Grace and Theodore de Laguna, and the Making of Willard V. O. Quine [Guest Post by Joel Katzav]

[This is an invited guest post by Joel Katzav--ES]

Grace A. de Laguna and Willard V. O. Quine contributed papers to a symposium at the 1950 APA Eastern Division meeting, a symposium that aimed to present reviews of what were then the main trends in critical and speculative philosophy. The papers were subsequently published in The Philosophical Review. Willard and his contribution about critical philosophy, that is his Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), are well known; the paper introduced his ‘revolutionary’ confirmation holism, his view that all statements (including those of logic and mathematics) are revisable and his critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction. These theses helped to propel Willard to international fame. Grace and her paper Speculative Philosophy (1951), by contrast, have been forgotten. And yet, Grace and her husband Theodore de Laguna had, in 1910, defended more sophisticated variants of Willard’s famous theses than can be found in Two Dogmas. Indeed, they presented their variants of the theses in criticising earlier, widely known, pragmatist variants. Willard’s paper, it appears, was a step backwards, and its fame appears to rest partly on collective amnesia.[1]

Theodore and Grace’s 1910 book Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy (1910) develops their evolutionary epistemology against the backdrop of a critique of pragmatist evolutionary epistemology and confirmation holism, and of, more broadly, modern philosophy. Their discussion includes a lengthy case for confirmation (and meaning) holism. Here is the case’s concluding statement of holism as well as how holism is used to argue that all beliefs are revisable:

[o]ur thoughts direct our conduct, and it is in this service that their meaning ultimately consists; but every concept means both more and less than any particular application of it contains.

To this we have added that the reference of a concept to a mode of conduct is never direct. The concept never directly bridges the gap between stimulus and response. On the contrary, thought is a long-circuiting of the connection, and its whole character depends upon its indirectness, its involution, if we may use the term. Though concepts, apart from the conduct which they prompt, mean nothing, yet their meaning is never analyzable except into other concepts, indirect like the first in their reference to conduct.

….Nowhere is there an absolute given, a self-sufficient first premise. From this, as well as from the indirect and equivocal nature of the reference of thought to conduct, it follows that the confirmation or invalidation of a concept by the result of the conduct which it serves to guide can itself be no more than tentative (ibid., p. 206).

Grace and Theodore are explicit that logic too is revisable. They write that

logic, like geometry and mechanics, represents a stage in the development of scientific universality, not the ideal consummation…..The vital question is whether the underlying concept of number itself, and below it the concepts of implication and inclusion, are absolutely final. This we see no sufficient reason to believe. On the contrary, the utterly unexpected development which the concept of number has recently undergone through researches in the theory of infinite numbers is an index of the possibilities which may yet be in store. Nothing could ever have seemed more necessary than that if 2X — X, X = 0; and yet we know today that there is a distinct class of other roots (ibid., pp. 159-160).

The bare commitment to confirmation holism and the revisability of all beliefs basically captures what Willard tells us about these issues in the final section of Two Dogmas, as well as what is to be found (see, e.g., Ben Menahem 2016) in early twentieth century pragmatism. But Dogmatism and Evolution goes well beyond this in developing confirmation holism. To begin with it explains that, while it is always the case that our beliefs include beliefs that contradict each other as well as that they, collectively, always contradict some observations, it is not the case that these contradictions automatically lead to belief revision (1910, p. 154). Rather, we evaluate the beliefs in a given domain primarily according to the standards and purposes of that domain, and it is these standards and purposes which tell us what attitude to take towards tensions between beliefs:

Because the special science is so remote in its reference to common life and so entirely controlled in its progress by its own special end, it becomes a system relatively independent of the great body of cognitive experience (ibid., p. 200).

Thus, for example, the standards of economics at a given time largely determine whether available observations become a problem for a theory in economics rather than merely something that can be explained away by an appeal to ceteris paribus clauses (ibid., p. 152). The resulting picture of evolving belief is strongly reminiscent of what we find much later in Thomas S. Kuhn’s or Imre Lakatos’s descriptions of the development of science, though Grace and Theodore develop more sophisticated accompanying theories of meaning and learning than these philosophers do.

