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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2001 by Malone, John C

Quine was critical of Peirce and wrote of the shortcomings of pragmatism (e.g., 1960, p. 23), but nonetheless he seemed to champion this plastic view of reality, feeling that it is vain to seek the nature of things, since everything is describable/knowable only in the language in which the question of existence has been put. There are many languages, as sets of symbols with which to describe nature, but there are no objects describable in the abstract, independent of the language of description.10 Some things are "theoretical," and some are "matters of fact." But these are merely differences in degree as our concepts evolve. Skinner's position was similar, as expressed in 1974:

One scientist said that "there is excellent reason to believe that the whole of chemistry is explicable in terms of electrons and the wave functions which describe their location. This is an enormous simplification of thought." It certainly is an enormous simplification-or would be, if feasible-but it is the simplification of verbal and practical behavior rather than of thought. (p. 117)

But Skinner did what Skinner often did-he left a real (metaphysical?) world that seems to be independent of our reaction to it:

The referents of concepts are in the real world; they are not ideas in the mind of the scientist. They are discoveries or inventions simply in the sense that a verbal environment has evolved in which obscure properties of nature are brought into the control of human behavior. (p. 118)

However, Quine and Skinner agreed that whatever that world is, there is no stable and unique real world. What specific referent could correspond to the label, the "real world?"

Synthetic and Analytic Propositions

The Logical Positivists attempted to enclose science in a propositional system, contrary to Peirce's (1962) analysis, and it was Quine who recognized that there is no logical framework of guaranteed truths with which to organize and interpret statements about nature. To say that there is no unchanging and trusty rational system is saying that there are no analytic propositions that are true by definition because they are definitions. The analytic/synthetic issue was prominent in Kant's (1781/1929) critique of Hume; Kant interpreted Hume as assuming the a priori truth of analytic statements, such as "bodies have mass," but denying the same to synthetic statements, such as "bodies have weight." Bodies must have mass, since that defines them, but they need not have weight. We say that they have weight when we detect acceleration downward, but that is a posteriori, after the fact of experience. Kant believed that the necessity of time and space as preconditions for experience meant that we possess an a priori framework in which nature must be cast-thus, there are a priori synthetic truths.

For Quine, .the certainty that had been assigned to analytic statements: definitions, mathematics, and logic, was misplaced and analytic statements were susceptible to revision when occasioned by later experience. He argued this in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," published in 1951. Peirce (1962) had argued that logical statements-the framework of science-and empirical observations were malleable, but Quine pressed the issue and thereby contributed to the demise of logical positivism.