Description

María de Ponte (ILCLI):"Quine’s Pyrrhic victory. A defense of reference and modality"

December 14th, 2023. 3:30 pm.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 5.

Abstract

Motivated by a discussion held in 1986, at Stanford, by Quine, Davidson, Dreben and Føllesdal, this talk begins with a short historical account of modality, focusing on Quine’s challenges to modal logic and Føllesdal’s rebuttal.

In a series of well-known papers, Quine launched a strong attack against modal logic. For decades, his views convinced many against modality and modal logic. Quine’s victory seems to have been a Pyrrhic one, however. The notion of necessity was not abandoned and possible worlds semantics is ubiquitous, not only in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic, but in virtually all branches of philosophy. Necessity and possibility have gone from untenable bits of metaphysics to clear concepts in terms of which most of everything else is to be understood.

In this talk, I focus on Føllesdal’s notion of genuine singular terms. Føllesdal’s notion dismantles Quine’s attack and the slingshot argument (used by Quine, but also by Church, Davidson, and many others). Moreover, it does not depend on any strong essentialist notion, disregarding trans-world identity as an ill-founded problem. I briefly discuss Quine’s reaction, his reluctance stance towards reference, and a conflation of different notions of essentialism. I then sketch my own view—based on joint work with Korta and Perry—of necessity (and possibility).