Quine’s Pyrrhic Victory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v16i2.5717Abstract
Modal logic is widely used in computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines. But how could this have happened? Didn’t W. V. Quine destroy modal logic halfway through the twentieth century—at least as something that any naturalist or empiricist could take seriously? Quine’s work was quite influential. It seemed for a while that modal logic, if not given a death blow, had been gravely injured. But in the Transcript, Dreben points out that this seems to have been a Pyrrhic Victory. In this paper, we briefly discuss Quine’s problems with modal logic and Føllesdal’s answer. We then argue that Føllesdal’s proposal has all the tools necessary to deal with modal concepts and terms. Finally, after a discussion of their reluctance towards reference and the uses both Davidson and Quine make, in the Transcript, of the expressions “necessary,’’”necessarily,’’ and “necessity,’’ we outline our own proposal for necessity. We sketch an account of modal properties that, assuming Føllesdal’s two-sorted semantics and, therefore, a benign form of Aristotelian Essentialism, lacks metaphysical implications grave enough to discard modal logic and, in particular, has no need of possible worlds.
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