Plato’s Beard, Quine’s Stubble And Ockham’s Razor

Abstract

Once upon a time there was a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. The dialectic of this particular Hegelian story is the relation of natural language to logical theory. The thesis was provided by that early stage in analytic philosophy wherein when logical theory clashed with natural language, it was natural language that suffered. An epidemic of charges of meaninglessness occured. Among those charged as linguistic deviants were such purported perversions of use as singular existentials, strings with vacuous singular terms, and the improper mating of objects or expressions of the wrong type. The title of Ryle’s famous essay “Systematically Misleading Expressions” captures the ethos of that period. That essay documented purported cases of natural language, usage which were perceived to be at odds with certain logical forms provided at the time, and predictably for that period, the fault was located in natural language, not in the logical forms suggested by Principia Mathematica. The antithesis in this dialectic was supplied by ordinary-language philosophy, where such clashes lead to downplaying the role of logical theory and upgrading natural-language considerations. A favored practice of the period consisted of dissolving philosophical problems by illustrating that they had their roots in the misuse of ordinary language. The problem would disappear upon abandoning some theoretical infringement on natural language and by carefully sticking to ordinary language. The synthesis (the hero in Hegelian fictions) is the present period, and especially the position taken by the author of the fiction. Here natural language considerations and those of logic go hand in hand. This is due to a number of factors: a growth in logical theory, a more flexible attitude towards logical forms (competing theories of logical form are tolerated) and the growth of linguistics as a theoretical and somewhat formal theory of natural languages.