In his essay “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” Quine discusses the relation of the behavior of ostension with the imputation of identity, and further gives an account of the hypostasis of abstract entities as purported objects of identity. Quine’s behavioristic stance leads him to begin his treatment of this topic, appropriately, with the act of ostension and then extending that explanation outwards to accounts of the cognitive phenomena of identity and of the hypostasis of abstract entities. However, as I herein argue, Quine’s behavioristic assessment of ostension leads him to conclusions about relations of ostension between word and object that are flatly incorrect, as can be shown by any common experiential understanding of the relations between words and concepts, as well as by simply taking his own behavioristic standard to its logical conclusion. Quine’s failure to do so can probably be attributed to his commitment to ontological parsimony. By a similar token of behavioristic confusion, Quine’s account of the hypostasis of abstract entities is inadequate.

As is typical of Quine’s essays, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis” begins with a helpful discussion of the issues surrounding the subject matter, in this case ostension and identity, elucidating the difference between the identity of the river Caÿster as a time-consuming object, and that of the water that runs through it.¹ Quine then goes on to attempt to treat of the word “red” as if it referred to the single discontinuous “object” consisting of all the red objects in the universe.² The radical ontological simplicity of comparing objects of ostension on a one-to-one, substitutable basis surely motivates Quine’s attempt to call out, in a single stroke, the significance of the behavior of ostension. Quine suggests a theoretical anthropology of language in which objects of ostension, including “the river Caÿster” and “red,” as soon as language was developed to name them, were all considered concrete objects on a par with one another.³

However, it is not even prima facie plausible that the word “red” was originally invoked to signify the single large discontinuous red object comprising all the red objects in the universe (nor is it ever used now in such a way, for that matter). If concrete extended objects were to have been the starting-point for ostension and identity, as is perfectly plausible, it is just as implausible that “red” was meant to refer to “all red objects everywhere.” For such an object cannot be ostended to in any practicable sense, nor is such a near-abstraction as the totality of red instances what a primitive human at the level of simply ostending to concrete objects could possibly have in mind as the object of ostension.⁴ But the identical behaviors in each case, that is, ostension, to the “objects” of what is meant by “red” seem to force Quine into identifying in kind what is meant with every act of ostension. Surely, though, one must go beyond behaviorism to give any kind of meaningful account of the intensional act of ostension: what is meant by the behavior. But it is not even necessary to go beyond behaviorism in order to refute Quine’s account of “red” as an ostension to all the red objects in the universe.

If I wish, by successive acts of pure ostension (here, we are in the realm of sheer behaviorism), to convey to an observer who does not speak my language what I mean by “the River Caÿster,” I can point to various points along the river in question, and begin to give an idea of what is meant in the ostension. Obviously, the number of “points” on the river being infinite, I cannot give an exhaustive ostension of the object of identity I have in mind by pointing to every one of them. But reasonably assuming certain co-native propensities between myself and my counterpart, such as the tendency to make natural groupings such as points in space all occupied by the same substance moving in the same direction, I can presume that a very limited number of acts of ostension will convey what I mean by “river” to the other person, even if that person has never seen a river before. To seal the proper-noun-named identity of the “River Caÿster” to the observer, I can point to the bounds of the object in question—giving the sense of where it begins and ends (this is particularly crucial if the River Caÿster is geographically part of a longer river whose name changes up and down stream from the part I call “Caÿster”). Conveying, by the successive acts of ostension themselves, the bounds of the object I call “Caÿster,” the identity is thereby definitively also conveyed.

In contrast, take the purported “entity ‘red’,” and it is abundantly clear that no one would feel the need to convey the full sense of the word “red” by successive ostensions to every red object in the universe: a few ostensions to red objects sufficiently dissimilar in other respects would certainly convey, by elimination, the full sense of “red.” A visitor from another planet, unfamiliar by experience with our uses of language and wanting to clarify the same, would surely find out from any number of experiments on English speakers' ostensions involving the word “red” that that word is not a reference for all the red objects in the universe (personally, I can testify for both myself and my wife that “red” is not the name for all the red objects in the universe; any reader who does use the word in that sense or knows someone who does will please contact the author for immediate disbursement of a $1,000 reward).⁵

