Ontology recapitulates philology: Willard Quine, pragmatism, and radical behaviorism

Behavior and Philosophy, 2001 by Malone, John C

He liked the poet and essayist Jorge Borges, as do I, and he typed his doctoral thesis on a 1927 Remington typewriter, which he was still using in 1996. But he "had an operation on it" to change a few keys:5

"I found I could do without the second period, the second comma-and the question mark."

"You don't miss the question mark?"

"Well, you see, I deal in certainties."

He generated countless quoteable lines- words that stick with us, such as:

Life is what the least of make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.6

The last one was a line in a letter to an unknown recipient, dated November, 1946, found in a handwritten journal by his son, Douglas Boynton Quine (footnote 5).

Quine and Skinner

The Harvard Society of Fellows began with four founders, including Quine's mentor, the eminent philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead and A. Lawrence Lowell, retiring president of Harvard. Lowell donated a million dollars, and Eliot House was fitted with a paneled lounge and dining room that featured what was said to be the breakfast table of Oliver Wendall Holmes. A class of about eight Junior Fellows was to be chosen each year, college graduates "from anywhere" (Quine, 1985, p. 108), who would be offered a stipend, room and board, and use of Harvard's libraries, laboratories, and classrooms for a three-year term. There were no formal duties-this was a sweet deal indeed.

The group of Junior Fellows would later comprise 24 members, some rotating on and off each year. But the first class, of six, was outnumbered by the Senior Fellows, a group that included the original four founders, along with the President of Harvard, the Dean of Arts & Sciences, and a seventh man, a member of the Harvard Corporation. They all met on Monday evenings for sherry, dinner, and conversation. A candlestick was set at each place, along with a two-pound block of silver, engraved with the fellow's name.

Quine and B. F. Skinner were selected for membership in the first group of six Junior Fellows at Harvard in 1933. Clearly, the two were similar in fundamental ways, but did Quine influence Skinner and thus play a part in the development of radical behaviorism? Was the influence reciprocal? Bill Verplanck (personal communication, February 20, 2001) thinks the latter:

I had half completed a post [email] on Van Quine's death when others took note of it. The New York Times had a well-researched obit on this great logician/ behaviorist which, however, lacked the emphasis of the profound influence that Skinner and Quine had on one another's work....7 Through the years of my close relationships (administrative, social, and academic) with Fred Skinner (1946-1955), Quine was a relatively frequent topic of Fred's conversation, more so during the Indiana years than later, when I did not see Fred almost daily.

Both had been greatly affected by their years as Junior Fellows, when Whitehead was associated with this small group. Through Whitehead, Bertrand Russell also contributed to their intellectual development ("There is thinking, and 'I' is a pronoun." Right?) During those years, Quine was there in the background, as attested (at one remove) by one of his students who took my course in Exptl. Psychology at Harvard. In this course, we did a good bit of shaping human behavior. This activity was promptly recognized as meshed, closely related to, with what one student had been "doing" in philosophy; he was immediately at home. He went me one better, and did a bit of research of his own contrivance. His results were straightforward, and led to the fuller research that produced my paper on The Control of the Content of Conversation: Reinforcement of Statements of Opinion.