Cuban author and musicologist Alejo Carpentier wrote that Latin American music is a phenomenon like an explosion whose history and evolution, unlike the history of European music, cannot be traced in a linear or coherent pattern. According to Carpentier, Latin American music arises from nowhere as a series of accidents, unplanned events and startling surprises. One might argue that all culture is an accident, but Carpentier's point is intended to emphasize the arbitrary and even violent roots of Latin American music. The music now associated with the countries and regions of Latin America originated from three cultural formations: indigenous American, European and African, but the genealogies of the many products of these sources are not easily traced. Once the Europeans had arrived in the Americas, followed later by the Africans they brought as slaves, the three traditions began to mix and alter, so that it was no longer possible to speak in terms of pure forms, whether European, African or indigenous.

The history of Latin American music is therefore a complicated affair. There are conflicting versions of the origins of many forms, often the result of calculated speculation from uncertain evidence or the consequence of a particular politics of identity. Some musicologists have sought the origins of Argentinian tango in English country dancing of the mid-seventeenth century and have offered a genealogy that passes through the Cuban dance forms, the habanera and contradanza. Their genealogy exemplifies the accidental transformations likely to be undergone by any genre, but overlooks important local phenomena, including the wave of European immigration to South America in the late nineteenth century and the earlier significant presence of black communities in the River Plate republics where tango first appeared.

In this passage from the novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Gabriel García Márquez depicts the impact of 'modernity' on the previously isolated town of Macondo. New technologies of light, speed and sound - 'so many marvellous inventions' - are brought in on what is described as an 'innocent' yellow train, though this innocence is revealed to have more sinister implications as the imperial powers, in the form of the banana company, soon arrive and take charge of the region. A local merchant offers the first movie projection in town, with films and equipment bought in from outside: the very technology of cinema, its cost and sophistication, is seen to reflect and exacerbate the unequal development between 'peripheral' places like Macondo and the metropolitan centres. The new audiences would gradually learn the conventions of documentary and narrative cinema, but the immediate impact of the medium was thrilling, ‘dazzling’, ‘amazing’. The people of Macondo have an immediate empathy with filmic melodrama – and melodrama would be one of the main structuring forces of Latin American cinema – but find the developing ‘star’ system, with celebrated actors in different roles, somewhat less believable. Cinema, which Macondo’s mayor calls ‘a machine of illusions’, is here seen as a most powerful form of entertainment, instruction but also obfuscation.

One main theme in Quine’s philosophy, one that emerged in the very early article “Truth by Convention” (1936), was skepticism toward the notions of meaning and analyticity. These were key notions in the work of Carnap and other philosophers whom Quine regarded highly. His criticism soon spread to the notions of logical necessity and possibility, which, following Carnap and C. I. Lewis, he regarded as closely connected with the former notions. Carnap and Lewis subscribed to the so-called linguistic view on necessity, which Quine formulated this way: “[A[ statement of the form 'Necessarily … ' is true if and only if the component statement which 'necessarily' governs is analytic, and a statement of the form 'Possibly … ' is false if and only if the negation of the component statement which 'possibly' governs is analytic” (RAM 143).

Quine saw two kinds of problems connected with the modal notions. First, like the notions of meaning and analyticity, they are unclear: It is hard to draw a line between what is necessary and what is merely accidental. This is the case with many other notions, too. Where does one draw the line between mountains and mere hills, and when does a man cease being thin haired and become bald? However, the obscurity affecting the modal notions and the notions of meaning and analyticity is of a different and more malignant kind. There is not just vagueness, a problem of difficult borderline cases; even in the seemingly most clear-cut cases, it is difficult to understand what distinguishes the necessary from that which is merely possible. One can, of course, “explain” necessity in terms of possibility: What is necessary is what cannot possibly be otherwise.