Setting out to allay worries about the discontinuity of the supposed large universal object “red,” Quine gives the example of the United States, whose area is discontinuous, incorporating Alaska and Hawaii as well as the contiguous 48 states.⁶ But the United States, like all bona fide concrete objects of ostension, is still defined by its boundaries even if discontinuous—for instance, on a map, we may represent the United States by coloring its area, discontinuous as it is, by a uniform color. In that way, every point on the object of identity can be ostended to, exhaustively mapping out the coordinates on which it lies, thereby giving a total ostension to an unambiguously bounded object of identity. Once again, however, no exhaustive ostension to every red object in the universe is necessary to fully convey the sense of “red,” the reason being that “red” is not a bounded object, discontinuous or no. In his invocation of the discontinuity of an object such as the United States, Quine subtly evades the burden of proof (which is certainly to be the totality of ostension that is to convey an object of identity, in this context), and likens the United States, certainly a concrete object, to “the entity ‘red’” merely on the basis of its discontinuity.

It is important to reiterate for clarity that the boundedness inherent in an object of identity is necessarily and accordingly part of the ostension as well. “All the red objects in the universe” is a finite discontinuous “object,” but one does not refer to all such objects when pointing to a red object. Compare that with another example of Quine’s, the case of taking the set of all people in a certain income group,⁷ where, though the constituents themselves may be unknown as named individuals, every one is explicitly referred to in the ostension. How can we know that from Quine’s own behavioristic standard of identity? Simply replace the putative identification with the pure act of ostension. One could, theoretically, point out each individual in a given income group, and thereby indicate precisely and definitively what is meant by the identification. The universe being finite, one could also, theoretically (but far less practically), point out every bounded red object in the universe, but such would not be necessary to fully convey what is meant by “red.” Quine’s own behavioristic extensible standard thus comes right back to bite him. The question of “red” representing an ostension is, in fact, begged at the outset. What is “ostended” in the denotation are examples of manifestations of the named attribute (again, sheerly experimentally, ask anyone and I’m sure they will agree that this is what is meant by “red"). That is the only way to make sense of such a word.

With that, we have now passed from pure behaviorism into recognition of qualia, the class of abstractions of which “red” is a member (note that none of the preceding has yet taken note of any such abstractions, or even the perfectly plausible linguistic notion that there must be some appreciable difference between nouns and adjectives). As one final pass over a behaviorist view of ostension to “red,” and the characteristic inadequacy of explanation it can give, let us note that the careful and meticulous behaviorist will notice that when a person seeks to convey an exhaustive ostension to “red,” never is there an attempt made to point to every red object in existence. Instead, as previously noted, a very limited number of ostensions to red objects sufficiently dissimilar in other respects will eliminatively, and reliably, convey the meaning of “red.” If “red” is the single large discontinuous red object, why did the agent under investigation not make any attempt to refer to it all in terms of its boundaries, as a person would certainly be expected to do when conveying identity of a bona fide object of ostension? The reason would seemingly remain a mystery to the strict, thoroughgoing behaviorist, obtusely unaware as he is from his own experience of the existence of qualia.

The account Quine gives of the hypostasis of abstract entities, such as “square,” depends directly on his conception of all acts of ostension as referring only and ever to concrete objects, which, as lately discussed, is what led to such notions as “the entity ‘red’.” The following sentences encapsulate his view on why universals are named by singular terms:

“We can imagine that universals in general, as entities, insinuated themselves into our ontology in the following way. First we formed the habit of introducing spatio-temporally extended concrete things, according to the pattern considered earlier. Red entered with Caÿster and the others as a concrete thing. Finally triangle, square, and other universals were swept in on a faulty analogy with red and its ilk.”⁸

The “faulty analogy” Quine suggests is the key to understanding this treatment. After establishing confidence for his own purposes that “red” can be treated objectively as the pooling of all red objects in the universe, he tries that exercise with shapes in his “artificial little universe of regions” of §3 and notes that pooling of all triangles in a given region does not simply form a bigger triangle, but, depending on the extent of the space used, results in squares, trapezoids, and rectangles, too.⁹ The “faulty,” then, refers to a person's failure to make the distinction between cases of ostension using the word “is” (the word “is” accounts for the “analogy”) in which “is” has somewhat distinct senses, such as “is red” and “is square”, and subsequent hypostasis of “triangle,” or “square,” as abstract objects.

