Existence is -- what existential quantification expresses.
-- W.V.O. Quine, “Existence and Quantification” (epigrammatic punctuation added)
And, contra a couple of celebrated slogans of Quine:
The
locution ‘ontological commitment’ is not one I have any use for, and
neither do I care to ask or to answer the curious question “What is
there?” I say “There are chairs in the room,” and if someone wants to say “Therefore there are chairs”, tout court, it sounds odd… If this is ontology, then ontology is a mouthful of air.
-- Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (1960)
The subject of this essay is
ontology; we gave a foretaste of the subject
here.
By
its dictionary definition, ontology is the study of
Being. Now, for
me, “What is Being?” is the ultimate conversation-stopper; that
question, like Being itself in so bald an encounter, is like a diffuse
and vaguely repugnant blancmange, filling all space. It is questions
like that which persuaded me early on that I was
not interested in Philosophy. And at that level, I still am not.
Quine, it turns out, is of like mind, for he remarks, of his
epigram above, “This is as unhelpful as it is undebatable, since it is how one
explains the symbolic notation of quantification to begin with. The fact is that it is unreasonable to
ask for an explication of existence in simpler terms. … Explication of general
existence is a forlorn cause.”
(Similarly, this, self-stultified by its own generality:
The meaning of a remark in any
language.
-- section-heading in: Jonathan
Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning (1963), p. 154 )
A pre-philosophical, psychosociological observation: The opportunity of waffling-on about
Being with a capital B, seems to bring out the worst in writers. As, Emerson (well, not quite fair to
ontologists, since it doesn’t take much to bring out the worst in Emerson -- an
ordinary pen-nib will do), in his celebrated essay “Compensation” (1841):
There is a deeper fact in the soul
than compensation, to wit, its own nature. The sould is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. …. Being is the vast
affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all
relations, parts and times within
itself.
Now that is ten pounds of horse-doody in a five-pound bag.
~
At only one level down of abstraction, philosophers have
traditionally brooded upon the ontological status of qualities or attributes
or essences -- “whether concepts
have a supramundane, or only a psychological existence; whether they are transcendent intuitables or only private instrospectibles.”
(Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language” (1953).) For hardcore Realists like Meinong and even early
Russell, “Consistently with the assumed equation of signifying with naming,
they maintained the objective existence of all sorts of abstract and fictional entia rationis.” (id., “The Theory of
Meaning” (1957).)
The
question becomes more compelling in the context of the philosophy of
quantification (“To be is to be the value of a variable,” quoth the
Quine); and shapelier still in the context of what counts as an ‘item’
for, say,
physics.
(Incidentally… I have borrowed the
title of this post from a well-known work (1948) of the eminent
Harvard philosopher, who taught me logic when I was but a wee lad.
Quine, having passed to a different realm of quantification, will
doubtless not object.)
(Sudden update: Just browsing around, I notice that this is actually the
second time I stole the title -- Shakespearian in its simplicity -- of my former magister; earlier effort
here.)
Thus, the focus shall be now not on Being, but on beings -- on what counts, for us, as entities, when we pursue science, and why. As Quine nicely puts it: “Ontology … is a generalization of somatology.” (Roots of Reference
(1973), p. 88). The top-down approach to ontology -- “What is Being?”
-- is baffling; but starting from what we understand, we might build
upwards.
Thus, we confront more tractable matters of hypostasis (reification) and individuation.
By
getting down in the weeds concerning what choices have been hit upon
by the various scientific enterprises that have had to deal practically
with such matters, we might in time return refreshed to the general
question.
Consider
this analogy. The ancient Greeks asked themselves, “What is motion?”,
and discovered that, once you dig into the matter, it’s more puzzling
than it looks -- cf. St. Augustine’s celebrated quip about the meaning
of Time: If you don’t pose the question, I know perfectly well; if
you ask me point-blank, I am flummoxed. Some philosophers even came to
feel that the very notion of motion was paradoxical, or impossible :
compare more contemporary thinkers with similar doubts about Free Will.
(Eppur’, in both cases, si muove.)
Once one has studied the matter, however, in classical dynamics and in
special relativity, and understood how (Achilles and the tortoise) an
infinite series may yet sum to a finite value, you return to the matter
with new confidence.
~ ~ ~
We
must concede at the outset that ontological quandaries seldom arise in
daily life. Only very occasionally, and that not systematically, do
you pose What-There-Is questions. Things like: Does Bigfoot exist?
Does Dark Energy? (Everyday life if you’re a physicist, that is.)
True, a questing undergraduate may once in a while trouble himself with
questions such as the Existence of Other Minds, and
Is the Universe an Illusion; but such queries cease once he gets himself a proper
girlfriend.
~ ~ ~
The
atomists, in their purest and here somewhat idealized form, imagined a
world in which indivisible particles were the basic Things, all else
being combinations of these, and thus, in the most parsimonious view,
ontologically subaltern. (Leibniz imagined something rather like this
for the noösphere, with his ineffable
monads.)
And indeed, we can well imagine a world, in which such entities
entered into but fleeting congeries, without definite or lasting
outline, and crucially, with no emergent properties for the ensembles
(thus, in particular, no reproduction of atomic ‘clouds’). Such a
world would have an essentially unambiguous, monolevel ontology.
Now, however, consider a different world: a pool table. And
-- for this is necessary too, and we rather finessed the question in
the fable immediately above -- consider that we have been given a task:
viz, to characterize the perambulations of matter atop it. In this
scenario, it is the billiard balls themselves we must consider, and in
no wise the atoms that constitute these.
Consider
now Euclidean geometry. Here, fundamental ontological status was
posited for just two entities: the point, and the line.
(Notoriously, one can present this geometry in a ‘substrate-neutral’
way that professes agnosticism as to the nature of these posited
‘points’ and ‘lines’ -- beer-mugs and beer-mats, we could call them just
as well. And, more tellingly, styles of geometry in which the point
and the line are dual to each other, thus interchangeable. But to
consider this further, were to sail afield.)
No
higher figures were distinguished as fundamental -- neither the
triangle nor the ten-million-and-seventeen-gon enjoy axiomatic status
as part of the furniture of the Euclidean universe. And indeed, in the
broader perspective (the Erlangen Program)
which sorts out and makes sense of a variety of geometries, it is not
the individual figures on which all things hinge, but their
transformations -- their symmetries, and the way these form an algebraic Group.
~ ~ ~
The prototypical example of an indisputably extant entity is
you.
You are physically coherent, you have purposes and plans, you are
self-aware from moment to moment; ontologically, it doesn’t get better
than this. And if you’re Donald Trump, you’re done: end of ontology.
You slide through life like a bubble down the duodenum, a blob of
solipsism.
For the rest of us, we embrace the existence of Other Minds, and indeed quite on a par with our own.
And now comes (as Blessed Pope John Paul II
put it
) an ontic discontinuity or “ontological gap” between ourselves and
the beasts. There is a spiritual truth to this, but biologically, it
does not cut nature at the joints.
(Note: That gap itself should not be over-emphasized, since, in the grand mediaeval vision of the scala naturae, it is just one of several such. Roughly:
archangels -- seraphim -- cherubim -- penguins -- mankind -- critters -- Protista -- sludge.)
[Click that image for more exciting details!]
So
we admit the biosphere -- only, just where to draw the lines among
individuals gets murky, the more you learn about what-all is out there.
Herd animals, species all of whose members are genetically identical,
parasites, incorporated former parasites such as plasmids and
mitochondria, slime mold, elm forests (one giant
subterraneanly-connected plant), and even such exotica as the cast-off
arm of a male cuttlefish: as Darwin put it, “So completely does the
cast-off arm resemble a separate animal, that it was described by Cuvier
as a parasitic worm”.
There is no
fact-of-the-matter about such cases; their intershadings show that our
question, Which are the functional individuals?, must be more sharply
posed.
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"Were I alive
today, and in the mood for a mystery,
this is what I would be
reading: "
(I am Quine, the great and powerful;
and I
approved this message.)
~
~
Let us revisit the examples of the pool table, and the
geometries. Here the basic entities were identified relative to
certain transformations of the roster
of potential entities: the billiard balls caroming about, rebounding,
never blending, proved to be the units to reckon with here. And in
modern mathematics, the symmetry transformations of the individual geometries
proved more important that the various squiggles and shapes (or collections of
squiggles and shapes) that undergo them. So perhaps the way
forward is to consider the kinematics
of life. Ecology, that is, and Evolution.
When the theory of Natural Selection was introduced to the world in 1859, species rose to prominence in our conception of the way the world really is, right in the title of that great work, The Origin of Species.
