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Could Propositions Explain Anything?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William G. Lycan
William G. Lycan*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

In “Quine on Meaning and Existence, I,” Gilbert Harman makes the following exegetical claim about Quine's attitude towards the postulation of propositions:

Quine is not against the postulation of intensional objects because he has a ‘taste for desert landscapes.’ It is not that he thinks intensional objects, propositions or meanings, are a queer kind of entity (as one might believe that electrons must be a queer kind of entity). His complaint is not that intensional objects, as something abstract, offend his sensibilities in the way that they no doubt offend the sensibilities of Nelson Goodman. He believes in sets, although sets are abstract entities. Quine's argument against the second cluster of views [propositional theories of meaning] is that the various views in that cluster are theories that don't explain what they purport to explain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , March 1974 , pp. 427 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Harman, Gilbert “Quine on Meaning and Existence, I,” Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XXI (1967-1968).Google Scholar

2 One suspects that Harman's Quine takes the traditional account (“Two sentences are felt to be synonymous because they express the same proposition”) to be analogous to “Opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormitive virtue”—essentially circular (or merely a repetition of the explanandum) and hence at best a pseudo-explanation. But Harman does at one point compare propositions to “phlogiston or the ether (or witches)” (p. 126); I do not know whether he takes phlogiston theory and the rest to offer only pseudo-explanations too, or whether he is waffling on his original strong thesis. I assume, in any case, that he is not merely restricting his use of the term “explanation” to the correct explanation in whatever case is in question.

3 The reflexivity of containment can easily be derived from Axiom 3 and “x = x.”

4 Anderson, Alan Ross and Belnap, Nuel D. Jr. “The Pure Calculus of Entailment,” Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. XXVII (1962).Google Scholar

5 See Cole, Richard and Kahane, Howard “Hard and Soft lntensionalism,” Review of Metaphysics,Vol. XXIII (1969-1970).Google Scholar

6 There are at least two more obvious limitations: (i) We have assumed for simplicity that we are dealing just with eternal, disambiguated sentences. We shall eventually have to let in all possible strings of words as the values of our sentential variables, and complicate our proofs accordingly (there is no real theoretical problem about this; it just makes computation obnoxious). (ii) It does sound simpleminded to talk of sentences’ expressing propositions in vacuo. To do justice to the “total speech situation,” we would need a more complicated pragmatics.

7 Notice that the most obvious answer, that the sentence or the “that”-clause names the proposition, is unavailable to us, since there are impressive arguments to show that, if sentences name anything at all, they name truth-values; all true sentences corefer, as do all false sentences. (See Church, “Review of Carnap's Introduction to Semantics,” Philosophical Review, Vol. LII (1943)Google Scholar, and Godel, “Russell's Mathematical Logic,” in Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Harper Torchbook edition, 1963.)Google Scholar

8 I am indebted to my colleague, Steve Boër, for helpful discussions on this topic.