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Word and Object (Studies in Communication)

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This is one of the great books of 20th-century philosophy, with page after page of brilliant arguments. Although Quine had an understated wit and a gracefully economic style, this is not an easy book. I would not tackle it without some training in philosophy, logic, or linguistics. Particularly useful would be some understanding of logical positivism, which Quine is reacting against.

The book's motivating question is how a word (or words) can refer to an object or be used to pick out an object. This might seem to be a narrow topic, but it leads Quine to discuss a large number of epistemological, logical, and metaphysical issues. Quine's conclusions in these areas were so novel and profound that decades later philosophers are still digesting them.

Was Quine right about everything? Surely not, but like all great philosophers, he made us look at the old issues in new ways and made us aware of problems which we hadn't known had existed. For this we can be profoundly grateful.

Willard Van Ormen Quine died 25 December 2000.

First of all, unless you specialize in self-torture, don't try to read past chapter 2. (I myself died in the middle of chapter 5.) Chapters 1 and 2, however, are fantastic. You've probably heard the story before...it seems we can't tell whether by "Gavagai" the natives mean "rabbit", or "undetached rabbit part." The reason is, every single time a native is stimulated by the one, he is stimulated by the other...or something like that. That much is a fairly amusing observation, and Quine has a field day with it, suggesting that it's impossible in principle to discriminate between these putative "referents". Hmm. Well, let's just see. Say you and I are observing a "source"...a black box, out of which ticks a stream of letters. Say that, occasionally, the string of characters "R-A-B-B-I-T" appears in the stream. You have noticed that whenever this happens, I announce (gleefully) "Gavagai!" It seems you're stuck. You can never tell whether by "Gavagai!" I take myself to "refer" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or to the rabbit-embedded "B-B" appearing in the stream. At least, not by passive observation. Once you can ask me questions about what I do take myself to be "referring" to, it seems that we can clear this issue up, but fast. Or not? Quine thinks not, and that's where things get interesting. I'm pretty sure he's wrong, but I'm not (exactly) sure why. Probably you can employ a meta-language to artificially attach referential information to sentences...more interesting, however, is the question why you would want to. Indeed, wouldn't a philosopher versed in the paradox just say "what's the difference?" when asked whether he "referred" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or a rabbit-embedded "B-B"? The moral seems to be that you aren't stuck at all...you know what I *mean* either way, you just don't know what I'm referring to: reference, in short, doesn't contribute in the way we usually think it does to meaning. But, whatever the answers are, the puzzles are here, so read it.

This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy," answering with consistency many perennial questions in ontology and epistemology in the process. Chapter two (the infamous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Quine's magnum opus completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy which together rang the death-knell of Cartesianism.

This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in the literature of analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy", and proceeds to plow through every permutation of problems which can arise from such an endeavor. Chapter two (the [in-]famous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Philosophy and the Empiricism of Mind," Quine's major work completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy.

In this incomparable and engaging book Quine takes up many of the questions he raised in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and in his other early papers. In Word and Object, he levels an attack against the traditional notion of meaning that is accepted by so many, because it is understood by so few. Though the position defended here is alomost completely wrong, it is wrong for interesting reasons and, along with Quine's other works, establishes a position regarding matters semantic that, from his ultra-empiricist positivist perspective is nearly inevitable. If you don't find his position at least a little compelling, then your heart is made of stone.

This book is Quine's first full-length book, and it sets forth his most elaborate statement of his wholistic thesis of language. Instead of the metaphorical statement in "Two Dogmas" written a decade earlier, here in Word and Object Quine expresses his thesis in the literal vocabulary of behavioristic psychology with his idea of "stimulus meaning".

Much of the book is an exposition of his thesis of semantic indeterminacy as it is manifested in translation between languages, which thus appears as his indeterminacy of translation thesis sometimes called his "radical translation" thesis. In fact there is nothing radical about it; linguists have long known of such translation problems. As has long been said: traduttore,traditore. But Quine uses it to critique positivism, and it is essential to his pragmatism.