Consider now the analytic-synthetic distinction, where this distinction is between statements that are true in virtue of their meaning and statements that are true but not in virtue of their meaning. Grace and Theodore deny there are truths that hold in virtue of meaning. All concepts, according to Dogmatism and Evolution, have as part of their meaning a reference to conduct and are judged by their ability to control conduct, including thought; this applies to the concepts of logic (ibid., pp. 206-207, 210, 212). Nevertheless, the book, like Two Dogmas, recognises that there should be a difference between the way in which logic relates to experience and the way in which more directly empirical concepts do. However, while Two Dogmas leaves this difference unclarified – it is simply taken to be a matter of our natural tendency to disturb our system of beliefs as little as possible (1951, pp. 40-41) – Dogmatism and Evolution provides a clarification of what the difference involves. Supposedly, it has been useful, from an evolutionary perspective, to develop ways of evaluating mental states in circumstances in which the stimuli which gave rise to the states are absent (1910, p. 140-1). As a result, logic has acquired a particularly high degree of autonomy from experience (ibid., pp. 205-210).

The de Lagunas go on to develop their views in far more detail than I have provided; they, for example, allow themselves a notion of analyticity, one that is a matter of degree, even though they reject the idea of truth in virtue of meaning. But I want to return to the observation that Willard’s fame was partly due to Two Dogmas. Part of the explanation for the impact of the paper is its criticism of logical positivism, but we can now add to, and go deeper than, this. To begin with, Willard and those involved in promoting Two Dogmas were not concerned with representing the existing problem situation in American epistemology of the time. For not only did they ignore the views of the classical pragmatists, but they ignored the development of such views by critics of pragmatism such as Theodore and Grace. If Willard and his fans did not know about these developments, it was because they did not bother to find out what some of the most prominent and widely read epistemologists and philosophers of language in America thought.[2] Willard need only have, during his formative years as a philosopher, consulted the widely read Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements (Adams and Montague 1930) in order to find particularly neat statements of what came to be some of his central positions. The statements are from Theodore’s overview of his own philosophy, an overview that appeared alongside similar overviews by thirty-three other prominent American philosophers. The philosophers were selected by a referendum vote of the three divisions of the American Philosophical Association and included – in addition to Theodore – John Dewey, George Santayana and Clarence I. Lewis. Willard could also have just asked Grace.

Two Dogma’s prominence, and hence Quine’s fame, may also partly have depended on a broader phenomenon, namely the development of collective amnesia about the work of philosophers such as Grace and Theodore. First, the large community of non-analytic, including speculative, philosophers in mid-twentieth century America was being marginalised, e.g., by being excluded from publishing in prominent journals (see here and here) and through the sectarian attitudes found in influential philosophy departments and PhD programs that were being taken over by analytic philosophers (see here). Second, the large number of young analytic philosophers entering the profession in the 1950s were introduced to speculative philosophy through the irresponsible words of philosophers like Hans Reichenbach (1951). Reichenbach tells us that the speculative philosopher is “the man who uses words for the conveyance of intuitive guesses and unanalyzed conjectures; the man who is willing to adjust his conception of knowledge to attainable forms of knowing from the man who cannot renounce the belief in superempirical truth” (1951, p. 311). From this perspective, speculative philosophers such as Grace should not be expected to contribute to philosophy. Plausibly, the combination of marginalisation and misrepresentation helps to explain why Two Dogmas came to be accepted as revolutionary even though its basic stance would have seemed, to many in the first decades of the twentieth century, underdeveloped and unoriginal.

Let me mention one more (there are others) of the causes of Willard’s prominence. Grace herself had a minor role to play in the development of amnesia about her work. While Willard’s (at best) ignorance of philosophy helped to make him famous, Grace’s knowledge of philosophy, and modesty, meant that her own contributions to philosophy made virtually no appearance in her symposium paper.

Bibliography

De Laguna, G. A. (1951) ‘Speculative Philosophy’, The Philosophical Review, 60(1), pp. 1-19.

De Laguna, T. (1930) ‘The way of opinion’. In G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague (eds.) Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, pp. 401-422: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. and the MacMillan Company.

De Laguna, T. and de Laguna, G. A. (1910) Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy, the MacMillan Company.

