[MUSIC PLAYING] If we took a poll among professional teachers
of philosophy on the question, who is the most important living philosopher, it's not
at all obvious, to me at least, who would get the most votes. But we can be fairly sure about some of the
names that would be in the top half-dozen-- Quine, Popper, Jean-Paul Sartre. Chomsky probably, though strictly speaking
he's not exactly a philosopher. Well, the first of those names, the one on
which I'd lay pretty short odds, is that of Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the professors
of philosophy at Harvard. Quine was born in 1908 and is still highly
productive, so he's had a long career. And it's by no means over yet. He's published innumerable articles and over
a dozen books, the best-known of which are From a Logical Point of View, published in
1953, and Word and Object, published in 1960. First and foremost, he's a logician. And the original contributions to the subject
which made him famous are for the most part highly technical and not really accessible
to the layman, though they always had their ultimate roots in problems fundamental to
philosophy. However, in the latter part of his career
he's become more overtly interested in philosophy in a more general sense. And I thought it would be uniquely valuable
in this program to have a philosopher at the very summit of world reputation talking about
the basics of philosophy and of his own activity. Professor Quine, what do you regard as the
central task or tasks of philosophy? I think of philosophy as concerned with our
knowledge of the world and the nature of the world. I think of philosophy as attempting to round
out the system of the world, as Newton put it. There have been philosophers who have thought
of philosophy as somehow separate from science and as providing a firm basis on which to
build science. But this I consider an empty dream. Much of science is firmer than philosophy
is or can even perhaps aspire to be. I think of philosophy as continuous with science,
even as a part of science. Well, if it's continuous with science and
even part of science, how does it differ from the rest of science? It differs in generality and in abstractness. Science is a continuum extending from history
and engineering at one end, if we think of science broadly, to such abstract pursuits
as philosophy and mathematics at the other. Philosophy considers the question of the nature
of cause, for instance, where physics contents itself with finding causal relations between
specific sorts of events, biology between other sorts of events. Again, whereas the zoologist will tell us
that there are wombats, and the physicist will tell us that there are electrons. The mathematician will tell us there are no
end to prime numbers. The philosopher is interested, rather, in
what sorts of things there are altogether. And it's in these ways that philosophy is
more abstract in general. In other words, the philosopher is investigating
what constitutes the connective tissue of everyone's thought, including other people's
thought. So that the physicist is trying to find out
sort of whether or not A causes B, but the philosopher is saying, but what does it mean
to say that anything causes anything? Sure. The physicist is trying to find out, say,
what particular subatomic particles there are. And the philosopher says, but what does it
mean to say of anything that it exists? Yes. It's at this level of complete generality
that the philosopher's investigations occur. Exactly. Is that right? Yes. Now, do you include in this or do you exclude
from it the age-old questions of how the world got here in the first place or how life began? I exclude these from philosophy. How the world began is a problem for the physicist
and astronomer. And of course, there have been conjectures
from that quarter. How life began is a problem for the biologist
on which he's made notable progress in recent years. Why the world began, why life began, on the
other hand I think are pseudo-questions because I can't imagine what an answer would look
like. And you think that because there's no conceivable
answer to these questions, they are, so to speak, meaningless questions. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So in other words, you regard the central
tasks of philosophy as the analysis and elucidation of concepts that are central to various fields
of human activity and also in particular notions like what it is for something to be a cause
of something else, what it is for something to exist, what it is for something to be,
shall we say, a scientific law, the most general notions that are, as it were, the connecting
tissue of thought and that we have to use and have to employ in the specific activities
that people like scientists-- or it could even be politicians, lawyers, and so on--
are engaged in. Is that a correct way of putting your view? Yes. Yes, I would agree with that. Do you think that the main or the most important
questions that philosophers have to deal with can be grouped under any particular headings? There are two headings which I think provide
an important classification to begin with. They're the ontological questions, as they
might be called. Well, I think you need to explain that term. These will be questions as to what there is,
the general questions as to what sorts of things there are as well as the question of
what it means to exist, for there to be something. And the other classification, the other class,
might be called the predicated questions, questions as to what sorts of things can meaningfully