In the translation situation he portrays the field linguist in the same situation that the positivist Carnap postulates in "Meaning and Synonymy in Natural Language", where Carnap attempted to describe how the field linguist can ascertain a term's "intension" or meaning by identifying its extension or range of application from the observed behavior of native speakers of an unknown language. Carnap admitted that this determination of extension involves uncertainty and possible error due to vagueness, but he excused this uncertainty and risk of error, because it occurs even in the concepts used in empirical science. While this admission of extensional vagueness in science made the fact unproblematic for Carnap, it had just the opposite significance for Quine.

For Quine extensional vagueness is an inherent characteristic of language that he calls "referential inscrutability", and which he later calls "ontological relativity." And what Carnap called intensional vagueness, Quine prefers to consider as a semantical indeterminacy in stimulus meaning but without admitting intensions.

For more on my views on Quine, please Google my book History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, which is also on my web site philsci with free downloads by chapter - especially BOOK III, and my other reviews of Quine's books at this AMAZON site. See also my ebook Philosophy of Science: An Introduction.

Thomas J. Hickey

Ever wondered what Wittgenstein would look like with a slight infusion of pragmatism and a major infusion of behaviorism? Enter Quine's book WORD AND OBJECT. It presents a few groundbreaking arguments and insights among a sea of just "ok" and mediocre ideas. Before I go into what I agree with and what I disagree with, let me just say that Quine was clearly no fool. Although, I'll end up seeing his views in this book as deeply flawed in many ways, it cant be said that, his argumentation wasn't rigorous or that his thinking was totally off base.

So in that spirit, let me review the main ideas and present the good enduring ones first and then outline some of my disagreements. The first chapter concerns his largely contextualist conception of truth and his limited view of it in light of criticisms of more foundational leaning philosophers. He also as an aside attempts to refute Hume's problem of induction, something I will talk more about later. He talks about specific problems regarding language as well, but the subject of language really kicks of in the second chapter. In that chapter he brings into play the now famous "Gavagi" problem and outlines his views of the problems of translation through this example and others. He ultimately however comes to the conclusion that use and stimulus reactions override indeterminacy of translation and that behaviorist views of language overcome the problems he presents in the first couple chapters.

The third chapter concerns his philosophical adages to the behaviorist view of language acquisition. Which to say the least as a basis for argumentation leaves a lot to be desired. It showed little or no regard for children's actual acquisition practices. Like the fact that they don't make random mistakes and seem to have the basic structuring of language, before any formal teaching or explanations from adults. That being said, Quine's adages although derived from a weak basis do seem to correlate somewhat to some later findings in regards to how children and adults generally seem to categorically understand words in different contexts. So while its relation to acquisition may be wrong his view of word use and function may not be completely false.

The rest of the book more elaborates on language problems in regards to mathematics and logic and how some of his ideas earlier in the book either eliminate or make irrelevant these problems. It also just talks about language generally, not much to say about most of this.

My first major disagreement with Quine, comes in the first couple of pages. His view of contextualism is deeply flawed for reasons that I cant fully elaborate on in the scope of this review. However I will give a few reasons as to why this is the case. He treats subjects as if they're completely separate domains, this is merely a fiction in my opinion and can be shown to be the case with innumerable examples. He also contradicts himself in this regard, by talking about things as if they're a holism and as separate domains several times in the book. What is ironic about this, is he criticizes logical positivists for seeing science as a separate domain as philosophy in the same vein and yet still makes this mistake himself to some extent.

Secondly his view is wrong because when he speaks of knowledge as being the totality of sentences near the start he adds contingency in to try and refute Hume as I said earlier, unfortunately this is wrong and can easily be shown to be the case. If knowledge is the totality of sentences, facts, propositions, ideas or whatever linguistic laden term you want to reduce things to you have realize that by doing so you're invoking a massive self referencing system. A classic example of this in regards to language is the dictionary, start with one word and keep following the root words away from it and at some point you will come back to that word. Why? Because there is no stable frame of reference in language it merely keeps pushing meaning to other words/sentences. This is all obvious though, so why am I bringing it up? Because Quine brings the word contingency in relation to Hume implying that causality will now make sense since he has imbued it into the "totality of sentences."