Hispanic people in the United States are no longer on the fringes of society. According to the US Census Bureau, 38.8 million lived north of the Rio Grande in 2002. That is only a record of those who are legally present. Many more, perhaps millions, are also part of the United States, although they are not yet full-fledged citizens. Not even the words used to define them are unproblematic. Too many educators, administrators and general readers are unclear as to what exactly the term 'Latino' means. Does it encompass all people with a Hispanic background, regardless of where they are born or currently live? Is the category of race a defining factor? Or is it class, nationality and language? Is Latino literature written exclusively in Spanish and delivered in translation? These misunderstandings are a symptom of a collective need to delineate - to some, simplify - a community that is only recently being considered, in statistics, by politicians and the media, as a single, semi-homogenized group.to journalists like Roberto Suro and Juan González, the definition is becoming more concrete in the public sphere, but not rapidly enough to dispel the scores of questions that abound concerning the background and unity of the minority. The term Latino has come to be used to refer to people of Hispanic background born and/or living in the United States. In terms of their size and their history, they are a minority group made of various national subgroups. The three largest are Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans on the mainland, followed by smaller groups such as Dominican-Americans and Colombian-Americans. In the general imagination, for decades this minority has been addressed in a myriad of ways, from the ‘Spanishspeaking people’ to hispanos to Latins.

In an essay written in 1928, the Peruvian radical intellectual José Carlos Maríategui reflected on literary nationalism:

In recent decades the concept of the nation has been under scrutiny in ways similar to Mariátegui’s critique. But in Spanish America, the creation of nations is inextricably intertwined with literarydevelopment, and no single historical narrative can account for the multiple developments in the literary sphere. National political projects shaped historiography as well as the history and concept of literature because, despite similarities of language and formation within the Spanish heritage, vast geographic extensions and striking cultural differences made Spanish America difficult to conceive without national categories. The dominance of the national framework did not, however, preclude other visions of the future. From the early years of the nineteenth century, independence leaders like Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar envisioned a unified Spanish America joined together by a common linguistic and occidental cultural heritage.

INTRODUCTION

Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation has been described as “the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” Yet it has proved extraordinarily hard to state clearly without trivializing it. An illustration will give a preliminary idea of what it is about.

Suppose a German physicist remarks, 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse'. Then any English-speaking physicist with a knowledge of German will translate that sentence by 'Neutrinos have no mass'. That meshes perfectly with the going scheme for translating between the two languages and raises no problems at all. However, if Quine is right, it would be possible to devise an alternative scheme for translating between German and English that fitted all the relevant objective facts yet offered as its own version of 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse' an English sentence that we should all agree was not even loosely equivalent to 'Neutrinos have no mass'. I cannot say what such an alternative translation would be like. The trouble, according to Quine, is that to produce a complete alternative scheme for translating between a given pair of languages would require too much time and effort to be seriously considered. (The project seems unlikely to attract a grant.) Attempts have been made to construct simple examples, but they are not compelling (see §11). Still, that illustration will serve to convey the general idea – except that without further explanation it is likely to create misunderstandings. I will try to forestall the commonest ones straight away.

Popular culture is a term used to refer to a very broad and diverse array of forms and practices such as salsa, samba, religious ritual and magic, carnivals, telenovelas (television soaps), masks, pottery, weaving, alternative theatre, radio, video and oral narrative as well as the 'wholeway of life', the language, dress and political culture of subordinate classes and ethnic groups. It covers a whole spectrum of cultural practices, which are seen as lying outside the institutionalized and canonized forms of knowledge and aesthetic production generally defined as 'high' culture. These practices have in turn been studied within different disciplinary frameworks and variously defined as 'folk culture', 'mass culture', 'the culture industry' and 'working-class culture'. To gain an understanding of popular culture in Latin America is therefore a challenge to our sociological imagination: it entails examining particular cultural manifestations while simultaneously being aware of how the very object of study, and hence our knowledge of it, is framed in a certainway by a given intellectual tradition or disciplinary framework.

In the 1920s a group of Brazilian intellectuals produced an 'Anthropophagite Manifesto', arguing that they should devour the arts of Europe in order to nourish themselves and to produce a new Brazilian culture, vital and powerful. This image is a helpful way of articulating much of Latin American culture in the twentieth century, as artists and intellectuals have actively soughtways of affirming their strength and autonomy while still acknowledging Europe as an important source of ideas. The cannibal metaphor is also a useful way of approaching the art of earlier centuries: much of the best of colonial art and architecture is not a weak and belated echo of European innovations, as conventional notions of centre and periphery would have it, but a translation or transformation of imported ideas to suit a different context. This chapter will argue that the art and architecture of Latin America are interesting for their selective appropriations and manipulations, for their originality rather than for their dependence.

