Promoting Extensionality

Author(s): W. V. Quine
Source: Synthese, Vol. 98, No. 1, Symposium in Honor of Alastair Hannay and Dagfinn
Føllesdal (Jan., 1994), pp. 143-151
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20117862
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 W. V. QUINE

PROMOTING EXTENSIONALITY

Logic is the technology of deduction. Its business is to show how, from

a given set of premisses, to derive conclusions that can be depended
on to be true if the premisses are true. Part of the technique, even in
antiquity, was regimentation. Regimentation figured mainly, at first, in
matching up clauses of the premisses.1 Often a clause in one of the
premisses admits of recasting, without violence to the speaker's or the
writer's purposes, in such a way as to match it with a clause of another
premiss. Each new duplication thus created is vital to the deductive
potential.
It is in symbolic logic that regimentation takes on modern efficiency:
that of pr?fabrication and mass production. A few basic and ubiquitous
idioms are singled out, each of which can accommodate a vast range
of clauses when these are suitably paraphrased. These few forms stand
open in their symbolic rigidity waiting for content to be poured in at
the user's pleasure. The fewer the forms, the greater the incidence of
eventual duplication among the clauses of a set of premisses and hence
the richer the deductive yield. Such is the premium on economy of
primitive notation.
Symbolic logic in its neoclassical form is predicate logic. In its aus
terest form, it imposes just two idioms, or grammatical constructions:
a truth function and the universal quantifier, together with variables
for referring back to the quantifier. The mold is built up of these
devices in iteration. The content to be poured into the mold consists of
predicates of one or more places.
In practice it is convenient and customary to relax this stark economy.
Symbols for five truth functions are admitted, though all can be reduced
to one by paraphrase. Existential quantification is added, though reduc
ible to universal and negation. From the unlimited stock of predicates
to be drawn on for content, one in particular is appropriated as pecu
liarly logical: the two-place predicate ' = ' of identity. Finally, the gates
are opened to other ingredients besides predicates as admissible con
tent; namely, constant singular terms as well as functors such as 'plus',
'times', and 'log' for forming complex singular terms. Each of these

Synthese 98: 143-151, 1994.

? 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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144 W. V. QUINE

could be reduced to a corresponding predicate, with help of tru

functions, quantification, and identity.
The matching up of clauses is no longer the main point of reg
mentation. Equally important is the streamlining of canons of ded
tion. In earlier times this scarcely mattered; the rules of the syllogi
added little to the unimplemented light of pure reason. With the ris
of symbolic logic, however, algorithms and complete proof procedur
in rigorous formalization assumed vital importance, both for the phil
sophical understanding that they have afforded and for their practi
utility. The burgeoning computer industry testifies to the latter.
On the philosophical side, the regimentation embodied in predica
logic has also brought illumination quite apart from the technology
deduction. It imposes a new and simple syntax on our whole language
insofar as our logic is to apply. Stripped down to the austere econom
that I first described for predicate logic, our simple new syntax is a
follows. The parts of speech are: (1) the truth-functional connective,
(2) the universal quantifier, (3) variables, and (4) atomic predicates of
one and more places. The syntactic constructions are: (1) applicati
of a predicate to the appropriate number of variables to form a s
tence; (2) prefixture of a quantifier, with its variable, to a sentence;
and (3) joining sentences by the truth-functional connective and t
adjusting parentheses.
I hesitate to claim that this syntax, so trim and clear, can accomm
date in translation all cognitive discourse. I can say, however, that no
theory is fully clear to me unless I can see how this syntax wou
accommodate it. In particular, all of pure classical mathematics can b
thus accommodated. This is putting it mildly. The work of Whitehea
and Russell and their predecessors and successors shows that the
scribed syntax together with a single two-place predicate by way
extra-logical vocabulary, namely the 'e' of class membership, suffices
in principle for it all. Even ' = ' is not needed; it can be paraphrased
terms of 'e'.
What makes for the surpassing clarity of theories couched in th
syntax is their extensionality. This means, in part, that if within a tr
sentence we supplant a true component sentence by another truth, o
a false component by a falsehood, the containing sentence will remai
true. Further, if we supplant a component open sentence by another
that it fulfilled by just the same values of the variables, the containin
sentence will still remain true.