But this depends directly on Quine’s earlier conception of “red” as a single discontinuous extended object—the cleavage is thus drawn between “poolable” objects of ostension, and “nonpoolable” ones (such as “triangle”). Ostension to objects of the latter kind, on Quine’s view, leads to hypostasis of according abstract entities through failure to recognize the two different uses of the word “is.”¹⁰ The word “is” being a serviceable linguistic substitute for an act of ostension, it is thus convenient for Quine’s purposes to translate acts of ostension to parallel uses of the word “is.” But given that “red” is not, in fact, ostensively the large discontinous extended red thing, there is, in fact, no “faulty analogy.” “Red” represents a quale, as do square-“ness” and triangle-“ness”—the difference is that objects of the attribution need not be bounded in the former case, whereas they do in the latter. The postulation of not only qualia, but of more than one discrete type thereof, may well threaten to induce apoplexy in someone with Quine’s commitment to ontological parsimony, but it remains inescapable that the two examples are in fact such.

Quine claims that there is actually no need to postulate such things as attributes at all in ostensive clarification of the term “square”: “our listener [must only] learn when to expect us to apply it to an object and when not; there is no need for the phrase itself to be a name in turn of a separate object of any kind.”¹¹ He also goes on to suggest that “[it] is clearest…to view this step of hypostasis of abstract entities as an additional step which follows after the introduction of the corresponding general terms.”¹² So, in Quine’s view, general terms, for convenience, are used as though they are singular terms, and then the hypostasis of an according abstract entity occurs by analogy with singular terms as names of concrete entities.

But, then, what is it about one’s perception of what the ostended objects have in common, that a single term is to be ascribed to them? On the behaviorist view, the content of the learning itself that enables one to correctly use the term “square” must presumably remain arbitrary or mysterious. But recognition that such objects of ostension are members of the class “square,” having the attribute “squareness,” acknowledged by Quine only as a second step, certainly seems to be in fact just what is necessary to correctly ascribe the term “square” to objects in the first place. Presumably, a higher ape may experimentally be shown to be able to recognize “squareness” in objects without necessarily having the concept “squareness” (they may well, in any case, have such a “concept”—but we need not necessarily admit so in order to make the point at hand), but to use the word “square” in any normal operational sense, with the usual adaptability to newness of context that that implies, is to have the concept “squareness” (in fact, this serves as a particularly apt illustration of the etiology of concepts themselves in connection with language!). Given all these obvious facts, it seems rather obtuse of Quine to recognize the behavior of ostension in application to objects of the phrase “is square” and not to recognize “squareness” as precisely the elicitive factor in various ostensions to nonidentical objects by the same word.

I think that Quine is almost correct in treating the hypostasis of abstract entities as occurring analogically—“almost,” but not quite, because abstract entities are not simply a second-level artifact of feeding considerations of word usage back into parallel syntactical usage, as Quine claims. I contend that abstract entities such as “square,” as used in the predication “is (a) square,” are hypostatized via an imaginative projection of a prototype object of the according attribution: the attribution itself being the indispensable apparatus for use of the word in predication, categorically not a second-step process. It turns out that no such “object” for “red” can be hypostatized, and this is due to the nature of the concept itself; the referred quale being not bounded or geometrical. With an addition of the suffix “-ness” to the adjective (in the case of “red”) or named universal (in the case of “square”), we arrive at the names of the qualia themselves, and in such a form they can be treated on a parallel basis: “redness,” “squareness,” “coldness,” and all the rest. It is an interesting linguistic happenstance that in normal language we treat abstract entities on a parallel syntactic basis to concrete ones (this is the role that “analogy” does indeed play in the hypostasis of abstract objects), even though the primary requisite for use of the word is recognition of the attribute, or quale, itself, which in turn tends to be referred to in a derived form of the abstract object’s name. It seems likely that this is a result of the historical fact that conceptual analysis came last in linguistic development, after concrete objects and abstract objects. It is a fitting illustration, too, of the fact that thought is essentially prelinguistic. Words come into use to refer to concepts after the inception of the latter.

