Quine, Grammar, and Other Philosophy Wonk Reflections

March 21,2005

Right Reason is a kind of [capital-R] Right-thinking open pub table, where no punches are pulled, political correctness isn't even on the menu, and all the while so far the conversation is civil, if unbuttoned. A lot of the fun is in the comments, here, a Monty-Pythonesque minuet around a point of grammar/vocabulary in Beowulf, following on a discussion of the relative stability of the perceptual and theoretical and Quine's model of human knowledge.

Conversations at Chez Dilys sometimes circle nervously around the analytical philosopher W. V. O. Quine, fascinated in horror by his offhand doctrine regarding imaginary friends.

That they do not exist is the linchpin of his epistemology.  How to explain so Existocentric a monster here to our not-yet-extinct soft and suede-like Pink D. family...?