Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis" — Part 2 of 2

Part 1 left the machine in pieces: five shapes pooled into one region, and the moral that the smallest word we have has been leading a double life. Part 2 is where Quine tells you what the second life costs, and the answer is three letters. Not a doctrine, not an argument—a suffix. Add "-ness" to a perfectly innocent adjective and you have just admitted an abstract entity into your ontology, and nobody will stop you, because the grammar does it silently!

In Part 2, Solomon and Clementine work out the bill. Why the ostension of square differs from the ostension of the Cayster by exactly one word—whether identity is imputed across the pointings — and why that one word is the whole difference; how the general term goes deflationary, so that pointing teaches a skill rather than ac ...