in Theories and Things. Sadly the discussion failed to notedthat there already existed a very substantial response to Quine's piece  in the scholarly literature: José A. Benardete's "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach," partially quoted above. Benardete's observations deserves further reflection (I have made some tentative comments in this lecture in honor of my former colleague). 

Below I reproduce a transcript of a letter from Quine in response to Benardete's piece. (I did not correct the typos.) I thank Diego Benardete for calling my attention to it, and I thank the Quine estate, especially Douglas Quine, and José Benardete for allowing me to reproduce it on Digressions. I also thank Dan Dennett for helping me contact Douglas Quine. The piece is of interest primarily for Quine's brief intellectual autobiography, but it also acknowledges one of the technical points (on tropes) in Benardete's piece. [A pdf file copy of the original is available to scholars upon request.]

 

38 Chestnut Street

Boston, MA 02108

October 14, 1996

 

Dear Professor Benardete,

I was delighted with the wit ingenuity, and erudition that went

into "Metaphysice[sic] and Poetry: the Quinean Approach." What with my

intentness on the ontic demands of science and the joy of meeting them

as frugally as may be, I never entertained quality instances sive ab-

stract particulars. They are gratuitous for science, and science owes

much of its beauty and efficiency to economy of thought and objects.

But poetry has its beauty too, or can have, and economy is merely one

among the wellsprings of its beauty. To each its own, therefore, and

vive le sport. It is refreshing to see my familiar devices in strange

applications.

 

Let me clarify the history of my ontology. Except for one fleet-

ing flirtation in midlife, I have been an extensional platonist since

undergraduate days. For some years my platonism was reluctant, but im-

posed by my standards of ontic. commitment. Those standards, viz. val-

ues of variables, became explicit in 1939 ("Designation and Existence” ), [sic]

 

The fleeting flirtation was my 1947 paper with Goodman, "Steps to-

ward a Constructive Nominalism.'' It adhered to my commitment criterion

and was technically correct, but the mathematics that it accommodated

was clumsy and limited. I promptly resumed my extensional platonism.

In later years, when I saw into the basic function of reification as a

means of structuring science (see From Stimulus to Science. 1995, pp.

24-36), even the reluctance lapsed.

 

My strictures against analyticity, by the way, were never meant

to challenge the very cases (e.g. elementary logis [sic] or the Bachelor)

that served to identify the folkconcept of "truth by meaning" whose

philosophival [sic] extrapolation I was challenging. What I scouted was the

extrapolation of the dichotomy across the whole fabric of theoretical

science. I was criticizing Carnap, who leaned so heavily on just that.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

W. v. Quine

Comments

[Greg Frost-Arnold]

Thanks for posting this! This is actually extremely helpful for something I am trying to write this year.

I just wanted to add a little bit of further detail that is probably not widely known.

1. It is potentially slightly misleading for Quine to say that his "flirtation" with nominalism was that "fleeting." In the Quine archive, there is a personal notebook that covers most of the 1930s (it's 300 pages long). In it, we see that he's trying to be a nominalist in the later 30s. Here are 3 examples:
- Nov. 26, 1935; ‘Philosophical Background of the Conceptual Calculus’:
Quine describes an idea that “amounts to showing that objects higher in type than individuals never need to be assumed to exist at all; it is therefore nothing more nor less than a logical validation of nominalism, a solution of the problem of universals.”
- Nov. 21, 1937; ‘Nominalistic Logic’
- May 5, 1938: ‘A Semantic Interpretation of Logic’:
“In view of the ambiguous position assumed by Cantor’s Theorem in the light of my liberalization of the theory of types (see “On Cantor’s Theorem,” JSL 1937), we are perhaps justified in reopening the question of the nominalistic identifiability of classes with terms (expressions).”

Anyone interested in this material should look at Paolo Mancosu's excellent 2008 article, “Quine and Tarski on Nominalism”, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol IV, pp. 22-55.

Now, of course, one could reply "Oh, this is just the 'reluctant' part of Quine's reluctant Platonism." And that may well be defensible. But Quine was actively working to refute Platonism for a decade -- and that, to me, goes beyond mere reluctance (analogy: Imagine a Canadian citizen who spends a decade trying to overthrow the Canadian government. Is that person really well-described as a 'reluctant Canadian'?).

2. In that same notebook, in entries from early 1940, Quine outlines a book project/proposal for (what he calls) "Neo-Pythagoreanism." All that exists is the natural numbers. The Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is enlisted to reduce the natural sciences to arithmetic. This is of course a platonism in the philosophical sense of admitting abstract entities, but it is not Quine's familiar, public, set-theoretic Platonism.

----
Finally, I have a question that I don't know how to answer. Why does Quine give up his nominalism after a single publication? Massive reduction projects are often huge, and require a sustained amount of work (Principia Mathematica, the Aufbau for a smaller example). What convinces Quine that nothing has a good chance of working, after just a single short article in JSL?

[Eric Schliesser]

Greg, thank you for your very helpful comments. (I'll reflect on all of them.) As a methodological rule: I am inclined to be very cautious about autobiographical statements if they are understood as history. I find them more informative if understood as how an author (e.g., Quine) wishes to be seen or remembered late in life.

[Greg Frost-Arnold]

Thanks! I agree 100% with that methodological rule: working on archival material from the 40s, and comparing it to Carnap and especially Quine's autobiographies written decades later, has convinced me that autobiographical remarks are not to be trusted.

[Christopher Stephens]

Thanks for posting this. Not surprising, I guess, that even in 1996 Quine still seems to think Carnap's internal-external distinction is the same as the analytic-synthetic one he criticizes (otherwise its hard to make sense of the last sentence of the letter).

[Douglas B. Quine]

It is wonderful to see the historical connections that experts find in the Quine archives. I'm glad to be helping these documents see the light of day again.

[Russell Marcus]

Thanks, Eric, for posting this great piece. And thanks, Greg, for your contextualizing comment. I think that Quine's claims to be a reluctant platonist merely flirting fleetingly with nominalism are utterly consistent with his work, despite the ten-year plot to overthrow the sets. And so the question about why he gave it up so quickly is kind of a non-question. His approach was always toward austerity (until perhaps near the end as he describes it), given his preferences for desert landscapes (i.e. parsimony and simplicity as methodological principles). His method persistently entailed wanting to see how much mathematics was really needed (indispensable) to our best theories. So, for instance, Quine (or a Quinean) could want to see whether logic (or metalogic) really requires sets even with the background understanding that our physics (and so our one big theory) does.

More interesting to me is the way in which he connects platonism with his "commitment criterion." The criterion is often presented (and read) as neutral in the platonism/nominalism debate (as in the neutrality at the end of "On What There Is"). But I've long suspected that the relationship, at least for Quine, is closer.

By the way, Greg, is that early neo-Pythagoreanism the same one that comes out in "Whither Physical Objects" (and one other place I'm forgetting right now)?

[Seth Edenbaum]

The problem of art for philosophy, and philosophers, is that artists don't mind at all if their art is seen as "of their time". That statement does no damage to their egos, or their reputation.
Wallace Stevens was "a mid 20th century American poet". Referring to WVO Quine as "a mid 20th century American philosopher" opens up a lot of questions. Art can age well or badly. Truth isn't supposed to age at all.

Quine's philosophy owes as much to American Puritanism as to logic.