Book contents
15 - Predicate wormism
from PART IV - DE RERUM NATURA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
In Quine 1976a, W. V. Quine attempts to show that, even if you have them, worlds, unlike times, cannot provide robust continuity conditions for the sort of ordinary objects that we want to talk about. Quine begins his paper by explicitly invoking the world–time parallel:
Identifying an object from world to possible world is analogous, it has been suggested, to identifying an object from moment to moment in our world. I agree, and I want now to develop the analogy. (1976a, p. 859)
Like Quine we will restrict our discussion to physical objects. Quine's conception of a physical object is given in the second paragraph of his paper:
Consider my broad conception of a physical object: the material content of any portion of space-time, however scattered and discontinuous. Equivalently: any sum or aggregate of point-events. The world's water is for me a physical object, comprising all the molecules of H2O anywhere ever. There is a physical object part of which is a momentary stage of the silver dollar in my pocket and the rest of which is a temporal segment of the Eiffel Tower through its third decade. (1976a, p. 859)
So Quine's metaphysics is in the mereological tradition examined in the last chapter. We have stressed that this book does not take sides on metaphysical issues, so we make no claims about whether this is a viable metaphysics, or even how precisely it is to be understood. Quine, as we present him, thinks of individuals as ‘worms’ construed as strings of events over times.
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- The World-Time ParallelTense and Modality in Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 166 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012