Abstract
Over the past thirty-two years, Quine has presented a number of arguments against the modalities, his criticism culminating in Word and Object. During the same period, modal logic has flourished as never before, and a number of semantic systems for the different modalities have been proposed, apparently quite unencumbered by Quine’s criticism. What is even more remarkable, Quine’s arguments have very rarely been discussed or even referred to by the proponents of modal logic, and the few who have discussed them, have all taken exception to them. What, then, is the current status of the modalities and of Quine’s arguments against them?
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References
Notes on Existence and Necessity’, Journal of Philosophy 40 (1943) 124. See also From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1953 (2nd ed., 1961. Paperback: Harper Torchbooks, New York 1963), p. 148. In ‘Whitehead and the Rise of Modern Logic’, in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, ed.), Northwestern University Press, Evanston and Chicago 1941, p. 142 n., Quine uses the same example to illustrate the breakdown of the substitutivity of identity in modal contexts.
From a Logical Point of View, p. 152; Word and Object, pp. 197–198.
Alonzo Church, Review of Quine’s ‘Notes on Existence and Necessity’, in Journal of Symbolic Logic 8 (1943) 45–47.
Alonzo Church,‘A Formulation of the Logic of Sense and Denotation’, in Structure, Method, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Henry M. Sheffer (ed. by Paul Henle, H. M. Kallen, and S.K. Langer), Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1951, pp. 3–24.
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Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Individuals, Possible Worlds, and Epistemic Logic’, Noüs 1 (1967) 38; cf. also Hintikka, ‘Modality as Referential Multiplicity’, p. 61.
Cp. Hintikka, ‘Individuals, Possible Worlds, and Epistemic Logic’, pp. 55ff.
Again, Church’s logic of sense and denotation is not what I call a modal logic, since it has no opaque constructions.
Word and Object, § 30 and § 31.
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From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed., p. 155. Cf. also ‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’ (1953), p. 80, and ‘Reply to Professor Marcus’, p. 104.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Føllesdal, D. (1969). Quine on Modality. In: Davidson, D., Hintikka, J. (eds) Words and Objections. Synthese Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1709-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1709-1_12
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