be asked about what there is. In other words, you've got two enormous spheres
of questioning here, one about what there is and the other about what we can know about
what there is or what we can say about what there is. Yes. And epistemology would be included in the
latter. Yes. Yes. Now, I think since you've made this distinction,
for clarity's sake in our discussion we ought to cling to it a little. And I think we'll take these two areas one
at a time. And we'll take your first one first, the whole
group of questions about what there is, what exists, or as you say, what is called ontology
by philosophers. Although there are innumerable theories about
this, I think it's fair to say that throughout the history of the subject, there have been
two broad opposing views in the matter of ontology between what you might very roughly
call materialists and what you might call idealists. I mean, although there are innumerable different
versions of both doctrines, you do have on the one hand a view that reality consists
of matter, or material objects, in space and time which exist independently of anyone's
or anything's experience of them. And on the other hand, you have a view of
reality as consisting ultimately in spirits or minds or as existing in the mind of God
or as being put together in our minds. Now, can I put very crudely the $64 question
to you and ask you which side you're on? I'm on the materialists' side. You're a materialist. Yes. Yes, I hold that physical objects are real
and exist externally and independently of us. I don't hold that there are only these physical
objects. There are also abstract objects, objects of
mathematics that seem to be needed to fill out the system of the world. But I don't recognize the existence of minds
of mental entities in any sense other than as attributes or activities on the part of
physical objects, mainly persons. Now, that must mean, then, that you not only
reject idealism. It must also mean that you reject dualism. I mean, one might describe dualism as almost
the common sense view. I think throughout human history, most human
beings have taken the view that reality consists ultimately of entities of two categorically
different kinds, minds and bodies. And as far as we know, in all civilizations,
past and present, most people seem to have thought this, that there were bodies and that
there were minds, and that these were two fundamentally different kinds of things. Now, that's what is meant by the term "dualism." Now, you must reject this view if you don't
believe in the existence of minds. It's true. I do reject the view. The dualistic view presents problems, creates
problems which are neither soluble nor, it seems to me, necessary. It's clear that an individual's decisions
will affect his movements, will determine his movements in many cases. And his movements in turn will have consequences
in the movements of other physical objects. At the same time, the natural scientists,
the physicists, insist on a closed system, there being physical causes, physical explanations,
in principle for the physical events. They allow no place for the incursion of influences
from outside the physical world. Given all this, it would seem then that a
person's decisions must themselves be activity on the part of a physical object. The alternative of rejecting this basic principle
of physical science to the effect that there's no change without a change in the distribution
of microphysical properties over space, that alternative I find uncongenial because the
successes in natural science have been such that we must take their presuppositions very
seriously. In other words, what you are saying is that
wishes, emotions, feelings, decisions, thoughts are all things which take place in physical
objects, namely people. And of course, in a sense that's an obvious
fact. And what you're saying is that not only are
these always accompanied by microphysical changes, changes in our brains and our central
nervous systems and so on, but they indeed are those microphysical changes. Exactly. Now, before I go on to raise with you some
of the apparent difficulties inherent in that view, I wonder if you can explain how it is
that almost all of mankind, as I said only a few minutes ago, has disagreed with you
about this? So why people in general take a dualist view
of reality. Let me add this point. If I put that question to almost anyone else,
he could say, well, it's obvious why people think like that. They think like that because dualism corresponds
to directly experienced reality. That is how we experience things. But you can't say that because you don't think
it is how we experience things. So what would your answer be? I recognize certainly a profound difference
between so-called mental events and externally observable physical ones, in spite of construing
these mental events as themselves event-states activity on the part of a physical object. As for the traditional dualistic attitude,
certainly this goes back to primitive times. I think one partial explanation may be the
experience of dreams and the seeming separation of the mind from the body. In that state, certainly animism antedated
science. Thales, the first of the Greek philosophers,
is said to have said that all things are full of gods. Primitive peoples today are said to be animists
very largely and to believe that what we call inanimate objects are animated by spirits. One can even imagine traces of animism in
the basic concepts of our science itself. The notion of cause I suspect began with the
feeling of effort, of pushing on the part of the individual, the subjective feeling
