Ruth Barcan Marcus Research Papers (original) (raw)

The centrality of Quine's naturalistic outlook to his conception of ontology has long been overlooked. But it is thrown into sharp relief if we contrast his view with that of Ruth Barcan Marcus, a classic nominalist, and try to disentangle where and why they misunderstood each other. Quine thinks that the only way we can know an object is by positing it, tentatively, as the best explanation of significantly overlapping observations. Our only access to objects is descriptively, by considering the object's role in our best theory. Fans as well as detractors of Quine also routinely miss that this implies Quine's unattractive view of identity as mere indiscernibility-according-to-the-theory. After all, if an object can only be admitted into the ontology by playing some explanatory role couched in terms of the predicates of the theory, there will never be any reason to admit two objects which satisfy all and only the same predicates of that theory. There is no distinct explanatory role for the second object that the first doesn't already discharge. Nor can we appeal to a stronger language to distinguish the two. Quine's naturalism implies that we must always work within our best theory. Barcan Marcus, by contrast, believes that our minds can reach out and touch objects directly. Her ontologically committing expressions are not variables, but names, encoding in language such direct access to objects. Variables are relieved of the burden of commitment: her substitutional interpretation reduces them to substitution instances using names. She neatly turns Quine's criterion, which paraphrases away names in favour of (Russellian, existentially quantified) descriptions on its head. Identity statements between directly referential names, or \emph{tags}, as Barcan Marcus calls them, are true or false \emph{tout court}, without any need for descriptions or indiscernibility. My paper explores how Barcan Marcus and Quine talked past each other at crucial points, for instance where Quine misread her quantifiers as objectual quantifiers, or her identity as equivalent to indiscernibility, and where Barcan Marcus urges Quine to use Russellian descriptions to dispel puzzles about so-called contingent identity, not realising that for him names never rise above the level of descriptions. I finish by considering what a synthesis between the two would look like, and considering what sort of role could be played by directly referential ontologically committing expressions in a naturalistic theory. Uses of ostension, direct perceptual access, and the case of introspective methods used in contemporary psychology and psychiatry provide intriguing test cases.

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- Ontology, Philosophy of Science, Willard Van Orman Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus

[If you refer to the paper, please send me a message.] The textbook-like history of analytic philosophy is a history of myths, re-ceived views and dogmas. Though mainly the last few years have witnessed a huge amount of historical work that aimed to reconsider our narratives of the history of ana-lytic philosophy there is still a lot to do. The present study is meant to present such a micro story which is still quite untouched by historians. According to the received view Kripke has defeated all the arguments of Quine against quantified modal logic and thus it became a respectful tool for philosophers. If we accept the historical interpreta-tion of the network between Quine, Kripke and modal logic, which is to be presented here, we have to conclude that Quine’s real philosophical animadversions against the modalities are still on the table: though Kripke has provided some important (formal-logical) answers, Quine’s animadversions are still viable and worthy of further considera-tion.

- by Adam Tamas Tuboly
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- Modal Logic, Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Logic

Quine's 'Two Dogmas of of Empiricism' is generally seen as overturning the epistemological picture of mathematics and the sciences of Carnap. However, I wish to stress how these arguments grew out of arguments not having anything to do with large scale epistemological concerns, but as a reaction to Ruth Barcan Marcus's recent groundbreaking work on quantified modal logic. Quine had thought he could demonstrate that it was impossible to add anything like ordinary quantification to modal logic, but Barcan Marcus does exactly this. In fact, as I will argue, 'Two Dogmas. .. ' can be seen as growing out of a 1947 paper of Quine's where Barcan Marcus is the explicit target. In certain exchanges with Quine, Barcan Marcus is simply demonstrably correct on logical questions. We also see Barcan Marcus defending a consistent and interesting position on matters of ontology and the philosophy of language.

- by Gregory Lavers
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- Modal Logic, Ontology, History of Analytic Philosophy, Modality

The last paragraph of ‘On Denoting’ contains Russell’s plea for tolerance of anyone who has not “ attempted to construct a theory of his own on the subject of denotation”(1905, p.493). He then reinforces his hope that this attempt will tame the reader who does not want to sacrifice simplicity: “whatever the true theory may be, it cannot have such a simplicity as one might have expected beforehand”(1905, p. 493). That paragraph had an encouraging effect on this author. Russell himself recognized the diculty. Perhaps, then, once the inevitability of the dificulty was deciphered, the text would be more easily opened to interpretation. I later discovered that the mentioned challenge can extend to the roots of deeper philosophical problems. Denotationisoneoftheleastsemanticallywell-behaved parts of the linguistic code because it involves the fixation of referential coordinates that are highly vulnerable to time and counterfactual reconditioning. The difficulty felt by Russell, which becomes clearer when we read other texts by the author ( The Nature of Familiarity, The Monistic Theory of Truth ), was linked to his desire to reconcile the mystery of Denotation with a theory that escaped idealist and coherentist solutions according to which referential identity can be partially fixed as if it were a fragment of the “total truth”. His solution was to make a bet: to trust that ordinary grammar obscures the propositional rule to exclude a portion of “extension” that defines its truth conditions absolutely, and not just partially or as a fragment of the whole. In a purging of these grammatical vices, then, we could resume the extensional simplicity of the act of denoting and asserting. For this, he offered complicated paraphrases. Those formulas show what is defined by propositions, even in intensional contexts and conditions vulnerable to time-counterfactual changes. In this paper, we will propose a reading of the development of this thesis and its possible compatibility with semantic fallibility. We will concentrate on Russell’s text and some insights from Ruth Marcus. Due to the limited space, It is not possible to make comparisons with competing theories, but we hope the text will allow us to give a characterization of the Russellian solution that differs from other extensionalists(Carnap-Tarski). We’ll call it superextensionalism.

- by Lucas R Vollet
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- Bertrand Russell, Ruth Barcan Marcus, On Denoting
- by Adam Tamas Tuboly
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- Modal Logic, Philosophy, Logic, History of Analytic Philosophy
- by Pascal Engel
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- Ruth Barcan Marcus

I develop a modal extension of the Quantified Argument Calculus (QUARC) - a novel logical system introduced by Hanoch Ben-Yami. QUARC is meant to better capture the logic of natural language. The purpose of this paper is to develop a variable domain semantics for modal QUARC (M-QUARC), and to show that even if the usual restrictions are imposed on models with variable domains, M-QUARC-analogues of the Barcan and Converse Barcan formulas still are not validated. I introduce new restrictions - restrictions on the extension of the predicates - and show that with these in place, the Barcan and Converse Barcan formulas are valid. The upshot is that M-QUARC sheds light on the in-/validity of such formulas.

- by Jonas Raab
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- Modal Logic, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Quantified Argument Calculus
- by Frederique Janssen-Lauret
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- Metaphysics, Ontology, Willard Van Orman Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus