HARTRY FIELD, Realism, Mathematics and Modality.

Oxford UK and Cam-

bridge USA: Blackwell, 1989 (paperback 1991). viii + 290 pp. £14.95.

Reviewed by ALASDAIR URQUHART, Department of Philosophy, Univer-

sity of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M6R 1Y9, Canada

British philosophers are obsessed with the problem of meaning, North Amer-
ican philosophers with the problem of realism. Over the past few years, an
outsider hanging out at a philosophical convention in the United States, and
hearing endless talk of brains in vats, Twin Earth and similar stuff, might have
been forgiven for thinking he’d wandered into a science fiction gathering. Per-
haps philosophers in the U.S.A. are worried that the hardheaded businessmen
who pay their salaries will think them not worth their keep unless they believe
in good hard, solid facts and abjure anything smacking of the immaterial.
Be that as it may, Field is a fairly typical representative of this modern
breed. He believes fervently in the universe described by modern physics (or at
least that part of it which excludes quantum theory, up to and including general
relativity). This puts him in a bind, though, because modern physics is heavily
mathematical, and seems to involve appeal to non-material entities, mathemat-
ical objects such as numbers, sets and functions. His solution to this quandary,
first set forth at length in his highly acclaimed Science without numbers (SWN)
(1980), was to propose a programme of “nominalization” of physical theory.
Physical theories were to be reformulated as “nominalist” theories which had
to satisfy the condition of being “attractive,” then it was to be shown that the
addition of mathematical concepts and postulates to the nominalist version of
the theories was conservative. That is, it was to be shown that the addition
of mathematical postulates resulted in no new nominalistic assertions being
deducible.
Field’s execution of the programme was incomplete and not wholly satis-
factory. In his book, the logical basis on which he is operating is never made
quite clear, so that the nature of the conservative extension claims is obscure.
Furthermore, on some plausible construals Field’s claims are simply false, as
John Burgess and Yiannis Moschovakis first pointed out (SWN, p. 104). The
reasons for this are closely related to the Gödel incompleteness theorem. The
programme was in fact carried through in only one case, a sketch of a “synthetic”
version of Newtonian gravitational theory. In other cases, Field resorted to ar-
guments such as: ‘Good mathematics is conservative; a discovery that accepted
mathematics isn’t conservative would be a discovery that isn’t good’ (SWN, p.
13).
The volume under review is a collection of six previously published articles
dating from 1982 to 1988, with an introductory essay written especially for
the book. Of the six previously published essays, two have been substantially
revised. Most of the essays are closely related to Field’s book in that they
expand upon themes of the book, or reply to criticisms of it. In order they

1
are: a summary of the main argument of the book, a defence of the claim that
mathematical knowledge is just logical knowledge, a reply to criticism based
on the incompleteness results, an attack on Crispin Wright’s version of Frege’s
doctrine that numbers are objects, a lengthy argument in favour of a substantive
view of space-time, and a discussion of the role of modality in mathematical
anti-realism.
As it is impossible to do justice here to all of Field’s long and often convoluted
arguments, I shall focus here on only one essay, the reply to criticism based on
the incompleteness theorems. Replying to Stewart Shapiro, who had written
a long article detailing the criticism sketchily alluded to in the book, Field
indicates several ways out of the dilemma. One is to adopt full second order
logic over a finite dimensional real space as the logical basis (this is the the
choice of his book). A second is to use Henkin’s secondary notion of second-
order logical consequence, instead of the classical notion. This last tack avoids
the problem by evoking a non-standard notion of consequence.
The concept of logical consequence, in fact, is difficult for Field, since as
usually formulated it involves reference to abstract structures (models). His
solution to this is to invoke primitive modal notions of possibility and necessity
to do duty for the usual metalogical notions. The third essay is largely devoted
to elaborating this idea. The approach to modality is similar to that of Carnap.
A good deal of modern North American philosophy has an oddly scholastic
flavour. Among features it has in common with scholasticism are: a preoccupa-
tion with internally generated puzzles, an ingrown attitude of mind, a fascination
with modality, and a very reverential attitude to arguments involving the idea
of causality. Field places great stress on the last of these. His main reason for
disbelief in the existence of mathematical objects is that they cannot participate
in causal interactions (p. 18). Similarly, his reason for holding arbitrary space-
time regions to be nominalistically acceptable is that ‘space-time regions are
now known to be genuine causal agents: that is what field theories like classical
electromagnetism or general relativity or presumably quantum field theory tell
us’ (p. 47). Field shows little interest in the actual content of modern physics
and mathematics, even though his book treats of the foundations of both sub-
jects. Instead, the real focus of his book is the well-worn Quinean theme of
ontological commitment.
The book is well produced, and will be useful to those philosophers who
are still interested in the realism/antirealism debate. For “methodology” read
“method” throughout.