Blurring Boundaries: Carnap, Quine, and the Internal–External Distinction

Abstract

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former's internalexternal distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine's metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine's perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine's position is much closer to Carnap's than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects.

Doi Desativado

“…Así que antes de tomar al pie de la letra la aparente adhesión de Quine a creencias metafísicas, ya sea con respecto a la existencia del mundo externo, los objetos del sentido común, las entidades teóricas o los entes matemáticos, conviene tomar en cuenta que varios autores han rechazado una interpretación metafísica de sus ideas. Verhaegh (2017), quien, sobre la base de diversas declaraciones de Quine, muestra significativas coincidencias entre Quine y Carnap, señala que Alspector-Kelly (2001) y Price (2007,2009) fueron los primeros en sugerir que la interpretación estándar del debate entre aquellos destacados filósofos estaba descaminada. Una de las ilustrativas declaraciones que muestran la proximidad entre Quine y los empiristas lógicos con respecto a la metafísica se refiere al clásico problema de la realidad del mundo externo:…”

Sobre una diferencia entre Carnap y Quine respecto de la metodología elucidatoria

“…Cf. Verhaegh (2017, §2) y Wagner (2016. 37 Ver, por ejemplo, (Carnap, 1963e, p. 933), (Carnap, 1963d, p. 66) y (Stein, 1992, p. 280).…”

A pragmatic approach to the ontology of models

“…See van Roojen (2018),Blackburn (2006), and Schroeder (2010, esp. Ch.2) for more on Moral Noncognitivism.7 For further contemporary discussions on the distinction between internal and external questions, as well as on the debate between Carnap and Quine on metaphysics seeBird (1995),Yablo (1998),Alspector-Kelly (2001),Eklund (2013),Verhaegh (2017),Verhaegh (2018),Morris (2018) andFlocke (2018). Blatti and Lapointe (2016) is a comprehensive collection of essays on Carnap's overall approach on ontology and metaphysics.…”