Individuation can be problematic when we contemplate such things as
animals undergoing complete metamorphosis, sessile vs. vagile stages,
and so forth: but at each moment the species
are (in the somewhat idealized classic view) sharp in outline,
non-interbreeding, reliable entities. (From a NeoPlatonist perspective,
the species may even be more real than any of the variously imperfect
and misshapen individuals that instantiate that ideal.) For a time,
Nature red in tooth and claw was conceived as a battle among these supra-individual
entities, competing, going extinct -- tyrannosaur versus triceratops.
predator and prey, the early mammals peering out discretely from the
prehistoric underbrush, waiting their chance.
Yet no sooner had we managed to wrap our heads around the notion of the species
as the fundamental unit of biological accounting (which in
particular, delightfully, cleared up the mystery of sex), than a pot
of cold water was flung in our face:
Why
should a female produce offspring carrying only half her genes, when
by parthenogenesis … she could produce clones…? The simple answer,
that the variability produced by sexual recombination makes for greater
adaptability, and is therefore ‘for the good of the species’, will not
serve. Darwinian natural selection … has to do … with individuals,
and selection for group characteristics has no simple place.
John Bonner & Robert May, introduction (1981) to a reprint of Darwin’s Descent of Man.
The
next step (and the consensus of current thinking) settles neither on
individuals nor on groups, but on a unit which, in Darwin’s day, was not
even known specifically to exist: the gene. The argument has been superbly laid out for the general public in Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, so we needn’t walk through the reasoning here. The upshot is as follows:
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2nd edn. 1989), p. 34:
In
sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large and too
temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural
selection. The group of individuals is an even larger unit.
Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky
or dust-storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or
federations.
(This reminded me curiously of a suggestive passage from a historical-espionage novel by Tim Powers, Declare:
You
know what the djinn tend to be made of, from moment to moment -- wind,
dust, snow, sand, agitated water, swarms of bugs, hysterical mobs. )
Anyhow, Dawkins goes on to make clear that his definition is functional not anatomical:
The largest practical unit of natural selection -- the gene -- will usually be found to lie somewhere on the scale between cistron and chromosome.
This functional/structural rather than physical definition is reminiscent of the notion of phoneme, as opposed to a phone or sound.
Edward Wilson concurs:
The
average differences between people in different localities … are
narrowing. Genetic homogenization has similarities to the stirring
together of liquid ingredients. … But the most elemental units, the
genes, remain unperturbed. They stay about the same in both kind and
relative abundance.
-- E.O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 273
Now we feel we are back on familiar ground. These genes
are rather like biological analogs of atoms, in the old Greek
well-behaved, billiard-ball-like conception of these. They just take
some getting used to.
Yet even after the
first ontological question has been answered (What is there?) in favor
of the gene, there is still the second (What is it?). As.
Should we think of a gene … as a structure that is replicated, or as information that is copied and translated?
J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 10
Actually,
Dawkins makes a much simpler and apparently unanswerable argument for
thus privileging the gene as a unit of accounting:
The true unit of natural selection has to be a unit of which you can say it has a frequency.
(Individuals and
groupings obviously don’t fit the bill.) This argument is completely
general, and is independent of the details of biology. Thus in
particular, it should apply (if it is valid) mutatis mutandis outside of biology.
For
the style of thought, though not the detailed content, cf. Quine (“On
What There Is”), maintaining that quantification is “the only way we can involve ourselves in ontological commitments”.
Further, compare this:
Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 246, quoting Read Tuddenham:
To the statistician's dictum that whatever exists can be measured, the factorist had added that whatever can be 'measured' must exist
[For a brief and untendentious survey of the various candidates for status as a Unit of Selection, click
here.]
~ ~ ~
Having
persuaded us that the gene, rather than the individual or the herd or
the species, is the fundamental reckoning-unit of life, Dawkins then
complicates matters in a way reminiscent of those extended and
ill-individuated entities like elm forests and slime molds, or even
Bertrand Russel’s definition of the number ‘four’ as the set of all
foursomes:
What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA. … ‘It’ is a distributed agency, existing in many different individuals at once.
By
this time it is clear that, the more you look into it, the ontology of
biology looks more like biology and less like Ontology -- in that
original maximally abstract metaphysical program to whose allurements we
confessed ourselves deaf.