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 PROMOTING EXTENSIONALITY 145

The useful idioms of propositional attitude - 'x believes that /?', 'x
hopes that/?', 'x says that/?', and the rest - are in conspicuous violation
of extensionality. We may well believe that p and not that q, though
both be true.
What is worse, even scandalous, is that these idioms violate the
substitutivity of identity: the putting of equals for equals. How can
something be true and false of the same thing under different names?
Yet these idioms are useful to the point of indispensability. More
over, I think they are rooted in the earliest stages of language. I picture
the earliest idiom of propositional attitude as 'x perceives that/?', where
'/?' stands for an observation sentence such as 'It's raining', 'That's
milk', 'That's a dog'. When the mother is monitoring the child's utter
ance of such a sentence, she has to empathize with him. She imagines
herself in his place, facing in the same direction, and then checks
whether she, thus oriented, feels moved to volunteer the sentence
herself. In short, she checks, however inarticulately, whether the child
really perceives that it's raining, that it's milk, that it's a dog. This
much in the way of an idiom of propositional attitude, all unspoken, is
essential to the very handing down of language from generation to
generation; for observation sentences are the child's entering wedge to
language. And then, down the ages, the idiom 'x perceives that/?' was
extended to non-observational sentences, and, by analogy, the other
idioms of propositional attitude emerged.
Gottlob Frege, confronted with the paradoxical failure of substitutiv
ity of identity, concluded that in those idioms the recalcitrant terms
have changed their reference and taken to referring to what would
normally be their meanings, or senses, rather than their normal objects.
A better solution is suggested by the mother's relation to the child in
monitoring his observation sentence; namely, empathy. When someone
ascribes a propositional attitude to someone, he impersonates that
person to some degree. The subordinate clause of the construction is
uttered from the subject's point of view, somewhat as if from the
subject's mouth. No wonder substitutivity of identity fails; the subject,
poor fellow, didn't know the things were identical. Likewise for failure
of extensionality: the subject would have been unprepared to inter
change the two coextensive clauses in question, simply because he
didn't know they were coextensive.
Along with the failure of extensionality and the failure of substitutiv
ity of identity, in clauses of propositional attitude, there is a third

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146 W. V. QUINE

failure: failure of quantifying in. A quantifier outside the clause canno

bind a variable inside the clause, at least not without raising problem
of interpretation. The quantification

(1) Bx (Ralph believes that x is a spy)

raises an ontological problem of the value of 'x', since Ralph trus
Bernard J. Ortcutt but suspects a man in a brown hat who is in fact
Ortcutt. The difficulty, again, is just discrepancy between the re
world, to which the outlying 'Bx' relates, and the empathized world -
Ralph's - in which the recurrence of V is trapped.
Clarity is gained by banishing propositions, as objects of belief and
other propositional attitudes, and settling somewhat unnaturally for t
sentences themselves, the mere strings of letters or phonemes. This,
after all, was where it all began, according to my conjecture: in th
observation sentences that the mother felt moved to affirm when emp
thizing the child's attitude. Let us construe the conjunction 'that' of th
propositional-attitude construction simply as a quotation mark.
It does take an obvious bit of adjusting. 'He believes that he is
Napoleon' becomes
He believes T am Napoleon',
since the believed sentence is conceived as in the subject's mouth. In th
case of indirect discourse, moreover, which is an idiom of propositiona
attitude, confusion with direct quotation would have to be avoided. W
might agree to use 'say' for the indirect and 'utter' for the direct.
In taking the objects of the attitudes as sentences, I do not presum
that the creature in the attitude speaks the language of the sentence
or any language. The sentence is in the language of the ascriber of th
attitude, but he frames it from what he takes to be the subject's poin
of view.
The failure of extensionality, the failure of substitutivity of identity,
and the failure of quantifying in all become natural and obvious when
the objects of the attitudes are seen as sentences, set off in quotation.
The quotation simply designates the depicted string of letters or
phonemes, unrelated syntactically to the outlying context.
We may seem to have paid a price for this clarification. We may
seem to have taken leave of the clear and simple syntax of predicate
logic by admitting a potential infinity of sprawling quotations as unana
lyzed singular terms. However, not so. Quotations can be reduced to

