Quine

After Willard Van Orman Quine died at age ninety-two on Christmas Day, 2000, lengthy obituaries appeared in prestigious newspapers around the world. Although the journalists who composed these obituaries certainly must have consulted philosophers, what they wrote was, sad to say, too confused to give any real picture of Quine's philosophy. A great philosopher—one of the greatest of the twentieth century—had died, but what made him so important (let alone "great")? The journalists obviously didn't have a clue.

A part of the problem—but only a part—was, of course, that Quine's philosophy was "technical." With his lifelong friend, Rudolf Carnap, Quine belonged to the generation that brought the mathematical logic created by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead into the forefront of philosophy. Not only did many of Quine's arguments and claims employ terms from logic (including quantifier, value of a variable, extensional, and the like), but a central claim of his philosophy was that logic—the new logic, as it was then—was of fundamental metaphysical importance. For Quine, the best guide we have as to the nature of reality—the only guide that deserves to be taken seriously, even if the guide changes its mind from time to time—is science. But science does not wear its philosophical significance on its sleeve, nor is it always clear what is and what isn't "science." For Quine, the central job of the philosopher is to rewrite science (or at least those parts that employ obscure language or otherwise fall below our highest standards of clarity) in the language of modern logic. When we discover the best way to do this, we will have discovered the best available account of reality. Obviously, the result will not be easy to explain to anyone who doesn't know what modern logic is.

But I said that the technical character of Quine's philosophy is only part of the difficulty that the obituary writers found in explaining the significance of Quine's contribution. Another part is that the writers (or the philosophers who advised them, perhaps) tried to "tone down" Quine's radical theses, and, in the process, not only distorted them but (worse) made them sound bland and uninteresting. The enormously controversial theses of "the indeterminacy of translation" and "ontological relativity" associated with Quine's name were trivialized and made unrecognizable in the process. And this toning down reflects, I think, a failure to see that there are two radically different sorts of philosophical genius.

One sort of philosophical genius—Aristotle and Kant were, for their respective epochs, ideal exemplars—proposes a highly believable (at least in its own time), coherent, and profound account of reality and a profound criticism of the views of both forerunners and contemporary rivals. If one thinks that this is the only sort, one will assume that to call Quine a genius is to claim, inter alia, that his theses are believable. But there is also a very different sort of genius—Berkeley is a famous example—whose views are not believable (although they are coherent and profound), whose importance lies precisely in the fact that they aren't believable.

How can that be? What made Berkeley so important was that his arguments seemed to demolish our everyday view of the world (say, that it consists of or at least contains "matter"), and that those arguments were not sophisms but exposed genuine and deep difficulties. For example, ever since Berkeley (and Hume—although Hume began the process of "toning down" Berkeley), philosophers have been forced to think and rethink the question, "Just what do we mean by 'matter'?" (as well as, "What do we mean by 'perceiving' something?").

In my view, Quine was a genius of this second sort. I do not know of any philosophers except Richard Rorty and Roger Gibson who both understand Quine's claims about the indeterminacy of translation in their full radicality and also believe them. But the process of thinking and rethinking what we mean by translation...