Unfortunately this doesn't work. In a constantly deferred frame of reference no necessity can be shown, because no obvious chain of causality can be found in the totality, we cant even find a preferred point let alone an obvious chain or pattern. This refutation of Hume is deeply flawed and just continually begs the question, like an infinite regress of gods.

This argument also would hamper knowledge creation significantly. As necessity means determinism in Quines context here he would essentially close the frame of reference we know as language and hamper its subjective aspects. This refutation is harder to understand and I realize that. So I have tried to the best of my ability to come up with an example or two and here is what I have:

Imagine all of language is represented in five people. Since this version of language is the language represented in Quines epistemology here, imagine that they're contingently reliant upon one another to keep bouncing references back and forth the way language has to to keep deferring meaning. Assuming that Quine's view of a language imbued with necessity, this language need never grow or change, since each sentence justifies the next in an infinite causal loop, these five people can merely keep bouncing their presently-existing sentences off of each other forever in the same way.

Now imagine another example. Roads are a lot like language, they are a semi-closed system with rules and ambiguities and just like a language they grow and extend amorphously. But lets bring necessity to the system of roads. That means roads need to be necessitated upon other roads to have meaning and work. While I do need to know what a road is and the general system it connects to, it doesn't need to contingently be attached to other roads and or a road system to make sense. The ambiguous nature of roads as a system means I can have a road that connects to my house, but that splits before being attached to the rest of the system. This is the problem with his argument against Hume, I can still have the frame of reference, deferred meaning and rules, without his forced contingency.

His contingency is unnecessary and at worst it is debilitating to knowledge creation as it leaves no reason why we would need new words and ambiguities in a system of contingently necessary deferred meaning. It almost comes of as foundational which is contrary to his anti-foundational stances.

I have other problems with his epistemology, but I think I have said enough to show that right out the gate, his views fail in some critical ways.

The biggest problem I have with this book other than this, is his want to eliminate intentional meaning. Now I understand his motives, behaviorists want to deal with intentions as much as a homophobe wants to march in a gay pride parade, but if his ultimate goal throughout much of his philosophy was to help bring about a better more understandable picture of the world, eliminating intentional statements is far from coming closer to that, it leaves out about 80% of our daily experience and concept of meaning. That being a generous estimate, because analytical or contextual meaning derived from behaviors may account for even less than the average persons experience then that. I don't need to get into a big tussle over this though, I'm sure by now most people understand that the behaviorists neglect of subjective experience and mental states was a mistake to one extent or the other.

To rate the books writing style and format. Well let me first say this book is definitely not for beginners in philosophy. This was hard, even for me, the symbolic notation and dense wording were not always easy to understand and I'm not sure I always understood what was being said even after a few rereads. I haven't ever put a book above intermediate level on this site other than BEING AND TIME, but today that changes, this book is what I would call a "hard" book to read. Even harder because sometimes it comes off as deceptively simple, in his no nonsense analytical leanings. You definitely need a large amount of background knowledge to really grasp whats going on here.

I don't think hes particularly gifted with prose or anything either. His "Gavagi" argument was probably the most entertaining thing in the book and I wouldn't pull out the popcorn for that. His argumentation though flawed at points was well played and excellently elaborated on. Although it isn't a page turner I would definitely recommend this to those with the knowledge to understand it and who want to be engaged in the groundings of contemporary philosophical debates and ideas. Keep it "real."

Quine tells a fascinating story about translation. His is not a lazy mind.

His assumption (or belief) that language is learned completely through experience is simply false. Ample evidence drawn from experiments in psychology, neuro-physics, and even common sense demonstrate otherwise. Like the English philosophers who wrote about language and cognition centuries before him, his work will be found to be historically interesting, but ultimately dated; one might say, in the field of linguistics, pre-Copernicus.