Ben-Menahem, Y. (2016) ‘The Web and the Tree: Quine and James on the Growth of Knowledge’. In Janssen-Lauret, F. and Kemp, G. (eds.) Quine and His Place in History, pp. 59-75. Palgrave Macmillan.

Quine, W. V. O. (1951) ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, The Philosophical Review, 60(1), pp. 20-43.

Reichenbach, H. (1951) The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, University of California Press.

[1] As Sander Verhaegh notes, Willard would partly agree.

[2] The Philosophical Review had, in 1951, recently been made virtually speculative philosophy free. Grace’s publication is a stamp marking the end of an era in the journal rather than an expression of interest in speculative work (see here).

Comments

[Margaret Atherton]

I am so happy to see the work of Grace de Laguna publicized here. She was in fact a prolific philosopher whose work I have admired for some time. It is also worth noting that both she and her husband were professors in the philosophy department of Bryn Mawr College.

[Eric Schliesser]

Margaret, did you know her personally? Would love to learn more about her.

[Margaret Atherton]

Eric! How old do you think I am? The De Laguna’s daughter, Frederica, taught at Bryn Mawr when I was there but sadly I don’t think I ever heard any mention of her mother, although I was a philosophy major.

[Trevor]

Related to whether Quine knew about their early views, I just noticed that he gave a lecture at Bryn Mawr in December 1949: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2021795

[Walter Horn]

"Willard"?

[Eric Schliesser]

Margaret I was careful NOT to ask if you had *studied* with her.:)

[Margaret Atherton]

Thank God for small mercies, Eric. But really, thank you for calling attention to Grace de Laguna and I hope some people are driven to take a look at her work.

[Leonard J Waks]

The post is useful in bringing the work of Grace de Laguna back into circulation. It is a perhaps unfortunate, but inevitable fact, that philosophy has a programmatic dimension. In their publications each philosophers advance both arguments and claims and also themselves and their schools. Some philosophers and their works fall off the current map. Calling this 'amnesia' is not helpful.

The argument is also somewhat uncharitable to Quine. As one who started my study of philosophy on the 1960s it is hard to overestimate the importance of Two Dogmas. I would not say that all of my teachers were 'dogmatists' but clearly these dogmas polluted the very air we breathed. Quine, along with Kuhn and a few others, really helped to clear the air.

One thing I would love to know more about is the de Laguna's critique of classical pragmatism. Their views as stated here sound surprisingly like Dewey's views - already developed in his essays on logic of 1902.

Finally, I am very pleased to see G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague (eds.) Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements. I read this as an undergraduate and it impressed me deeply. Over the last ten years I have been editing a book series modeled explicitly on this book, and plan to turn to the various branches of philosophy soon.

[Greg F-A]

This is a very interesting post! I didn't know anything about the de Lagunas, so thanks for writing it.

The one thing I would mention is that Quine really *did* know the views of C. I. Lewis, since Lewis was his teacher and then colleague at Harvard. And many of Quine's epistemological claims are much closer to Lewis's formulations than to the de Langunas'. So I would hesitate to say that Quine "ignore[d] the views of the classical pragmatists." Here are two quotes from Lewis's _Mind and the World Order_:

"that is a priori which we can maintain in the face of all experience, come what will" (231). That sounds very close to Quine's view in "Truth by Convention" that an analytic sentence is a statement which is "held true come what may."

(2) "the whole body of our conceptual interpretations form a sort of hierarchy or pyramid with the most comprehensive, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as 'swans' etc. at the bottom; that with the complex system of interrelated concepts, we approach particular experiences and attempt to fit them, somewhere and somehow... Persistent failure leads to readjustment... The higher up a concept stands in our pyramid, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be if we abandon it..." (305-6).
And that sounds very similar to Quine's web of belief.

