Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis" — Part 2 of 2

Part 1 left the machine in pieces: five shapes pooled into one region, and the moral that the smallest word we have has been leading a double life. Part 2 is where Quine tells you what the second life costs, and the answer is three letters. Not a doctrine, not an argument—a suffix. Add "-ness" to a perfectly innocent adjective and you have just admitted an abstract entity into your ontology, and nobody will stop you, because the grammar does it silently!

In Part 2, Solomon and Clementine work out the bill. Why the ostension of square differs from the ostension of the Cayster by exactly one word—whether identity is imputed across the pointings — and why that one word is the whole difference; how the general term goes deflationary, so that pointing teaches a skill rather than acquainting you with an entity, and "is square" need name nothing at all; Frege's toll-booth, a criterion for when a term is naming (will it go into an identity context and obey the law of putting equals for equals?), and how it welds Quine's two contrasts into one contrast seen twice; then the operator itself—"class of" and "-ness", one move in two notations—and Quine's shrug at the difference between an attribute and a class, which turns out to be a signpost rather than a shrug. Commitment lives in the noun, not the adjective. Then the conjecture: that abstract entities got their hold on our imaginations through nobody noticing this distinction in the first place.

Then the verdict, and the three things Clementine has been carrying in pencil since Part 1. The blank check on natural groupings—left standing, and traced forward to Goodman, to entrenchment, and to grue. Discourse-relativity—paid in full by section five's pragmatic standard, just a section later than promised. And Hume's ghost, where the hosts genuinely disagree and end split rather than convinced.

Start with Part 1 — this half runs straight on from the cliff, and we rebuild the room at the top but we do not reassemble the machine.

This is a close reading across two parts, so you come away actually understanding the argument, not just its headline. Read along if you like: W. V. Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis," Journal of Philosophy 47, no. 22 (October 26, 1950), pp. 621–633 — also reprinted, lightly reworked, as chapter IV of From a Logical Point of View (1953), pp. 65–79.

[Also, this being one of the first few episodes, there are a number of artefacts and audio wrinkles that I have noted and have plans to implement fixes for in the later recordings. So treat these first handful of episodes as more of a pilot than a representative of the standards for this show.]

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