INTRODUCTION

Our theories of the world are related in various ways to experience. We construct theories partly in order to account for what we have observed and partly in order to systematize and support our expectations for future experience. But what we experience is not sufficient to determine our theories. Different theories may account for our observations equally well. This, roughly speaking, is the thesis that physical theory is underdetermined. W.V. Quine has formulated the idea in different ways in different contexts.

However, before we consider Quine’s formulations, let us look at the following passage from an address delivered by Albert Einstein on the occasion of Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday in 1918:

Brazil's literary narrative began to emerge only after the country's formal independence from Portugal in 1822, and it gained full force only in the second half of the nineteenth century. While generally accompanying the Western literary tradition's major trends and transformations, it has developed its own voice and matured into an important part of a rich and diverse national literature. It has not always received the international acclaim that has been accorded Spanish American literature, but that perhaps has less to do with quality than with the facts that it is written in Portuguese rather than Spanish and that translations have been rather slow in coming. It was not until the 1950s, for example, that turn-of-the-century writer Machado de Assis, whom Susan Sontag has described as 'the greatest author ever produced in Latin America', was translated into English.

Brazil is a continent-sized country with tremendous disparities in wealth and education. Given the country’s historically high rate of illiteracy and relatively small reading public, fictional narrative has largely been a form of expression produced by and for a privileged minority of Brazilians. In absolute terms the number of people with the cultural disposition and cultural capital necessary to consume literary works has grown progressively over time, as access to public education and literacy has expanded, but it continues to be limited in relation to the country’s total population. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is not uncommon for a novel’s initial print run to be no more than three thousand copies. Consequently, it has been difficult for writers to subsist on literature alone, and they have often been economically dependent on such occupations as teaching, journalism and particularly government service.

The painting reproduced on the cover of this volume is entitled EFCB (Estação de Ferro Central do Brasil [Brazil Central Station]). It was painted in 1924 by Tarsila do Amaral, then a member of an avant-garde group of artists and writers based in the main in São Paulo, who were looking to renovate national culture. Nationalism was not defined in narrow, autarchic, terms. One of the main promoters and interlocutors of the group was the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, who, alongside Apollinaire, had 'founded' cubist poetry in 1913. Cendrars had been invited to Brazil in 1924 by the cultural maecenas Paulo Prado, an important promoter of modern art, and he was amazed at the newly extended, vibrant city of São Paulo, whose modern buildings and cosmopolitan culture reflected the wealth of the coffee-producing elite. He wrote a number of 'snapshot' poems about the city, celebrating its scope and achievements - including the railway system and the train station that had been built as a replica of Paddington Station in London. Tarsila's painting is, in this context, a homage both to Cendrars and to Brazilian modernity.

Though there are clear anticipations in Quine’s earlier writings of his commitment to a naturalized epistemology, its first full-dress presentation appears in his essay “Epistemology Naturalized.” I will use this carefully plotted essay as the central guide to Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology, making excursions into earlier and later works where this proves useful

Quine begins this essay declaring that “epistemology is concerned with the foundations of science” (EN 69). Oddly, this opening claim naturally suggests a project quite the opposite of the one he is about to endorse. To speak of the foundations of science suggests an attempt to find some way of validating science as a whole - that is, an attempt to find some way of basing science on something more primitive and more secure than science. This, however, gets Quine’s conception of epistemology pretty much backwards. For Quine, epistemology does not provide an independent standpoint for validating empirical science; instead, empirical science provides the framework for understanding empirical knowledge, including the empirical knowledge provided by empirical science. This reversal represents the revolutionary core of Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology.

Over the last two hundred years there have been continuous debates over the origins, development, identity and future of Latin America. Indeed, this term is itself a Parisian concoction of the 1860s that sought to bestow a terminological unity upon a region that seemed to lack cultural, political, economic and even geographical coherence, particularly to outsiders and especially to Anglo-Americans. Both at home and abroad the quest for a convincing explanation of the evolution of the American ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal has often descended into interpretations based on race or some 'Iberian tradition' or a ubiquitous economic 'dependency'. Whether optimist or fatalist in vision, such essentializing has usually taken on a providentialist spirit and combative tone, but it has rarely matched the assurance of the self-images and ideologies underpinning the popular culture of the United States from the 'manifest destiny' of the 1840s to the globalizing ambition of the post- Cold War era.

