Tributo de Timothy Williamson a Ruth Barcan Marcus.

Via Leiter Reports


Laudatio: Professor Ruth Barcan Marcus

Timothy Williamson


The central methodological advantage that analytic philosophy enjoys over all other forms of philosophy, past and present, is the rigorous framework of formal logic within which it can conduct its inquiries.

Although different systems of logic are needed for different branches of philosophical inquiry, in the core area of metaphysics and surrounding fields for the past forty years the most natural and fruitful setting for inquiry has been quantified modal logic, in which we not only have the resources of first-order logic with identity but can also raise explicit questions of possibility and necessity with elegantly perspicuous generality.

The first study of quantified modal logic as a branch of formal logic was published in March 1946 in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, under the title ‘A functional calculus of first order based on strict implication’, by Ruth C. Barcan, a logician whose identity with Professor Marcus is of course necessary.

The system that she presented there did not simply combine pre-existing non-modal quantified logics with pre-existing unquantified modal logics. It identified a crucial axiom about the interaction of the two sides, the interchange of modal operators with quantifiers.

The axiom says that if there can be something that has a certain property, then there is something that can have that property. This is the famous Barcan formula; most logicians can only dream of having a formula named after them. Its converse is also derived in the paper.

The Barcan formula and its converse are neither obviously correct nor obviously incorrect (on the intended interpretation), but they are of the utmost importance, both technical and philosophical, to the distinctive nature of quantified modal logic. Technically, their presence or absence makes a large strategic difference to the ways in which the proof theory and formal semantics of quantified modal systems can be developed.

But this is closely connected to their philosophical significance too, for together they are tantamount to the claim that it is non-contingent what individuals there are. Although that non-contingency claim may sound implausible on first hearing, it can be given a sustained defence in more than one way, either by taking a narrow view of what individuals there can be or by taking a broad view of what individuals there are.

In metaphysics there are disputes whose content is notoriously hard to pin down, for example concerning actualism (the thesis that ‘everything is actual’) and its analogue for time, presentism (the thesis that ‘everything is present’). These disputes are threatened by trivialization; they can easily sound verbal. It is increasingly appreciated that the best way to focus them on worthwhile issues may be to reconfigure them as disputes over the validity of the Barcan formula and its converse and their analogues in tense logic.

Those formulas lie at the heart of other metaphysical debates too: for example, they present a lethal threat to one contemporary version of the correspondence theory of truth, according to which a truth has to be made true by some thing, a truthmaker. We are going to be hearing much, much more of the Barcan formula and its converse in metaphysics.

The 1946 paper did not initially meet with universal acclaim, although its importance was recognized by C.I. Lewis, one of the founders of modern modal logic. Its main critic was W.V.O. Quine, who argued that its application of modal operators to formulas with free variables was incoherent and unintelligible (although he did concede that Miss Barcan ‘is scrupulous over the distinction between use and mention of expressions — a virtue rare in the modality literature’: rare praise from the guardian of the use-mention distinction).

Quine’s original criticisms were technically unsound, and he was forced over the years into a series of revisions that eventually reduced the charge to one of a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. Even there, technical results vindicated Professor Marcus’s later reply that the commitment was to the intelligibility, not the truth, of essentialism, and that in any case there may well be a scientific basis for some form of essentialism. Philosophy has gone Marcus’s way, not Quine’s, but the vindication of her paper was a gradual process: it was years ahead of its time.

In 1947, Miss Barcan published another pioneering paper on quantified modal logic, ‘The identity of individuals in a strict functional calculus of second order’. It is best known for the first proof of the necessity of identity, the thesis that individuals cannot be contingently identical. For many years this was regarded as a paradox, perhaps even a reductio ad absurdum of quantified modal logic.

There were thought to be obvious examples of contingent identity. But on further analysis the apparent counter-examples turned out to rely on philosophical confusions, concerning either the scope of definite descriptions or the distinction between the contingent and the a posteriori, or at least on deeply questionable metaphysical assumptions. In contemporary philosophy, the necessity of identity is widely seen as a vital insight into modal metaphysics, and a valuable constraint on philosophical theorizing.

The 1947 paper is pioneering in another respect too. It is a system of second-order modal logic. That is, it permits quantification into predicate position, not just into name position as in first-order logic. In cruder terms, it lets one generalize over properties, not just over the individuals that have those properties. Despite Quine’s opposition, second-order non-modal logic is now widely recognized as the appropriate logical framework for many mathematical theories and other applications. But very little attention has been paid to second-order modal logic. I predict that it will play an increasingly central role as the framework for many debates in metaphysics and other areas of philosophy, and that this aspect of the 1947 paper will turn out to have been more than sixty years ahead of its time.

Who was the author of these seminal works? She was born in 1921 in New York, to Sam and Rose Barcan, Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in the Bronx. Ruth Barcan graduated in 1941 with a B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from New York University, where she had also studied some physics, history and classics.

Informally, she learnt mathematical logic there from J.C.C. McKinsey, who encouraged her precocious interest in both technical and philosophical aspects of modal logic and her move to Yale for graduate studies. There she received her Ph.D. in 1946 with a dissertation on quantified modal logic, supervised by Frederic Fitch. Her early papers were the fruits of that research. She spent the year 1947-8 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, in Rudolf Carnap’s seminar; he too made early contributions to quantified modal logic. Astonishingly, from 1948 to 1963 Ruth Barcan Marcus, as she became, had no regular affiliation with a major department, and never applied for one.