Still,
this business of the gene, defined as a functional rather than a
spatiotemporal unit, does get us back to old-fashioned ontology as
practiced by philosophers. Quine sparkles at this. He wastes no time
on “What is the Nature of Being?”, but rather rolls up his sleeves,
and, in the chapter “The Ontogenesis of Reference”, constructs a
plausible, insightful, and wittily-told fable of how we acquire our
notions of objects, and what it is that we acquire. (A wry tribute to
the style of mind involved in such exercises can be appreciated
here.) By page 98 of
Word & Object (1960), he has made a case for the ontological respectability of “a single sprawling object”, and admonishes:
There
is no reason to boggle at water as a single though scattered object,
the aqueous part of the world. Even the tightest object, short of an
elementary particle, has a scattered substructure when the physical
facts are in.
To
which, Amen; adding only that, when even more surprising physical
facts are in, concerning indistinguishable elementary particles (bosons,
at any rate), there is a sense in which these too could be considered a
single scattered object.
The genes (or bosons), as thus conceived, are only, so to speak, accidentally
scattered; things empirically might have been otherwise. Consider
now rather entities that are scattered by construction, by definition:
higher-level entities, sets or collections of lower ones.
Questions
about the ontological status of such things can arise even in the
everyday pre-philosophical world. In what way can we say that the
following are genuine entities, with lasting contours and cross-temporal
identification, despite the changing roster of the individuals that
make them up? -- Your (nuclear/extended/….) family; the Boy Scouts; the
nation-state to which you belong. This is a moral and practical
matter, not simply ontological: having pledged allegiance to any one of
these at t=0, are we likewise bound at a later time, despite their
ever-shifting membership (and foreign policy)? (I address such
questions in a projected essay, “Continuity of Identity”.)
So,
we have noticed an actual ontological question within the cares of
daily life. Still, it is not to a metaphysician that you would turn for
clarification, should your eighth cousin thrice removed suddenly show
up on your doorstep, claiming ties of kin that give him the right to
move in with you and to borrow your car, nor to an ontologist, were the
Boy Scouts ever to get the Bomb.
In Biology -- the fons et origo
of structured higher-level objects in scientific practice -- such
entities include: species (made up of conspecific individuals); genus
(made up of species); family (made up of genera); order; class; and so
on up. Here the ‘atom’ is the individual animal or plant; there is no
place in the traditional taxonomy of considering an individual as a
congeries of genes -- and indeed the set-theoretical structure is
completely different, the gene-sets in question being radically
non-disjoint, whereas an animal is either in one species or another, not
both.
In the
nature of the case, it is clear that the higher taxa of biology are not
ontologically given as such, but are confections of convenience,
based to be sure upon what’s out there, and proceeding via sound and
defensible principles. Thus in particular, whereas a species as a
whole does pretty much hang together or hang separately (say, in a
sexually reproducing species, if the survivors are too sparsely
scattered to hook up), there is no such selective linkage among the
various n-level groupings in a taxon at level n+1. Should
the
echidna ever bite the dust, ‘twill be a sad day for all lovers of
monotremes; but the valiant
platypus still will soldier on.
There
have also been major revisions in higher-order taxa; even some quite
familiar ones (reptiles, insectivores, puffballs) have upon closer
inspection been dismissed as polyphyletic.
~ ~ ~
So much for the entities of biology. What of
Chemistry -- which is “the next level down” in terms of the agenda of
Consilience?
Here
we are in for a pleasant surprise. No such agonizing and backtracking
will be necessary as it was before. The answer is: atoms. And not
just atoms, in a row as it were, but, stacked,
structurally stacked, in a most revealing way. This is the Periodic
Table of the Elements, first unveiled to a grateful world by Mendeleev,
of blessed memory. It is possibly the single most satisfactory
scientific object on the planet. Moreover its elements and its
structure reach directly, consiliently, straight down to basic physics.
It is a wonder to behold.
There
is even a loose analogy between atoms-and-molecules, on the one hand,
and genes-and-individuals, on the other. Loose, but better than most
of those cited by Wilson in his ambitious book.
~ ~ ~
Physics,
by contrast, is in no such happy case. Such subjects as cosmology or
thermodynamics or hydrodynamics don’t seem to have ‘basic-level
objects’ in any obvious way. There are, to be sure, the “elementary”
particles, but these have been as troublesome as they are helpful,
referred to distastefully as the “particle zoo”. What with quarks and
various subtle symmetries, these have now been regimented into
something more satisfactory, though still nothing like as
self-explanatory as the Periodic Chart. Further, they do not span the
whole of physics, but only of Particle Physics, a subfield.