As much of the material in this Companion will show, that margin of comparison with ‘the North’ has provided a rich vein of cultural creativity so that even in conditions of economic inferiority and political disadvantage Latin Americans have retained a distinctive identity. By the end of the twentieth century thiswas also true inside the frontiers of the USA itself, where the expansion of the Hispanic population to over 30 million (roughly equivalent to that of Argentina) and the broader effects of globalization had further weakened the over-stressed notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, based on the ideology of Protestant supremacism, and the formal egalitarianism of the Founding Fathers, many of whom held slaves.

To find a ground for poetry which is not an inheritance from the past, however prestigious, nor a programme for social change, however necessary, has been a recurrent preoccupation for Latin American poets. Pablo Neruda's long poem 'Alturas de Macchu Picchu' ('Heights of Macchu Picchu') is one of the key poems where those concerns are worked out: 'Alturas' is itself part of Canto general (1950; Canto general), an epic presentation of the land, prehistory, history and politics of Latin America up until the middle of the twentieth century. Canto general celebrates Latin America as an alternative to already-known histories, a new world and a new definition of the possible. But in 'Alturas', that epic narrative reaches a point of collapse: the magnificence of the native Inca city, whose architecture makes it seem to grow out of the extraordinary subtropical landscape, is not enough. A terrible grief for the nameless, forgotten dead and the hunger and slavery they suffered floods into the poem and extends outwards into a wider need to mourn the unburied and unmourned of later history, from the Spanish Conquest to the dictatorships of the twentieth century. And with that the language itself breaks, and reveals its architecture of unresolved pain and violence, the long burden of conquest, colonialism, hunger and early death secreted in the language spoken by Latin Americans through into the twentieth century and beyond.

No one since Russell has contributed so much to both philosophy and logic as Quine. No major philosopher has given anything like so much to logic, nor has any important figure in logic borne Quine’s stature as a philosopher. His work in the two fields, though distinguishable, has been very much related. He has been a pioneer philosopher of mathematical logic, while he has integrated his view of logic into the very core of his epistemology. I will discuss how logic fits with the rest of Quine’s philosophy and what motivated his choices as an expositor and teacher of logic. I will examine in particular aspects of his text Methods of Logic, now in its fourth edition.

Logic plays a central role in Quine’s philosophy. Quine is preeminently an epistemologist. His epistemology is wedded in interlocking ways to empiricism, naturalism, and physicalism; together they lead him to see science not only as the arbiter of what is to be believed about the world but also as providing the context in which we must make our philosophy. Rather than pursue some first philosophy, we look to science for our bearings: “[I[t is within science … that reality is to be identified and described” (TPT 21). And “the basic structure of the language of science … is the predicate calculus: the logic of quantification and truth-functions” (FM 160).

The concept of 'Latin America' is a mid-nineteenth-century European invention, conjured up as a convenient means of distinguishing the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries from the Anglo-American world which, after the American Revolution, found its most powerful expression in the United States. However, if 'Latin America' was a novel term in the nineteenth-century political lexicon, the societies to which it referred were far from new. The independent Latin American states created in the early 1820s took political control of societies which, during three hundred years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, had been formed by interaction between peoples descended from the Amerindians who were the original peoples of the Americas, the Europeans who came to settle and the Africans who were forcibly carried across the Atlantic into slavery. None of these states was the same: they differed in geographical and demographic scale, ethnic composition and economic resources and potential. But they shared one fundamental feature: their societies, economies and cultures had all been profoundly marked by relations with the Iberian colonial powers in the centuries before independence. Indeed, the Latin America that came into being in the early nineteenth century was, in key respects, still redolent of an older world, with roots that went back to the European discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and beyond, into the past of the Amerindian societies which had developed over thousands of years before Columbus. Any appreciation of modern Latin American culturemusttake account of that historical experience.

W. V. Quine, who turned ninety on June 25, has been central to the analytic tradition in philosophy for more than sixty years. A sign of his centrality is that one of the three award-winning essays at the special APA session on American Philosophy from Other Perspectives - a session to which Quine must soon go in order to comment on the essay - is devoted to him and Carnap. A second paper is on John Rawls, Quine’s Harvard colleague of many years, and who acknowledged Quine’s influence on him in the preface to A Theory of Justice.

W. V. O. Quine ’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”(TDEa 20-43) is perhaps the most famous paper in twentieth-century philosophy. Certainly, it is the most widely reproduced of Quine’s works. Even if it had been ignored, it would still hold a special place for Quine, for to a large extent Quine has defined himself and his philosophy in opposition to Rudolf Carnap’s separation of our scientific claims into the analytic and the synthetic as well as in opposition to any theory of knowledge, such as Carnap’s, in which the analytic-synthetic distinction figures so prominently. “Two Dogmas” is central to Quine’s work if only because it contains his first sustained public attack on analyticity. Moreover, the paper’s last section is the first, and one of the most systematic, of his sketches of an alternative epistemology.

