THE GAVAGAI BUNNY CHALLENGE: QUINE'S QUIET DEMOLITION OF ABSOLUTE REALITY Titelbild

THE GAVAGAI BUNNY CHALLENGE: QUINE'S QUIET DEMOLITION OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

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THE GAVAGAI BUNNY CHALLENGE: QUINE'S QUIET DEMOLITION OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

Von: Boris Kriger
Gesprochen von: Glenn Bulthuis
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A linguist steps off a boat onto an unmapped shore. A rabbit runs past. A native speaker points and says a single word: gavagai. The linguist writes in a notebook, with reasonable confidence, the translation rabbit. And in that moment of reasonable confidence, as Willard Van Orman Quine demonstrated with devastating patience, an entire philosophical civilization quietly collapses. For the word could equally mean undetached rabbit part, or temporal stage of a rabbit, or the universe minus this rabbit, and no amount of evidence — no gesture, no experiment, no lifetime of fluent conversation — could ever settle which. The rabbit that ran past the linguist has been running through philosophy ever since.This book is the story of that rabbit, and of the quiet, courteous, logically armored man who set it loose. Quine never raised his voice. He wrote spare, elegant prose, taught at Harvard for four decades, and dismantled, one theorem at a time, the oldest assumption in Western thought: that there is a fact of the matter about what exists, waiting out there, independent of the theories we use to describe it. His doctrine of ontological relativity holds that questions about what there is only make sense relative to a background theory and its language — and that the background itself rests on nothing but another background. Existence, it turns out, is always somebody's variables.But this is not a book about despair, and Quine was no nihilist. The Gavagai Bunny Challenge takes his demolition one step further than he took it himself — into construction. If whole ontologies can be swapped without a single observable consequence, then the swap itself becomes an instrument: a test that separates what a theory actually measures from what it merely declares. What survives every permissible redescription is what a theory truly carries; what can be permuted away without a trace was never load-bearing at all. To be, this book argues, is not simply to be the value of a variable.©2026 Boris Kriger (P)2026 Boris Kriger Philosophie
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