There are,
nonetheless, deep ontological questions within physics, with
still-tentative but sophisticated answers. I am not currently
competent to comment on these, but a selection of intriguing quotations
may be consulted
here.
~ ~ ~
Astronomy
affords relatively little by way of ontological interest; but consider
this wise observation by astronomer Mike Brown (quoted in The New Yorker for 24 July 2006):
Planets are like continents. ‘Continent’ is a good geological word, but, like ‘planet’, it has no scientific meaning whatsoever.
That is an epigram, and thus permits itself a breezy way with words; meaning here really means ‘ontological status’.
The
point is of course lost on the layman; witness the heavy coverage of
Pluto’s “dethronement” by the latest Kuiper-belt detritus, as though
this were of the least importance for the understanding of our cosmos.
But far more important, the opposite assumption seriously misled some of
the finest minds of the Middle Ages. For Galileo’s misadventure with
circular planetary orbits, click
here. For Kepler’s fine failed vision of the planetary distances reflecting nested Platonic solids,
here.
Their basic insights were sound, even brilliant; but planets (i.e.,
floating lumps of dirt) simply don’t have the ontological status to
deserve such angelical constructions.
~ ~ ~
In Mathematics,
the conundrum concerns, not so much the existence of thís (class of)
object versus that (class of) object, let alone which are the
‘basic-level’ objects (I know of none), but the existence of any objects
überhaupt. That is, we have retreated from the question of beings, and are back at the bad old topic of Being. At best:
for in fact, the question is probably not best posed in terms of “the
existence of mathematical objects”, which threatens to involve us in
fruitless discussions of what they are exactly (e.g. the integers as
really sets of one sort or another, including Russell’s extravagant
suggestion), whereas in fact, mathematical objects or entities or
thingums or whatever they are, are the very plume and prototype of
substrate-neutrality; a less contentious formulation would be “the
transcendence (epistemological independence) of mathematical truths”.
(One is less likely to wonder whether a “truth” is, say, pink, than
whether an object is.)
Let
us consider a specific question, with an at least superficially
ontological aspect, that is more localized than that vast
barely-answerable question about the ontological status of mathematics
as a whole. (My attempt at a Realist answer to that one begins
here.)
For
example: Does there exist a topological object of the following
description: It is regular, second-countable, yet could never be
assigned a metric? Urysohn looked into the matter, and concluded that
none exist. But it wasn’t by looking around,
or by exhaustive search, that he reached this conclusion, the way you
might drag every inch of Loch Ness and finally conclude that it
contains no monster. Never quitting his armchair, he deduced the result, in a way in which things were never really serially considered.
Indeed
we had to strain a bit to cast the problem in the form of a question
about ‘existence’ at all: it’s not like finding Bigfoot, or failing to
find him. If biology were like mathematics, then we could
infer
the existence or non-existence of Bigfoot, without ever actually
spotting him, nor searching the wooded hills, based upon abstract
patterns elsewhere in the system. This is one of the very many ways in
which biology and mathematics are not the least bit alike (I mention
this only because of the counter-program of
consilience - a nice idea, but a will-o’-the-wisp.)
Mathematics
does nonetheless afford good grist for the ontology-mill, indeed more
clearly ontological than anything we have yet seen. Namely, the
entities posited by what are known as “existence proofs”. There is no
properly (intra)mathematical doubt about these purported objects --
they uncontroversially have such&such properties, if indeed they are
there to bear properties at all. The problem is with the special sort
of purported demonstration that says, although we may never see such a
thing, yea verily, it doth exist. Such proofs can be purely deductive,
non-constructive; so that, although we are assured of the existence of
something fitting a given description, we are given no hint as to how to
find the item in question. Understandable ontological qualms about
such spectral beings led to the founding of a school of mathematics that
rejects such non-constructive proofs: Intuitionism.
This dog-in-the-manger school gets vastly less play in actual
day-to-day mathematical practice, than it does in philosophy books.
The one place within mathematics where ontology is definitely at home is Set theory. A typical credo:
I have written this book from an uncompromisingly realist or platonist
position; that is, I have taken the viewpoint that in some sense sets
do exist, as objects to be studied, and that set theory is just as
much about fixed objects as is number theory.