As Daniel Lindquist pointed out to me, Davidson thought Lewis was a massive influence on Quine's epistemological views (though Quine didn't fully realize that):

"DAVIDSON: I do think that C.I. Lewis had a tremendous influence on Quine, but Quine doesn't realize it. The explanation for that is that Quine had no training in philosophy and so when he took Lewis's course in epistemology, he took for granted that this is what everybody knows about epistemology. Quine didn't realize that Lewis was any different from everyone else; pretty soon he worked out that there are some things he didn't agree with Lewis about, like the analytic-synthetic distinction. I don't think Quine would put it this way. As I said, I don't think he realized any of this, but you can find most of Quine's epistemology in C.I. Lewis minus the analytic-synthetic distinction. Epistemology naturalized is very close to the heart of C.I. Lewis. I don't think that Quine knows the extent to which there really is a sequence that starts with Kant and goes through C.I. Lewis and ends with Quine." (in _Problems of Rationality_, p.237)

[Stephen Turner]

There is a literature: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0048393116672829

[Paul L. Franco]

Let me echo both of Greg's points above. The post is very interesting. I saw Peter Olen give a talk on Grace de Laguna at HOPOS 2016, which was also interesting (perhaps it was a version of the piece mentioned by Stephen above). So I'm glad to hear more about her views.

Also on Greg's point regarding Quine's connection to C.I. Lewis, Rob Sinclair has a nice paper on Lewis's influence on Quine: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.48.3.335?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

See also Carl Sachs and Peter Olen's recent volume on C.I. Lewis: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319528625

And since Kuhn's views were mentioned above, there's a link between him and Lewis also, as Juan Mayoral argues in the volume just mentioned and also in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368109000223?via%3Dihub

One other thing: It's interesting to note, as others have, Quine's "amnesia" about Carnap's clear statements of the conventional dimension of verification in "Testability and Meaning"--Lewis figures prominently here, too--and also about holism and the degrees of difference between L- and P-rules in §82 of The Logical Syntax of Language . Quine presumably read both of these works with some care (though Carnap, of course, didn't take the same lessons from these observations that Quine did).

[Chris]

Very interesting.

As you probably know, Quine apparently didn't know about Duhem's similar thesis about holism in physics until Hempel pointed this out after Quine published the Two Dogmas in Phil Review (and so Quine added a footnote to Duhem before the version was reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, I think). Of course, Quine (and others') thesis about holism is more general, but I thought it interesting that Duhem also doesn't seem to be discussed in Theodore and Grace's 1910 book. if I remember right, the Aim and Structure of Physical theory would've come out about 5 years before their book.

Does anyone know if anyone has done a history tracing the development of confirmational holism? (whether restricted to physics or broader in scope?)

[Joel Katzav]

The de Lagunas acknowledge their debt to Dewey, as well as trace their holism back to Hegelian idealism. As for C. I. Lewis, I do not count him as a classical pragmatist, partly because he rejected speculative philosophy. Moreover, of course, Quine of the 1930s was close to Lewis. They both still believed in the a priori, for example. But it is only in the 40s that Quine comes to reject the a priori; his position at this time starts to come close to that of the de Laguna’s.

More importantly, I am not being uncharitable to Quine; an important reason why his work appeared so significant to young analytic philosophers in the 1960s is because analytic philosophers had been systematically marginalising thinkers like the de Lagunas. Their work did not simply ‘fall off the map’.

[Steven Gross]

Perhaps it's not so clear that Quine only rejects the a priori in the 40s. There's the following well-known remark in "Truth By Convention" (written 1935, published 1936): "Still, there is the apparent contrast between logico-mathematical truths and others that the former are a priori, the latter a posteriori; the former have "the character of an inward necessity", in Kant's phrase, the latter do not. Viewed behavioristically and without reference to a metaphysical system, this contrast retains reality as a contrast between more and less firmly accepted statements ...."

[Joel Katzav]

Yes, but the quote is consistent with supposing that some claims are held come what may, and Quine is explicit at the time that, on his view, the claims of logic and mathematics are insisted upon come what may.

[Steven Gross]

Yes indeed. But perhaps the basis for maintaining that we won't give them up is so fundamentally different from what had been meant ("viewed behavioristically") that there's room to question whether this amounts to an endorsement of the apriori as it had been understood? (Well, perhaps Quine himself would question whether there's sense in asking whether he's there endorsing what had been meant by 'apriori' or rather changing the subject.)

[Joel Katzav]

It is enough for me to make the point about Quine moving closer to the de Lagunas' position. In any case, Quine's early views were no more a departure from what had been said than his later views were.