Abstract
“This is the book that has meant most to me”, Quine has said about Principia Mathematica.1 On reading Word and Object, I am struck by the fact that Russell’s influence on Quine cannot have been restricted to the impact of Principia. Though there are easily discernible differences between Russell and Quine, they have a common basis for raising questions, and this is felt throughout Quine’s work. For my part I have always found it difficult to accept Russell’s way of raising questions, and my difficulty is still greater in respect of Quine. Perhaps our difference in fundamental outlook is the reason why I find it so hard to see a really coherent position behind Quine’s book. What he says in one place seems to me to be more or less inconsistent with what he says in another place. I am aware that this feeling may be founded on misunderstandings. If so, I hope that my criticisms will be a basis for removing them.
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References
See the back cover of the paper-back edition of Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, Cambridge 1964.
Quine does not explicitly characterize his own view as a kind of behaviourism, but he seems to do so indirectly by introducing the “division between behaviourism and mentalism” and siding against mentalism (WO p. 219).
I follow John Stuart Mill in referring the word ‘entity’ to objects, qualities, relations in intension, etc., irrespective of categories. Quine speaks of ‘entification’ and thus seems to take the word ‘entity’ to refer only to what I call ‘objects’. As to ‘categories’, cf. E. Stenius, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A Critical Exposition, Oxford 1960, Ch. II, § 2. - This book will be referred to in the sequel as WT.
Cf. Ryle’s argument against sensations in G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London 1949, p. 201ff. - By the way, the notion of a ‘projection on the retina’ seems to be fictitious in this context. Physiologists tell us that the eye is always oscillating; an immobile eye is blind.
E. Stenius, ‘Mood and Language-Game’, Synthese 17 (1967) 254–274.
Karl Bühler, Die geistige Entwicklung des Kindes, 6th ed., Jena 1930, p. 315; Charlotte Bühler, Kindheit und Jugend, 3rd ed., Leipzig 1931, p. 148f. Cf. below, note 9.
I use here, like Quine, the term ‘predicate’ as referring to a linguistic entity forming a part of a sentence, not in the intensional sense I have used in WT.
If I rightly understand Quine’s notation in Methods of Logic, he would prefer to use as dummies signs like ‘1’, ‘2’… instead of letters like ‘x’, ‘y’,…; but what signs we use as dummies is irrelevant.
Nobody can, of course, know what was the cause of the child’s excitement. Her parents had different opinions about how it should be explained. It is, however, note-worthy that Mrs Bühler’s interpretation can be said to come rather near to mine, although, naturally, she expresses herself in a very different vocabulary. Cf. note 6 above.
Cf. the paper mentioned above in note 5.
I have reported about this case in two earlier papers: ‘Den språkliga beskrivningen som isomorf avbildning’, Ajatus 16 (1950) 69–101, pp. 78ff.; ‘Linguistic Structure and the Structure of Experience’, Theoria 20 (1954) 153–172, pp. 159f.
Cf. Wittgenstein’s difficulties in Philosophical Investigations, Oxford 1954, § 28fT, and WT, p. 160 n.
This was an approach taken by P. Finsler in his paper ‘Über die Grundlegung der Mengenlehre I’, Mathematische Zeitschrift 25 (1926) 683–713. It was also adopted in my doctoral dissertation ‘Das Problem der logischen Antinomien’, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Comm. Phys.-Math 14, no. 11 (1949).
Cf. with this E. Stenius, ‘Are True Numerical Statements Analytic or Synthetic’, Philosophical Review 74 (1965) 357–371, § xiv.
D. Føllesdal, ‘Quantification into Causal Contexts’, in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 2, Humanities Press, New York 1965, pp. 263–274.
E. Stenius, ‘Begreppen “analytisk” och “syntetisk”’, Ajatus 27 (1965)97–122;forthcoming in English in Scandinavian Studies in Philosophy (ed. by R. Olsen ), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1970.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Stenius, E. (1969). Beginning with Ordinary Things. 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_4
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