as a mental entity. And force surely had that sort of origin. But as time has gone on and as science has
progressed in recent centuries, the dissociation of these concepts from their original mental
context seems to have been conducive to great scientific progress. And I think of physicalism as a departure,
a product of latter-day science. Which, of course, is a phenomenon that's very
uncharacteristic of the history of mankind. But I don't think that the chief reason why
most people take a dualist view of reality is to do with dreams or the other thing that
you mentioned. I think it's chiefly because we all do have,
it seems to me, direct experience of an internal flow of thoughts and emotions and responses
and desires and fantasies and memories and so on which is going on all the time that
we're awake. And which is extremely complex, not only in
the sense that it may be about complicated things but also in the sense that there may
be several different things going on at once. And I think we're all directly aware of something
like this going on inside ourselves. And this doesn't manifest itself in any way
in observable external behavior. No. We are aware of these things. And I'm not denying their existence. But I'm construing them or reconstruing them
as activities on the part of physical objects, namely on our part. And the fact that these are not observable
on the whole from the outside doesn't distinguish them from much that the physicist assumes
in the way of internal microscopic or submicroscopic structure of inanimate objects. A great deal goes on that we don't observe
from the outside and that we have to account for conjecturally. The important reason for construing all this
activity on the part of bodies is to preserve the closed character of the system of the
physical world. Does this mean that you deny the real existence
of the age-old problem about whether or not we have free will? It doesn't mean that because the will would
retain its status even though it is becoming ultimately a neuro phenomenon and an aspect
of the activity of a physical object. However, I think the problem of the freedom
of the will is an outcome of a confusion. There's no question in my mind about freedom
of the will, that the will is free in the sense that people very often do, but they
will to do. They are free, to within limits, of a constraint
and within limits of their strength or talent to do things that they will to do. Freedom of the will does not mean that the
will is free to will as it will. That would be nonsense. And it doesn't mean that the will is uncaused. The will is caused. And we all are prepared to recognize that
the will is caused when we try to train children in such a way as to influence their behavior,
or enact laws to discourage criminals, or you try to get votes. People try to sell things. All these are cases of causing people to will. But the freedom of their will remains insofar
as their activity is the result of a causal chain, one link of which is the willing. And that willing can be itself caused, and
is. Given that you hold these views, how do you
see the traditional body-mind problem? Let me just remind our viewers of what that
is. I've said earlier that most people seem to
take a dualist view of reality, a view that everything in the universe consists ultimately
of either minds or bodies, that there are both kinds of entity. And that has given rise to a traditional problem
which no one has ever come up with a thoroughly satisfactory solution to. And that is the question of how are these
incorporeal abstract non-material minds able to actually move and push about the material
bodies? Now, it's clear that since you don't believe
in the existence of minds as independently of bodies, the problem does not present itself
to you in that form. Given your views, do you simply bypass the
mind-body problem totally? No. As you say, the body-mind problem doesn't
exist in that form for me. There's no longer that problem of interaction. And in fact, it's in order to eliminate the
problem in that form that I opt for physicalism. However, the problem then arises, how are
we to talk about all these ordinarily so-called mental events and mental activity, this flux
of experience, if we're not recognizing minds, not recognizing mental entities? It's no good trying to paraphrase all this
into neurological terms because it would take too much in the way of detailed understanding
of the mechanism of the nervous system. Now, there's as a first step a quick, easy
solution to that. One may simply keep the mentalistic terminology
but regard all these terms as terms applicable to bodies and to the activity of bodies. This is easy. This is too easy in a way because there's
another point in favor of the physicalistic attitude which I haven't touched on up to
now, namely the advantage of intersubjectivity, objectivity. The data are not introspective data. The data are shared, or can be shared by other
observers. It's because of this, in large part at least,
that the natural sciences have been so successful. And introspective psychology has not been
comparably successful. Well, now if we simply take over all the conceptual
apparatus of introspective psychology and mentalism and simply try to excuse it by saying
all these are attributes or activities of bodies, we're no longer getting the benefit
of the intersubjectivity of natural science. However, there's a way of coping with this
difficulty. And it is behaviorism in the sense of which