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 PROMOTING EXTENSIONALITY 147

the syntax of predicate logic by spelling them out. What we need are
just names of the several signs or letters of our alphabet, together with
a term functor - analogous to 'plus' - to express the concatenating of
one letter or string of letters with another to form a longer string.
Given this much, we can define any quotation by spelling it out letter
by letter. When at last we are bent on reducing everything to the
minimal syntax of predicate logic, we reduce the letter names and the
term functor to predicates, with help of ' = ', as noted earlier. All in
all, first by quotation and then by spelling, we digest the propositional
attitudes syntactically and logically. Extensionality prevails, as well as
the substitutivity of identity and the syntax of predicate logic.
Semantically, however, the propositional attitudes remain low grade.
The objective criteria for whether x believes that/?, regrets that/?, etc.,
are heterogeneous, varying radically with '/?', and, as often as not, they
are indecisive. This is something to put up with, pending progress of
some sort or other; but the logical and the syntactical barriers are gone.
In all this, however, I have been taking the propositional attitudes
only de dicto. That is to say, I have been construing the content clause
as the ascriber's attempt to speak strictly from the subject's point of
view. The other interpretation, de re, permits the ascriber's own voice
to intrude on his simulation of the subject's voice. If we recognize the
de re alternative, the sentence

(2) Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy

becomes ambiguous. De dicto it is false, since Ralph denies the sentence

'Ortcutt is a spy', but de re it is true, because the subject in the brown
hat is Ortcutt.
More precisely, what may be taken de re or de dicto is not the whole
ascription of the propositional attitude, nor yet the content clause, but
only one or another place within that clause: one or another place
occupied by a singular term or a variable - thus the place occupied by
'Ortcutt' in (2). A term in de re position, or what I have called referential
position, is subject to substitutivity of identity after all, and a variable
in that position can be quantified from outside. Referential positions
are where the ascriber's world has intruded.
If the content clause of an ascription of a propositional attitude
contains referential positions, therefore, the content clause can no
longer be represented in quotation. Accordingly, in 1956 I proposed

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 148 W. V. QUINE

analyzing such cases by means rather of quoted predicates, thus freein

the referential positions from quotation.2 (2) becomes:
Ralph believes 'is a spy' of Ortcutt,
when taken de re. The referential position is thus exposed to substituti
ity and also to quantification,

Bx (Ralph believes 'is a spy' of x),

which captures (1).
It seems important to make sense thus of (1) and to contrast it wit
the trivial

Ralph believes 'Bx (x is a spy)'.

(1) suggests that some trait or circumstance, some description, singles
out the suspect in Ralph's mind. But this will not serve, as Robert
Sleigh showed in his example of the shortest spy.3 There is probably a
unique shortest, and Ralph surely believes that the shortest spy is a
spy; but this does not make for the political significance of (1). Nor
should it matter that there might be more than one shortest spy.
I now despair of a coherent theory of propositional attitudes de re,
despite appearances.4 When security agents are told (1), they are only
given a lead and not a coherent message. Following the lead, they
interrogate Ralph and record some straight de dicto beliefs, all nicely
within the bounds of our extensional scientific framework.
So I feel we have seen extensionalism safely through the perils of
the propositional attitudes. But threats remain from other quarters,
notably the modal logic of necessity and possibility.
Modal logic differs from the propositional attitudes in that all term
positions are referential, or potentially so. Quantification into modal
contexts is unrestrained, but substitutivity of identity in modal contexts
works for some terms and not for others. It is a question now not of
position, not of where, but of what. Hence Dagfinn F0llesdal's genuine
singular terms, or Saul Kripke's rigid designators. These are the terms
that obey substitutivity of identity even in modal contexts. These are
the terms, also, that support inference by existential generalization,
even in modal contexts; other terms do not. As we might say in a
modal spirit, these are the terms that name their objects necessarily.
They name them on the score of essential traits, not accidental ones.

