McX and Wyman
Comments on Casati's "On What There Is Not in 'On What There Is'"
Comments on Filippo Gabrio Edoardo Casati, “On What There Is Not in ‘On What There Is’”, Logique et Analyse, No. 240 (2017) pp. 421-428.
We previously noted that there was a puzzle in Quine’s “On What There Is”, namely that the two nonexistent, fictional philosophers whom he discusses, McX and Wyman, have a role in his argument that his argument seems to say that they cannot have. For instance, they have to have identity conditions (because he keeps treating McX as the same McX and Wyman as the same Wyman), he refers to them with pronouns and in ways that seem to require modeling that uses values of bound variables, etc. Casati’s brief note is the best discussion we have seen of this pragmatic inconsistency, in which Quine’s own use of fictional characters seems to require that Quine’s own position is incorrect.
Casati gives an example of how this causes a practical problem for the argument. Quine says that Wyman is someone with a sublter mind than McX. This seems to require that Wyman be someone who is subtler in mind than McX. But the natural way to think of this in Quinean terms would be as something like, Some unique thing is Wyman and is one of the ones who is subtler in mind than McX. Quine handles the ‘is Wyman’ by treating it as a predicate (‘wymanizes’), so, Casati notes:
Since Quine also endorses the ontological commitment, then we have (3*): “There exists exactly one X such that this X wymanizes and is one of those subtler minds [subtler than McX]”. Consequently, because such an X does not exist, then proposition (3* ) is false. According to the Quinean view, Quine himself cannot state that (1 *) is true. (p. 423)
In another case, Quine attributes to McX the belief that he cannot repudiate the existence of Pegasus; this is the reason Quine is arguing against him. But this requires that there be a McX to argue against who believes that he cannot repudiate the existence of Pegasus. If Quine tries to get rid of any ontological commitment here, his method of paraphrase seems to require that this actually be false. But if it’s false that McX believes he cannot repudiate the existence of Pegasus, why is Quine arguing as if it were true? (This is related to a point made by Routley, namely, that the method of paraphrase often requires you to treat the wrong things as false.)
Likewise, Quine says that Wyman’s universe is “unlovely” and that he and other lovers of desert landscapes are offended by it; this requires that there be a universe that is Wyman’s and is unlovely in such a way that Quine and other lovers of desert landscapes can be offended by that universe. But on Quine’s own view, Wyman’s universe does not exist, and Wyman does not exist, and therefore there is nothing for Quine and other lovers of desert landscapes to be offended by.
As Casati notes, these problems are not mere inadvertences. Quine repeatedly refers to things that his position requires us to regard as nonexistent in ways that seem to have be expressed by exactly those means that he says involve ontological commitment. (Casati counts 45 instances across ten pages.) As Casati puts it,
Even though ‘On what there is’ is supposed to be only ‘on what exists’, more or less 20% of the paper is ‘on what there is not’. According to this 20%, Quine is not Quinean enough because all his arguments need to assume that there is something true about non-existent objects. Unfortunately, this is exactly what his own theory forbids. (p. 425)
Further, Casati notes, Quine holds that it is impossible to distinguish between nonexistent things (this is one of his arguments against McX and Wyman). But Quine repeatedly distinguishes McX and Wyman, despite the fact that they are fictional and nonexistent. He uses different arguments against them, and explicitly contrasts them. Now, this is not a problem; there are lots of positions on which you can do this. But Quine’s is not one of them; Quine is repeatedly doing something that his own argument suggests he should not be able to do.
Perhaps Quine just made a mistake in using fictional examples? One could perhaps say that Quine could have (and should have) built his argument without McX and Wyman. But on Quine’s view it should be impossible to do what Quine apparently did in the actual paper; so the fact that Quine was able to do it seems to be inconsistent with his position. Whatever Quine could have done, what he actually did is still inconsistent with what his position claims he should be able to do. Actual Quine’s actual argument is a pragmatic counterexample to hypothetical Quine’s merely possible argument, showing that you can do what the argument treats as impossible. After all, if you can reformulate Quine’s argument so that it avoids using fictional characters, then the original argument, which made use of fictional characters, has to make sense. Otherwise you are just inventing a different argument. “What is remarkable here is that Quine himself, endorsing the impossibility of distinguishing between fictional objects, provides a counterexample to his own theory” (p. 427).
Casati ends by considering three arguments by which one might attempt to defend Quine from the charge of pragmatic inconsistency:
Perhaps Quine can use semantic ascent to change from talking about objects to talking about the words used? However, Quine does not actually do this at any point; he explicitly claims that the philosophers in question have various positions and beliefs, and he argues against their positions and beliefs. But words and phrases have no philosophical positions and beliefs.
Perhaps we could say that Quine is using the idea that fictions are about the ‘customary sense’ of non-referring expressions? But Quine does not actually accept that idea.
Perhaps we could say that Quine’s philosophers are fictional objects in an intentional context? But this is also a non-Quinean view.
In other words, while there are ways someone could avoid Quine’s pragmatic inconsistency, there seem to be no ways that Quine could. And it is, of course, not a real defense of Quine to avoid Quine’s problem by creating an anti-Quinean position. It is also worth noting that Casati’s argument is not a rejection of Quine’s position; it in fact accepts Quine’s position at least for the sake of argument. Casati is just pointing out that Quine’s practice in developing the position is inconsistent with that position. If Quine can actually make the argument that he has tried to make, his position cannot be correct; if his position is correct, he cannot actually make the argument he has tried to make.
While this argument is specifically concerned with Quine, attempts to handle fictional characters in paraphrastic approaches often run into analogous pragmatic inconsistencies. How far this goes, is not something that has, as far as we know, been discussed, but that such analogies exist show that Casati’s argument is more than just an exegetical discussion of Quine. It provides a good example of how avoiding such pragmatic inconsistencies can restrict the kinds of positions we can take about fictional characters (and many other things).