I think behaviorism is important and valuable. I think the role of behaviorism is the legitimation
of mentalistic terms without having to go through the indirect and in effect impracticable
channel of neurology. Intersubjectively observable criteria for
mental states are found in observable behavior. And that would include verbal behavior? Including verbal behavior, yes. And insofar as such criteria are available,
we do have the benefits of natural science, after all. And this is without a full neurological explanation. So the extent to which I'm a behaviorist is
in seeing behaviorism as a way of making objective sense of mentalistic concepts. I don't identify mental states with the behavior. I identify the mental states, rather, with
neural states. Nor do I regard behavioral accounts as, in
the last analysis, explanatory of the mental states, mental phenomena. I think the full explanation of these is to
be found, rather, at the neurological level. In other words, you're saying that behaviorism
is not an explanation of the kind of problems with which the philosopher deals but a way
of formulating them. I mean, it's a kind of language in which the
problem should be couched or formulated before we then go on to try and provide solutions. Exactly, yes. I think it would be helpful if we paused a
moment this point, Professor Quine, and if I try to recapitulate the ground that we've
covered before we attempt any forward moves. I started this discussion by asking you what
you regarded as the central tasks of philosophy. And you not only said what you thought philosophers
ought to be doing, you also said what you thought they ought not to be doing. And you ruled out a number of questions. But you grouped the questions that you thought
philosophers ought to concern themselves with under two main heads, the first head being
questions about what exists, what does reality consist of, and the second group being what
can we know about this, and how can we know, and what can we say about it, and so on. Now, from that point onwards, we've been pursuing
the first of those two groups of questions. And you've said that in your view, your view
of reality is physicalist. You think all reality consists in physical
entities, that there are not minds separate from physical entities, and that the notion
that there are leads us into all sorts of conceptual confusions, which you think a behaviorist
analysis liberates us from. I'd like us now to start going over to questions
of the second kind because we were beginning to get into them already. And that's why I thought it time to stop and
reassess where we were. Can we now move into the second area of how
we acquire knowledge of this physical world in which we find ourselves? Good. One correction I would make, though. My position is not that there are only physical
objects. There are also abstract objects. But these abstract objects are not mental. It's important to make that distinction, isn't
it? That's it. You don't believe in the existence of minds
as separate from physical things. Exactly. But you do believe in the existence of certain
abstract entities. Yes, numbers notably. But I think you need to explain that a bit. If you are a physicalist, how can you justify
your belief in the existence of abstract entities at all? The
status of sets or classes and numbers and functions, now from the point of view of the
predicative side of philosophy, is not basically different from the status of hypothetical
entities such as elementary particles in physics. In both cases it's a matter of framing hypotheses
which imply our past observations, which imply future observations under specifiable conditions,
which would then serve to corroborate or refute these hypotheses. And these general hypotheses contain reference
not only to the ordinary observable objects but also to many auxiliary objects, we might
say, in the way of unobservable physical particles and also in the way of numbers and functions. Because these come into the formulations into
the hypotheses of a quantitative kind, and even classes or sets. The biologist speaks of genera and species
of organisms. And
all these entities are furniture of the world, posited on an equal footing in our system
of the world. Well, you say "on an equal footing." But it does seem to me that there is a very
important difference between the sense in which subatomic particles are unobservable
and the sense in which, say, numbers are unobservable. And subatomic particles are bits of stuff. But it just so happens, perhaps because of
the accident of our optical apparatus, that they're bits of stuff which are too small
for us to see. But if we had microscopic eyes or supermicroscopic
eyes, perhaps we could see them. And if we had different kinds of fingers,
we could pick them up. I mean, they are bits of material. But numbers aren't bits of material, however
small, are they? I mean, they are, as it were, abstract through
and through. There is nothing but abstraction to them. It's true that there's this discontinuity. But the continuity of ordinary observable
objects with the elementary particles is rather more tenuous than had once been supposed because
an elementary particle is too small, for instance, even in principle to be detected by light
because it's smaller than any wavelength. Furthermore, the behavior of the elementary
particles is basically unlike that of larger bodies, so much so that it's, I think, only
by courtesy that they're called material. The indeterminacy with respect to whether
two segments of paths of an electron are segments of the path of the same electron or two different
