On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:39 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:

On Feb 10, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Christopher Menzel wrote:

On Feb 10, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:

...

Quine was a strict nominalist.

Not that it matters to your main point here, but it sort of depends

on

what you mean by a nominalist. If you mean someone who rejects the

existence of classic intensional universals like Wisdom and Redness,

then yes, Quine was a nominalist. If, however, you mean someone who

rejects the existence of all abstract entities across the board, then

Quine was no nominalist, as he argued that quantification over

mathematical objects (specifically, sets) is indispensable to

science.

But he also argued against admitting 'possible but unreal' entities.

True, but that question in my mind is entirely orthogonal to the issue
of nominalism.

I remember his withering question: how many possible men are

standing in an empty doorway?

Withering? It's a terrible argument (insofar as it's an argument at
all). The answer (for the defender of possibilia) is obviously ZERO.
Mere possibilia, by definition, are not in space and time (otherwise,
obviously, they'd be *actual*)

and hence cannot stand in any spatial
relations to a doorway.

Quine was in many ways a great philosopher, but his skeptical
arguments against modal logic and the general coherence of modal
notions were singularly poor and have been decisively refuted.

-chris


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