She was a wife and mother, living the life of a housewife and modal logician. However, it was not a life of complete professional isolation: she participated in the life of the greater Chicago philosophical community, and occasionally gave invited lectures or courses. The change of professional name was Alonzo Church’s doing, in his capacity as editor of The Journal of Symbolic Logic. She had married in 1942, but published under her maiden name until seven or eight years later, when he found out and informed her that future submissions would have to be under her ‘legal’ name.

Only gradually did the philosophical community realize that she had struck gold, not fool’s gold. Of course, gold is fool’s fool’s gold, but not only fools were deceived: the proper appreciation of her work required a diametric change of philosophical perspective, feeling one’s way out of deeply but often tacitly held commitments. It also required a willingness to learn about logic and metaphysics from a woman. Such changes do not happen overnight. Nevertheless, it should have been clear from the beginning that whether or not what she had found was gold, it was at least a mineral of quite unusual quality.

Things improved. Increasing attention was paid to her papers. Philosophical logicians such as Arthur Prior, Saul Kripke and Dagfinn Føllesdal saw their interest and significance. From 1960 onwards, after a gap of seven years, Professor Marcus published a burst of articles in which she reflected on the interpretation of quantified modal logic and answered Quine’s criticisms. One of the ideas in them that resonates most with current philosophy of language is that of proper names as mere tags, without descriptive content.

This is not Kripke’s idea of names as rigid designators, designating the same object with respect to all relevant worlds, for ‘rigidified’ definite descriptions are rigid designators but still have descriptive content. Rather, it is the idea, later developed by David Kaplan and others, that proper names are directly referential, in the sense that they contribute only their bearer to the propositions expressed by sentences in which they occur. Direct reference entails rigid designation but not vice versa. It was the wildest unorthodoxy when she wrote, and is the purest orthodoxy now.

These papers on modal logic and metaphysics open up and analyse a network of further themes: the nature of extensionality as a principle in semantics; the philosophical groundwork for the necessity of identity; the possibility of a substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers, but also of an objectual interpretation restricted to actually existing concrete individuals, both of which can validate the Barcan formula and its converse; the status of essentialism; the extension of these ideas to properties, sets and other ‘collectives’.

The discussion is extraordinarily fertile, tersely open-minded and exploratory, as befits the state of the discipline, although still sharply constrained by logic: the emphasis is more on raising questions than on settling them. She is laying out the agenda for a discussion that has been at the heart of philosophy ever since, concerning issues that are as alive now as they were then. Many have contributed substantively to that discussion; there is so much credit to go round that all can afford to be generous over its distribution.

Institutional recognition flooded in too. In 1963, Ruth Barcan Marcus became the founding chair and professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a position of great trust which she held until 1970. After three years at Northwestern University, she was then Halleck professor of philosophy at Yale from 1973 to 1991, and subsequently Senior Research Scholar at Yale and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California at Irvine.

She was a long-standing Chairman of the National Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and President of its Central Division, President of the Association of Symbolic Logic (which she helped achieve financial autonomy) and President of the Institute Internationale de Philosophie and thereafter Honorary President, in addition to extensive service on editorial boards, external review panels and other committees that underpin the collective life of the profession. She has held visiting research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the National Humanities Center, and a residency in Bellagio. She has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1977.

A festschrift packed with distinguished authors was published in her honour. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Illinois, the Wilbur Cross Medal by Yale, a medal by the College de France, the Machette Prize for contributions to the profession from the Machette Foundation, the American Philosophical Association’s Quinn Prize for service to philosophy and philosophers — and now, of course, the Lauener Prize itself. Not least amongst those services to the professions has been her formidable defence of the highest intellectual standards, of rigour and other core philosophical values, against compromise with fashionable political and cultural pressures.

We do not always expect much activity from great monuments of the profession, but in Professor Marcus’s case recognition coincided with a remarkable widening of the range of her creativity. Already in 1966 a pregnant note in Mind had helped clarify the interpretation of iterated deontic modalities. Her most-cited paper is one in The Journal of Philosophy from 1980 on moral dilemmas and consistency, in which she refuted the popular idea that moral dilemmas involve mutually inconsistent moral principles, and showed that they provide no support for moral anti-realism.

She made a powerful case against conceptions of belief that put too much weight on language-use rather than non-linguistic interaction with the external environment, and defended an elegant analogy between belief and knowledge, on which belief requires consistency just as knowledge requires truth. In the history of philosophy, she applied her expertise on modal matters to Spinoza’s ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God and her ideas on names to the development of Russell’s later views on ontology and reference.

The link with Bertrand Russell is no coincidence. If you look at the index to Ruth’s selected philosophical essays, Modalities, you will see that he has by far the longest entry of anyone. Like Russell, she uses logic as an essential and creative discipline for philosophy. She is every bit as good as he was at suffering fools gladly. Like Russell, she is willing to try out a variety of ideas with undogmatic experimentation, to follow the argument where it leads, however unpopular the conclusion, while still retaining exactly what he called ‘that feeling for reality, which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies’. In reading her work, one has a strong sense that there is truth and falsity in philosophy, just as in other sciences, however hard it is to tell the difference.

Sometimes, in sincerely honouring a genuinely distinguished philosopher, one nevertheless feels that in the end all their distinctive ideas will turn out to lie on the false side of the line. So it is a special pleasure to have been praising Ruth, many of whose main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fascinating, and influential, and way ahead of their time, but actually — I believe — true. The award of the Lauener Prize to her must encourage us all to have the courage and patience to carry on the work of analytic philosophy according to the highest standards in our tradition.