ones, indeterminacies of position, the antithesis between wave and corpuscle in the interpretation
of light, and other anomalies-- something called the Bose-Einstein statistic-- all suggest
that the analogy of body is an analogy that was useful for extrapolation up to a point. But then the reshuffling, the evolution of
hypotheses in the light of further experimentation and further refutations, have finally carried
us to the point where the continuity is no longer so evident. I would like to leave that particular point
there, Professor Quine, because I want to step back three paces in our discussion and
take up something which strikes me as being a very much more general interest that we
were talking about a moment ago. And then we got slightly sidetracked, and
I think it was partly my fault that we did. I want to go back to the point where you were
saying-- or suggesting, anyway-- that the adoption of a physicalist approach to reality
or behaviorist analysis, a behaviorist way of formulating problems, has the effect of
liberating you from the spell of certain entrenched ways of looking at things which, though they
may be part of common sense, are nevertheless mistaken. Now, that's the point I want to take you up
at. Can you say what some of the entrenched ideas
are from which you believe your approach would liberate us? Good. Liberation's one way of looking at it. A sterner discipline is another way of looking
at behaviorism. But at any rate, a major example is the notion
of meaning. There's the common sense notion that words
somehow convey meanings. How do we know that the same words convey
the same meaning to the two speakers? We can see that the speakers react in the
same way. All this is describable in behavioral terms. But might the meanings themselves be different? What behavioral sense can be made of the question? No adequate behavioral sense has been made
of it. There are other notions that could come similarly
into question. Translation-- once the notion of meaning is
questioned, the notion of translation becomes more complex. We can no longer say it's simply a matter
of producing another sentence. It has the same meaning as the sentence that's
being translated. The notion of necessity again comes into question. Well, there are two kinds of necessity, aren't
there? There are two kinds, yes. Logical and causal. Yes. The one commonly is understood as necessity
by virtue of the meanings of the words. The sentence is true by virtue of the meanings
of the words that it contains. This characterization goes by the board if
the notion of meaning does. Then there's the notion of physical necessity,
of necessity by virtue of physical law. This doesn't depend in the same way on meaning,
but by somewhat the same sort of scruples. It also becomes questionable. It's not clear to me that there's a difference
between a general truth-- a truth in the form of a general proposition, general statement--
which just happens to be true and one that is a law. The adverb "necessarily" is in very common
use, and that suggests that perhaps people have a distinction in mind between two sorts
of truth, the necessary and the accidental or contingent. But I think the ordinary use of that word
can be explained otherwise. I think it's dependent on situation, on context. One says "necessarily" and follows it with
a sentence. But when he thinks that the other person is
bound to admit it because of what he already has committed himself to or because he may
be presumed to believe, this will vary with the context. So you're calling into question such very
fundamental notions about thinking as causal necessity, logical necessity, the idea of
a law, the notion of meaning. Yes. The ground is beginning to disappear from
under our feet. And I think what I would like to do at this
stage, Professor Quine, is ask you to characterize for us as a whole the kind of view of the
world that we're coming out with. Can you-- Good. Well, let's proceed again in terms of that
dichotomy between the ontological and the predicational. On the ontological side, what I am accepting,
assuming, whereas physical objects-- a physical object being construed quite generously as
the content of any portion, however scattered and discontinuous, of space-time, and all
classes of such things and all classes of such classes and so on. And mathematicians have discovered over the
past century how all talk of numbers and functions and all other mathematical entities can be
paraphrased into talk of the pure set theory of classes. Classes, classes of classes, appropriate ones,
can be made to do the work of numbers and of functions and the rest, so we need these. On the other hand, these are abstract objects
that I accept. There are others that I would reject. Properties I would reject because there's
the question, in what circumstances do two descriptions, two characterizations, determine
the same property? And in what circumstances do they determine
different properties which just happen to be properties of all the same things? The problem, in short, of individuation, of
identification of properties. And it's ordinarily said that two clauses,
let's say, two phrases, determine the same property if they have the same meaning. But of course, this characterization goes
by the board if we don't accept the notion of meaning. In the case of classes, this problem of identification
does not arise because classes are identical simply if they have the same members. Properties I'm persuaded are dispensable in
science. It's not clear how to dispense with the classes. So this would be my tentative ontology. And I would regard it as part of science and
