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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2001 by Malone, John C

However, according to Paul Meehl (personal communication, August 6, 2001), Quine had absolutely no influence on Skinner. In Meehl's view, no one influenced Skinner, though Skinner influenced others. Meehl corresponded with Quine and was a long-time intimate of Skinner, who was:

... of course, one of the smartest people I ever met, and I've known some plenty smart people. He saw a smart critic-who took the trouble of understanding him-as an opportunity to test his ideas and sharpen his sword. He dismissed second-raters who read him carelessly or advanced stupid objections.

He suggests that Skinner, like Einstein and Freud, was single-mindedly independent of others, aside from their use as what appears to be sparring partners. Yet, the neopragmatism of Quine could not have failed to have had some influence on Skinner-we all know that our colleagues influence our general views, as well as our level of mental functioning. We become more intelligent in "smart" surroundings and less intelligent in other milieus, as we all learn early in life. But if Meehl is right, perhaps the effect was only to sharpen Skinner's arguments against extreme pragmatism.

Skinner's passion for language and his conviction that verbal behavior is crucial in establishing our "reality" was certainly shared by Quine, for whom "ontology recapitulates philology." So, perhaps surprisingly, Skinner's influence on Quine lies there, in the appreciation of language and its relation to basic questions regarding existence! That is, Skinner may have influenced Quine more than vice versa, and perhaps that influence was philosophical and even metaphysical. Consider the following.

Quine read John B. Watson in a psychology course in 1928 at Oberlin (Quine, 1985, p. 59). That may have influenced his psychology more than did his membership with Skinner in the group of 13 Junior Fellows. Skinner's influence was philosophical, as Quine wrote (1985, p. 110):

One of the Junior Fellows that first year was the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Fred exceeded the age limit by well over a year ... Fred and I were congenial, sharing an interest in language and a behavioristic bias in psychology. It has been wrongly assumed that I imbibed my behaviorism from Fred; I lately learned from his autobiography that in fact my exposure to John B. Watson slightly antedated his. It was particularly in language theory, rather, that Fred opened doors for me. My linguistic interest had run to etymological detail; he put me onto Bloomfield and Jespersen and gave me a first American edition of John Home Tooke.

Tooke was a philologist who wrote a critique of Locke's "New Theory of Ideas" in 1786. Quine noted that (1981):

The greatest part of Mr. Locke's essay, that is, all which relates to what he calls the abstraction, complexity, generalization, relation, etc., of ideas, does indeed merely concern language. (p. 67)

Most readers will know that these mental operations refer to what Locke called "reflection." Tooke argued that this is all linguistic (1786), and Quine (1981) noted that this shows that the idea of idea itself does not meet empiricist standards. If this notion, that the representational theory of ideas is vacuous, came to Quine via Tooke via Skinner, that is a tremendous influence by Skinner on Quine.