Given the amount of attention that “Two Dogmas” has had and the variety of its readers, it is hardly surprising that its arguments have been variously understood. It has been called an attack on empiricism or on reductionism. It has been said to embrace a behaviorism of an antitheoretical sort. The fault that it finds in analyticity is sometimes said to lie in the circularity of the definitions for it. None of this seems to me to be very likely. Sometimes the paper is said to say exactly what Quine was saying nearly fifty years later. This also seems unlikely, for Quine continued to develop and modify his arguments and to reassess their relative importance. Nor is it surprising that he would have. Indeed, the rich body of Quine’s later writings and discussions can be a hindrance as well as a help in understanding what some earlier passage may have meant, either to Quine or to his readers. Such evidence should be used, of course, but with caution.

Quine’s writings are the point of departure for the familiar doctrine that goes by the name 'meaning holism'. This doctrine contrasts with meaning atomism, according to which a linguistic expression e in a language L has its meaning 'Auf Eigene Faust' (viz., in and by itself) by virtue of a symbol-world relation independent of, and (metaphysically) prior to, whatever role e has in L. For meaning atomism, reference (however specified), then, is primitive, and the role of e in L is determined by, and derivative from, the meaning e acquires in virtue of that relation. In opposition, according to meaning holism, a linguistic expression e in a language L has its meaning in virtue of its (however specified) relations with other expressions in L; that is, in virtue of its role in L. For meaning holism, since the role of e in L constitutes e’s meaning, reference becomes derivative from, and (metaphysically) posterior to, the role e plays in L.

Practice and methodologies: space

This chapter offers an exploration of the development of the space for theatre in Latin America. It does not seek to give a detailed account of dramatists and plays, for there are now many sources for that information. Rather, it seeks, firstly, to understand the conditions for the production of theatre, and, secondly, to give a sense of the emergence of a dramatic art in Latin America. It aims also to facilitate an engagement with the thinking around the theatre, to open up for the reader some of the key ways in which this thinking has had an impact on the development of the art and to suggest a possible methodology for investigation.

Speaking of the experience of making theatre in Chile over the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, the director Jaime Vadell says:

Venezuelan critic Guillermo Sucre raised a crucial point about how the Spanish American novel's concern to name things in a 'new' world, its 'Adam-like passion', duplicated the foreign or exotic view of Latin America and led to exotic clichés about Latin America. The writer most linked to this task of Adamic naming was the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-80). In his seminal essay-prologue 'De lo real maravilloso americano' [About American Marvellous Reality], Carpentier combined a compensatory theory called lo real maravilloso that located a natural surrealism in the excesses of Latin American history and geography (as opposed to an inner, dream-based surrealism emanating from the Paris he knew so well in the 1920s and 1930s) with a baroque intention to include everything in a novel, because the uniqueness of Latin American reality still had not been described. Behind this poetics lay a blueprint inherited from the great scientific travellers of the nineteenth century who attempted to categorize and list in European taxonomies all that was new to them, supplanting or ignoring the local indigenous ones, and aiming to surprise European readers with the novelties of an unimaginable reality.

Issues of reference and ontology occupy a considerable portion of Quine’s work. In the Preface to Word and Object, Quine indicates that the bulk of that book is the product of his reflecting on “the development and structure of our own referential apparatus” (WO ix). His revival of the word 'ontology' in a nonpejorative sense marks, in precise fashion, a central disagreement that he has with the work of Carnap, who was his greatest teacher. In spite of their centrality to his thought as a whole, however, Quine’s views on these topics are not well understood. Nor, indeed, are they straightforward. The aim of this chapter is to set out those views as clearly as may be and to indicate points of remaining unclarity.

Let us begin with the views of Russell, which forma sharp and useful contrast with those of Quine on these topics. Russell postulated a direct and immediate relation between the mind and entities outside the mind, a relation he called acquaintance; this relation he held to lie at the base of all knowledge. His insistence on the directness and immediacy of the relation is to be explained in terms of his opposition to idealism. The idealists held that our knowledge is always mediated by a complex structure of which we can have a priori knowledge; this also gives us knowledge of the world, at least as far as it is knowable. It was in reaction to this that Russell, along with G. E. Moore, had postulated the notion of acquaintance. It was to be a cognitive relation, holding between the mind and objects, that relied on no kind of structure or theory: an immediate relation rather than a mediated relation.