A decided predilection for behaviorism and a concomitant failure to recognize concepts as the true substitutionary references of words is what causes Quine to come to such unsound conclusions as those noted above. I suggest that the attraction of behaviorism lies in its promise to provide the same objective criteria of explanation as what is offered by the natural sciences, on a par even more precisely with the ways in which we experimentally learn about the behaviors of nonhuman animals (Quine’s preference for behaviorism is hand-in-glove with his even more-basically underlying scientism). To treat of human behavior in this way, however, is to ignore a fact that, frankly, could not be more obvious: the experimenter is of the same species as the experimentee and can thereby learn about the underlying determinants of behavior from a decidedly “privileged context.”¹³ Behaviorists must ignore the cognitive phenomena that are part of common human experience in a rather disturbingly “Emperor’s-New-Clothes” fashion in order to maintain the integrity and sufficiency of their methods.

This is not to say, however, that there is no use whatever in behavioristic standards of explanation. It may at least be shown to act as a first-level “filter” by which purported connections and explanations that do not even jibe with behavioristic data may be dispensed with. Indeed, as demonstrated earlier, application of such a standard would have at least saved Quine the trouble of going through the explanations he did, based on false assumptions as they were.

I remain personally convinced, all the more so after an analysis of Quine's behaviorist fallacies, that conceptual analysis, though often-maligned in the contemporary literature by the inheritors of the anti-intensional legacy which Quine bequeathed, is the single key to a complete, coherent, meaningful, and correct philosophy of language. I intend in future work to more-thoroughly delineate its applications, including showing it to be the key to an explication of synonymy. Nouns (not proper nouns, however), adjectives, and verbs are ultimately references of concepts, and understanding the uses of language depends most fundamentally on explication of the role of concepts in meaning and reference.¹⁴ Concepts are the realm of utter intension, as well, and accurately understanding them is the key to understanding human thought, in any way that it may be possible for us to do so.

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References and Notes
1 W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1963): pp. 66–68
2 Ibid., pp. 68–69
3 Ibid., p. 73
4 One must also note that Quine’s conception of “the entity ‘red’” implicitly depends upon a conception of a finite universe. Even after a conception of “all such existent objects” is granted, if the universe is considered infinite, as it has been by some of various times and cultures, the notion of ostension to “all red objects” becomes fundamentally unsound, as in that case the set of “every red thing in the universe” could not be considered a bounded object at all. As it so happens, our current knowledge of the universe gives us a conception of it as finite, but this should surely not be a prerequisite to have a meaningful sense of the word “red.”
5 I realize that it is standard in philosophy of language to consider the “extension” of an adjective, such as “red,” as all extant objects that that word applies to. However, nobody uses the word “red” in that sense, so if the idea of the “extension” of a word is to go so far afield that it does not “touch” its usual contextual meaning, then such an idea is useless. Contrariwise, take "extension" as synonymous with "denotation," and you have a reality-relevant concept. Toward a coherent and meaningful theory of “meaning,” I would thus place “extension” as needing to come into contact with meaning somehow, so that intension, meaning, and extension are continuous with one another. So far this is just a rather vague, instinctive notion of mine, which I may develop more fully at some point into a more explicit theory.
6 W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1963): p. 69
7 Ibid., pp. 71, 72
8 Ibid., p. 73
9 Ibid., pp. 72–73
10 See ibid., p. 74
11 Ibid., p. 75
12 Ibid., p. 76
13 cf. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1960): p. 33
14 Quine actually, albeit on the limitations of his own terms, seems to realize this: “Concepts are language, and the purpose of concepts and of language is efficacy in communication and prediction. Such is the ultimate duty of language, science, and philosophy, and it is in relation to that duty that a conceptual scheme has finally to be appraised.” (p. 79) So, concepts are countenanced by Quine, after a fashion, but only in terms of the “conceptual schemes” he was later to flesh out as the relativistic matrix in which language is to be understood, on his view. This is really quite far afield from understanding the importance and application of concepts themselves.

Originally written January 2004
Last modified: Thursday, April 22, 2004; 4:40 pm CST