INTRODUCTION

Our theories of the world are related in various ways to experience. We construct theories partly in order to account for what we have observed and partly in order to systematize and support our expectations for future experience. But what we experience is not sufficient to determine our theories. Different theories may account for our observations equally well. This, roughly speaking, is the thesis that physical theory is underdetermined. W.V. Quine has formulated the idea in different ways in different contexts.

However, before we consider Quine’s formulations, let us look at the following passage from an address delivered by Albert Einstein on the occasion of Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday in 1918:

Brazil's literary narrative began to emerge only after the country's formal independence from Portugal in 1822, and it gained full force only in the second half of the nineteenth century. While generally accompanying the Western literary tradition's major trends and transformations, it has developed its own voice and matured into an important part of a rich and diverse national literature. It has not always received the international acclaim that has been accorded Spanish American literature, but that perhaps has less to do with quality than with the facts that it is written in Portuguese rather than Spanish and that translations have been rather slow in coming. It was not until the 1950s, for example, that turn-of-the-century writer Machado de Assis, whom Susan Sontag has described as 'the greatest author ever produced in Latin America', was translated into English.

Brazil is a continent-sized country with tremendous disparities in wealth and education. Given the country’s historically high rate of illiteracy and relatively small reading public, fictional narrative has largely been a form of expression produced by and for a privileged minority of Brazilians. In absolute terms the number of people with the cultural disposition and cultural capital necessary to consume literary works has grown progressively over time, as access to public education and literacy has expanded, but it continues to be limited in relation to the country’s total population. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is not uncommon for a novel’s initial print run to be no more than three thousand copies. Consequently, it has been difficult for writers to subsist on literature alone, and they have often been economically dependent on such occupations as teaching, journalism and particularly government service.

The painting reproduced on the cover of this volume is entitled EFCB (Estação de Ferro Central do Brasil [Brazil Central Station]). It was painted in 1924 by Tarsila do Amaral, then a member of an avant-garde group of artists and writers based in the main in São Paulo, who were looking to renovate national culture. Nationalism was not defined in narrow, autarchic, terms. One of the main promoters and interlocutors of the group was the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, who, alongside Apollinaire, had 'founded' cubist poetry in 1913. Cendrars had been invited to Brazil in 1924 by the cultural maecenas Paulo Prado, an important promoter of modern art, and he was amazed at the newly extended, vibrant city of São Paulo, whose modern buildings and cosmopolitan culture reflected the wealth of the coffee-producing elite. He wrote a number of 'snapshot' poems about the city, celebrating its scope and achievements - including the railway system and the train station that had been built as a replica of Paddington Station in London. Tarsila's painting is, in this context, a homage both to Cendrars and to Brazilian modernity.

Though there are clear anticipations in Quine’s earlier writings of his commitment to a naturalized epistemology, its first full-dress presentation appears in his essay “Epistemology Naturalized.” I will use this carefully plotted essay as the central guide to Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology, making excursions into earlier and later works where this proves useful

Quine begins this essay declaring that “epistemology is concerned with the foundations of science” (EN 69). Oddly, this opening claim naturally suggests a project quite the opposite of the one he is about to endorse. To speak of the foundations of science suggests an attempt to find some way of validating science as a whole - that is, an attempt to find some way of basing science on something more primitive and more secure than science. This, however, gets Quine’s conception of epistemology pretty much backwards. For Quine, epistemology does not provide an independent standpoint for validating empirical science; instead, empirical science provides the framework for understanding empirical knowledge, including the empirical knowledge provided by empirical science. This reversal represents the revolutionary core of Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology.

Over the last two hundred years there have been continuous debates over the origins, development, identity and future of Latin America. Indeed, this term is itself a Parisian concoction of the 1860s that sought to bestow a terminological unity upon a region that seemed to lack cultural, political, economic and even geographical coherence, particularly to outsiders and especially to Anglo-Americans. Both at home and abroad the quest for a convincing explanation of the evolution of the American ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal has often descended into interpretations based on race or some 'Iberian tradition' or a ubiquitous economic 'dependency'. Whether optimist or fatalist in vision, such essentializing has usually taken on a providentialist spirit and combative tone, but it has rarely matched the assurance of the self-images and ideologies underpinning the popular culture of the United States from the 'manifest destiny' of the 1840s to the globalizing ambition of the post- Cold War era.

