"The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples"
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Quine’s line has the dry mischief of someone loosening the bolts on “common sense” without pretending the house won’t still stand. “The familiar material objects” are your tables, chairs, hands: the everyday furniture of the world that philosophical skepticism loves to demote to illusion. Quine doesn’t fully indulge that demotion, but he refuses to grant these objects metaphysical VIP status either. “May not be all that is real” gestures at his larger project: reality isn’t given to us in neat object-packages; it’s a theoretical posit, shaped by the conceptual scheme of science and language. What counts as “real” depends on what our best overall theory needs to quantify over.
The sly turn is “but they are admirable examples.” He’s praising ordinary objects not as ultimate building blocks, but as successful constructs inside a system that works. A physical object, in Quine’s worldview, is like an efficient abstraction: it organizes the chaos of sensory stimulation into stable, shareable reference points. That’s why the compliment lands. It’s not sentimental realism; it’s pragmatic respect for a tool that earns its keep.
Context matters: mid-20th-century analytic philosophy was busy either defending certainty (via sense-data or foundations) or attacking it. Quine’s move is to trade foundations for engineering. He naturalizes epistemology, treating our ontology as continuous with science: reviseable, holistic, justified by explanatory power. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to both mysticism and armchair metaphysics: if you want “more real” than chairs, show what it buys you.
The sly turn is “but they are admirable examples.” He’s praising ordinary objects not as ultimate building blocks, but as successful constructs inside a system that works. A physical object, in Quine’s worldview, is like an efficient abstraction: it organizes the chaos of sensory stimulation into stable, shareable reference points. That’s why the compliment lands. It’s not sentimental realism; it’s pragmatic respect for a tool that earns its keep.
Context matters: mid-20th-century analytic philosophy was busy either defending certainty (via sense-data or foundations) or attacking it. Quine’s move is to trade foundations for engineering. He naturalizes epistemology, treating our ontology as continuous with science: reviseable, holistic, justified by explanatory power. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to both mysticism and armchair metaphysics: if you want “more real” than chairs, show what it buys you.
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| Topic | Deep |
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