subject to the fallibility of the rest of science, namely the individuals and the hierarchy
of classes and classes of classes and so on, built upon them, the individuals being physical
objects. On the predicative side, my view is, I think,
mainly rather negative. It's one of rejecting of predicates that have
too little in the way of observable criteria for their application. Or failing that, I think one must also accept
the theoretical predicates which don't admit of observational criteria. But there one must insist on their being pretty
firmly related to predicates of the observational kind through laws, hypotheses-- better-- general
physical theory. Which makes for a well-knit system of the
world, which expedites prediction. So that I would insist not that predicates
have necessary and sufficient conditions in observation but that they have a good share
in the way of observable criteria, symptoms of application, or that they play quite a
promising role in the theoretical hypotheses. One thing that pleases me very much about
the discussion that we've had is that none of it so far has been specifically about language
or about words. And I say that because a lot of intelligent
laymen who begin to take an interest in philosophy are sometimes put off by what they take to
be the discovery that modern philosophers are doing nothing but talking about words,
talking about terms, analyzing sentences, statements, and so on. And you haven't talked in that way at all. And it's quite clear that the problems with
which you are concerned are not problems about language. Nevertheless, someone opening your books or
a student coming to study with you at Harvard for the first time would find that a great
deal of your technique of approach to these problems is via the analysis of concepts and
therefore careful attention to words, the elucidation of sentences and statements, and
so on. Why is it that you and other contemporary
philosophers adopt this linguistic approach to what are, after all, essentially non-linguistic
problems? One reason is a strategy that I call semantic
ascent, A-S-C-E-N-T. Philosophical issues are often concerned with
very fundamental traits of one's conceptual scheme. And if two philosophers disagree on such points,
it's difficult for them to discuss their disagreement without each of them begging the question,
because it's hard to reason and argue without making use of the fundamental principles of
one's own conceptual scheme. And a way of avoiding or somewhat minimizing
this difficulty is the device of moving up one step semantically and talking about words
instead of using the words to talk about the things. And if one makes this move, then one can talk
about the rival systems as systems of sentences. One can compare them in point of simplicity
and in point of inclusiveness and make a judgment on a shared basis without the circularity,
the question-begging. We're coming to the end of our discussion
now, Professor Quine. But I would like just before we do literally
end, I'd like to ask you if you can say anything at all, perhaps in the light of the discussion
we've had up to this point, about what you are currently working on. I'll have to ask you to be briefer than I
would like because we have so little time left, but I would like you before we end to
say something about what you're doing original work on now. Well, at present I've been writing short things
in an effort to elucidate some of the points already in my other writings, or to extend
and improve them. But there are several problems on which I
would like to see someone make breakthroughs. One of them is connected with language, namely
the development of some conceptual scheme to take the place of the untenable old-fashioned
theory of meaning, something new and something more acceptable in the way of theory of what
goes into good translation, for instance. This is a job perhaps for linguists, but it's
something of philosophical interest. And it's a job also where someone with a philosophical
curiosity is apt to be helpful to the linguist. A second one is related rather to psychology. I should like to see a system of concepts
developed which would do the work of the old mentalistic idioms of propositional attitude--
x believes that p, x regrets that p, x hopes that p, this sort of thing. These idioms are subject to some subtle logical
difficulties and complications, and they're very, in large part of their applications,
wanting in adequate behavioral criteria. I should like to see, not for general discourse
but for scientific purposes, some apparatus which would serve the same purposes as these
and be free of those faults. The third is related rather to mathematics. Somewhat begrudgingly, I accept the apparatus
of abstract objects, sets and the rest, as auxiliary to science because it seems to be
needed. But I should like to see a minimum basis,
an economical basis, and a very clearly intelligible basis for set theory, which was just barely
adequate to so much mathematics, as is needed in natural science. And it might be that if this were developed,
it would, among other things, give us a more intuitive understanding of the so-called paradoxes,
the antinomies of set theory and their solutions, such things as Russell's paradox which are
familiar to some of our viewers, I'm sure, and not to all. So that might be a good place to stop. Well, we will have to stop. Thank you very much, Professor Quine. [MUSIC PLAYING]
How many academics today use ""World" as a word to describe "everything"?