As much of the material in this Companion will show, that margin of comparison with ‘the North’ has provided a rich vein of cultural creativity so that even in conditions of economic inferiority and political disadvantage Latin Americans have retained a distinctive identity. By the end of the twentieth century thiswas also true inside the frontiers of the USA itself, where the expansion of the Hispanic population to over 30 million (roughly equivalent to that of Argentina) and the broader effects of globalization had further weakened the over-stressed notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, based on the ideology of Protestant supremacism, and the formal egalitarianism of the Founding Fathers, many of whom held slaves.

To find a ground for poetry which is not an inheritance from the past, however prestigious, nor a programme for social change, however necessary, has been a recurrent preoccupation for Latin American poets. Pablo Neruda's long poem 'Alturas de Macchu Picchu' ('Heights of Macchu Picchu') is one of the key poems where those concerns are worked out: 'Alturas' is itself part of Canto general (1950; Canto general), an epic presentation of the land, prehistory, history and politics of Latin America up until the middle of the twentieth century. Canto general celebrates Latin America as an alternative to already-known histories, a new world and a new definition of the possible. But in 'Alturas', that epic narrative reaches a point of collapse: the magnificence of the native Inca city, whose architecture makes it seem to grow out of the extraordinary subtropical landscape, is not enough. A terrible grief for the nameless, forgotten dead and the hunger and slavery they suffered floods into the poem and extends outwards into a wider need to mourn the unburied and unmourned of later history, from the Spanish Conquest to the dictatorships of the twentieth century. And with that the language itself breaks, and reveals its architecture of unresolved pain and violence, the long burden of conquest, colonialism, hunger and early death secreted in the language spoken by Latin Americans through into the twentieth century and beyond.

No one since Russell has contributed so much to both philosophy and logic as Quine. No major philosopher has given anything like so much to logic, nor has any important figure in logic borne Quine’s stature as a philosopher. His work in the two fields, though distinguishable, has been very much related. He has been a pioneer philosopher of mathematical logic, while he has integrated his view of logic into the very core of his epistemology. I will discuss how logic fits with the rest of Quine’s philosophy and what motivated his choices as an expositor and teacher of logic. I will examine in particular aspects of his text Methods of Logic, now in its fourth edition.

Logic plays a central role in Quine’s philosophy. Quine is preeminently an epistemologist. His epistemology is wedded in interlocking ways to empiricism, naturalism, and physicalism; together they lead him to see science not only as the arbiter of what is to be believed about the world but also as providing the context in which we must make our philosophy. Rather than pursue some first philosophy, we look to science for our bearings: “[I[t is within science … that reality is to be identified and described” (TPT 21). And “the basic structure of the language of science … is the predicate calculus: the logic of quantification and truth-functions” (FM 160).

The concept of 'Latin America' is a mid-nineteenth-century European invention, conjured up as a convenient means of distinguishing the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries from the Anglo-American world which, after the American Revolution, found its most powerful expression in the United States. However, if 'Latin America' was a novel term in the nineteenth-century political lexicon, the societies to which it referred were far from new. The independent Latin American states created in the early 1820s took political control of societies which, during three hundred years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, had been formed by interaction between peoples descended from the Amerindians who were the original peoples of the Americas, the Europeans who came to settle and the Africans who were forcibly carried across the Atlantic into slavery. None of these states was the same: they differed in geographical and demographic scale, ethnic composition and economic resources and potential. But they shared one fundamental feature: their societies, economies and cultures had all been profoundly marked by relations with the Iberian colonial powers in the centuries before independence. Indeed, the Latin America that came into being in the early nineteenth century was, in key respects, still redolent of an older world, with roots that went back to the European discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and beyond, into the past of the Amerindian societies which had developed over thousands of years before Columbus. Any appreciation of modern Latin American culturemusttake account of that historical experience.