Frank Drake, Set Theory (1974), p. 18
Indeed,
this subject is often practiced by ontologically-inclined philosophers
(such as Quine) and taught in the philosophy department. (That other
mathematical outlier -- logic -- is likewise often so housed. I took
Intro Logic -- “Phil 140” -- from Quine.) It is from this milieu that
we got the slogan “To be is to be the value of a variable.”
Quine’s quip, suitable for recital to the babe in the cradle, is actually trickier than it sounds, owing to his notion of
substitutional quantification, which does not express existence, vs.
objectual quantification,
which does. There is a grey area of entities which, like most
nonalgebraic real numbers, are assumed to lead just as robust an
existence as the algebraic irrationals, but which are not finitely
specificable.
(Further remarks on the ontology of logic and set theory
here.)
Note, incidentally, a certain resonance between this last distinction, and the notion in physics of observables -- an attempt to get a firm handle on What There (Really) Is, amid the welter of mathematical abstractions.
~ ~ ~
Linguistics and Anthropology
come each in two flavors: on the one hand, traditional mostly-European philology and
Völkerkunde; and on the other, a present-day, typically American scientistical
approach. The former fall under the Humanties. They were not much
concerned with positing abstract analytical entities; the “parts of
speech” go back to ancient times, and were defined intuitively, largely
morphologically, which is something you can get away with in the highly
inflected classical languages like Latin or Sanskrit or Greek. The
latter, by contrast, strives (or, in the case of Anthropology, strove;
now it strives only to be politically correct) to be honest-to-goodness
sciences like physics or anything else. Many intricate and
closely-argued entities were posited and fought over, for phonology and
syntax (some in morphology and semantics too, of course, but those
weren’t worth fighting over); and anthropology became algebraically
structural in its analysis of kinship systems. Both fields were
self-aware of what they were up to, and there was a running discussion
of the ontology of the theories, under the genial rubric “God’s Truth vs.
Hocus-Pocus”. The God’s Truth faction took a Realist stance towards the
posited analytic entities; the Hocus Pocus faction, a Nominalist.
~ ~ ~
Somewhat surprisingly, the study of Folklore is also distinguished by the positing of abstract analytic entities, known as motifs;
and this, already in the early years of the twentieth century. These
were carefully and exhaustively catalogued in the Stith-Thompson Motif
Index. Their combinatorics determine the tale-types around the world.
They are reminiscent, not really of atoms (since the characteristics of
molecules are so wildly ‘emergent’ above anything visible in the atoms
that make them up; cf. H2O, I rest my case), but rather of genes.
Okay, the analogy is loose, but no worse than that of genes &
memes. Indeed, motifs were the forerunners of the meme idea, and
already much better thought out. There is even a sort of folkloristic
analogue of the allele: the oikotype.
~
There is no reason to boggle at water as a single though
scattered object, the aqueous part
of the world. Even the tightest
object, short of an elementary particle, has scattered substructure when the physical facts are in.
-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object
(1960), p. 98
In support of this:
(1) “the aqueous part of the world”: cf. “empty space”, an anything but
simply-connected entity (object).
(2) “scattered substructure”: Unsure quite what he meant by this
-- quarks are substructure of hadrons, but were unknown -- nay, unhypothesized
-- in 1960, the publication-date of Quine’s classic. However, a “smeared-out” (not really ‘substructural’) nature of something so tiny-tight as the
electron (still regarded as truly elementary) was suggested already
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Postscript:
These
are the posts so far that have touched on ontology. These
largely concern mathematical Platonism, which we won’t focus on here,
other than to say that Quine’s quip ("To be is to be the value of a
variable"), suitable for recital to the babe in the cradle, is trickier
than it sounds, owing to his notion of
substitutional quantification, which does not express existence, vs.
objectual quantification, which does.
[Footnote] Contra-Quine:
It is not true that ideas face the
bar of reality as corporate bodies:
rather, in the past, they evaded
reality as corporate bodies. …
This word has, so to speak, a turnover
ontology. The “objects” (ie. the terms in which we classify the continuum of
experience into “things”), are not
there for keeps. In trying to
handle … the continuum of experience, it is … proper to experiment with …
diverse ways of clustering the flux into “objects”.
-- Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword,
and Book (1998), p. 64f.