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 PROMOTING EXTENSIONALITY 149

Modal logic fails of extensionality, and up to a point it fails of

substitutivity of identity. Must I curb and compromise my extensional
ism after all? My answer this time is that I have not been sold on the
notion of necessity, the distinction between necessity and contingency,
which is what modal logic in its standard interpretation and primary
motivation is about.
The adverb 'necessarily' in its everyday use is another matter. Typi
cally it serves merely to mark a statement that one's interlocutor is
presumed to agree with, in contrast to whatever matters are under
discussion or investigation at the time. This use is clear and convenient,
but it has no place in logically regimented science, any more than other
occasion-dependent locutions such as T, 'you', 'here', 'now', and the
tenses of verbs.
The pioneer ventures in modal logic undertaken a century ago by
Hugh MacColl and more economically in 1918 by C. I. Lewis were
motivated by dissatisfaction with the truth-functional conditional. They
wanted a stronger connective: 'necessarily if. What was lurking in the
background was the subjunctive conditional, and there is no denying
that it pervades scientific thinking. It is implicit in the design of every
experiment: 'If this and this were set up, such and such would occur'.
However, the universally quantified truth-functional conditional covers
such cases. The experimenter's conjecture is a general one: 'Whatever
this and this obtain, such and such occurs'. Then he tests this general
conjecture by setting this and this up and watching for such and such.
The contrafactual case of the subjunctive conditional, however, must
be treated as elliptical and occasion-dependent. A universally quantified
truth-functional conditional is again implicit, I think, but with a complex
antecedent some of whose clauses are left tacit, to be divined from the
context and circumstances. It is along such lines that I would make
sense of subjunctive conditionals, contraf actual and otherwise, without
compromising extensionality.
Disposition terms such as 'soluble' are naturally associated with the
contrafactual conditional; thus, 'If this were in water, it would dissolve'.
My view of disposition terms, however, is that they do not ascribe a
special sort of property, a potentiality, but that they just name ordinary
properties in a special way, namely, by alluding to a fairly dependable
and convenient symptom or test. Solubility in water is a physical pro
perty analyzable, like others, in microphysical terms, but an easy and

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150 W. V. QUINE

generally reliable test of it is immersion in water to see if the stuff

dissolves. Again, fragility is explicable microphysically, but a fair
reliable test is to drop the object and see if it breaks.
The relation of cause and effect has been seen as a challenge t
extensionality, but again I think I see a reconciliation. I see the relati
as relating events, and I see events as physical objects in my bro
sense. Each event, each physical object, is just the total content o
some portion of space-time. If someone whistled a certain tune all th
way to the bus, and only then, I am prepared to identify his whistlin
that tune with his walking to the bus; they are the same event. So, i
his walking caused his arrival at the bus stop, his whistling caused it
This is odd usage, but harmless, for I do not generalize on it. Cau
laws relate classes of events, as usual, and whistling a tune does n
usually cause an arrival.
Finally, how does probability fare under extensionality? Where the
probability is statistical, we can settle for a statement of the statistica
basis itself as the ratio of sizes of classes of cases. Where the probabili
is subjective, i.e. the degree of expectation, we are up against issu
of behavioral or physiological analysis of mental phenomena, irrespec
tive of extensionality. The neat behavioral measure of a subjectiv
probability is the minimum acceptable odds at a wager.
Enigmatic as subjective probability may be, the crucially enigmatic
locus of probability is quantum mechanics. It seems that something lik
probability invests the behavior of elementary particles irreducibly. Th
problem I leave to the scientists, eagerly awaiting further progress o
their part and enlightenment on mine. There has long been discussio
of revisions even of logic for the simplification and clarification
quantum theory, and I can conceive that extensionality might not re
main immune. I can only hope, and leave it to the future to speak fo
itself.

NOTES

1 I was alerted to this central but largely neglected aspect by Sherry (1991).
2 Quine (1956).
3 Sleigh (1968).
4 But see Burdick (1982). He accommodates them extensionally by citing additional ope
sentences as tacit parameters.

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 PROMOTING EXTENSIONALITY 151

REFERENCES

Burdick, Howard: 1982, 'A Logical Form for the Propositional Attitudes', Synthese
185-230.
Quine, W. V.: 1956, 'Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes', Journal of Philosophy 53,
177-87.
Sherry, David: 1991, 'The Conspicuous Role of Paraphrase', History and Philosophy of
Logic 12, 151-66.
Sleigh, Robert: 1968, 'On a Proposed System of Epistemic Logic', Nous 2, 391-89.

Department of Philosophy
Harvard University
208 Emerson Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138
U.S.A.

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