ABSTRACT
I am not surprised that Charles Parsons thinks I have misinterpreted or misrepresented some of Quine's views. That is simply what happens when one criticizes great philosophers. If you criticize any of them, someone will always say that you have misunderstood. I also know that one can play the game of always seeking an interpretation that makes one's favorite philosopher come out completely right. That was my own attitude towards Quine's philosophy when I came to UCLA as a graduate student in 1949; at the very first meeting of Reichenbach's seminar, he asked me to talk about Quine's views on ontology. And Reichenbach was impatient with my endorsement of those views, and he said to me “So, you are saying that the existence of sets, is just like the existence of electrons.” Over the years (and it took me decades) I have come to the conclusion that, “Yes, that was Quine's view, and it's wrong.” I no longer interpret Quine so that he always comes out right. For example, Quine says in Theories and Things (1981) that the numbers five and twelve are “intangible objects”; that might be a good description of photons but it makes five and twelve much too much like photons. I now believe that Quine did fall into the error that Reichenbach rightly foresaw, the error of assimilating the epistemology of mathematics to the epistemology of theoretical physics.