Willard Van Orman Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 25, 1908. His father, Cloyd Robert Quine, was an Akron businessman with a machine shop background. In 1917, Cloyd Quine founded the Akron Equipment Company, whose business was the manufacture of tire molds. The business flourished, what with Akron being then the rubber tire capital of the world. Willard’s mother, Harriet Ellis Van Orman, was a housewife and public school teacher who taught at a local elementary school for ten years. In his autobiography Quine fondly recalls his mother’s culinary skills:

Harriet Quine considered herself to be deeply religious, and in her later life she became a deaconess in the Congregational Church. The religious training of Willard and his only sibling, Robert Cloyd Quine, a year and a half his senior, consisted of their being “sent to Sunday school about half the time, and seldom sent to church” (TL 14). However, the more Willard was exposed to the Word, the more skeptical he became:

INTRODUCTION

In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine’s most widely cited and reprinted paper, he famously rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction and a verificationist theory of meaning. Both of these had been fundamental tenets of logical positivism (or logical empiricism, as it has also been called), and Quine has been seen as an archcritic of this philosophical movement, one whose criticisms have contributed significantly to its demise during the second half of the twentieth century. And while logical positivism waned, Quine’s philosophy waxed and gained ascendancy.

This view of Quine and logical positivism – correct, as far as it goes – leaves out of account the significant fact that contact with members of the Vienna Circle, the chief begetters of logical positivism, and especially with its leading figure, Rudolf Carnap, was crucial for Quine in the early years of his philosophical development and that Carnap’s ideas and some ideas of other positivists, notably Otto Neurath, remained important to him throughout his philosophical life. This fact Quine himself insisted on and prominently acknowledged. Word and Object, Quine’s most important statement of his philosophy, bears the dedication, “To Rudolf Carnap, Teacher and Friend,” and Quine chose a passage from Neurath as one of the two epigraphs for that book. In “On Carnap’s Views on Ontology,” a paper Quine wrote and published at the same time as “Two Dogmas,” he declares, even while addressing philosophical differences between himself and Carnap, that “no one has influenced my philosophical thought more than Carnap” (OCVO 203).

The story of Spanish American narrative since 1970 is, inescapably, the story of Spanish American narrative 'after the Boom'. For the purposes of this brief account, then, it may be recorded that the so-called Boom was the culmination of what we may conveniently call the Spanish American New Novel, which stretched from the 1940s to the 1970s. Its origins lay in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and particularly the works of Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier, all writers who wrote their first significant books in the 1920s or early 1930s yet were still writing fiction in the 1960s. The Boom of Spanish American fiction was a grand finale, an extraordinarily fertile moment which saw the climax and consummation of Latin American modernism (in the Anglo-American sense of the word) and the inauguration of Latin American post-modern narrative. This unique conjunctural phenomenon, the Boom, stretched, arguably, from Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958;Where the Air is Clear) to his Terra nostra (Terra Nostra) in 1975. But when most critics think about the era, they tend to concentrate, naturally enough, on the 1960s alone and the brief but intense period from Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (1962; The Time of the Hero) and Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz) through Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch) to García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude); though, again, otherswouldsee José Donosós El obsceno pájarode la noche (1970;The Obscene Bird of Night) as marking the end of the era.

INTRODUCTION

Quine is an advocate of naturalism, a view comprising two theses, one negative, one positive. The negative thesis is that there is no adequate first philosophy - that is, there is no a priori or experiential ground outside of science upon which science can either be justified or rationally reconstructed, as was the wont of many traditional epistemologists. The positive thesis is that it is up to science to inform us about what exists and how we come to know what exists.

On the negative side, if there is no adequate first philosophy, then epistemologies as disparate as Descartes' and Carnap’s fail of their purpose. While Descartes sought to deduce the truths of nature from a foundation of clear and distinct ideas, (early) Carnap sought to rationally reconstruct scientific discourse from a foundation of elementary experiences. Quine advances a series of philosophical arguments and considerations designed to establish the untenability of Descartes-like and Carnap-like epistemic projects. In short, Quine argues that Descartes-like efforts fail because not even the truths of arithmetic, let alone all the truths of nature, can be deduced from a (consistent) foundation of clear and distinct ideas, and he argues that Carnap-like efforts fail because a theory’s theoretical terms cannot be defined, even contextually, in observation terms.