EMPIRICISM Quine`s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

Quine
EMPIRICISM
PHIL3072, ANU, 2015
Jason Grossman
http://empiricism.xeny.net
Willard van Orman Quine, 1908–2000
anecdote
PhD supervised by Whitehead.
Very important mathematician.
Taught (e.g.) Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman, David Lewis,
Daniel Dennett and Hao Wang.
lecture 15: 20 October
Quine's “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
Ayer to Quine
Quine is sometimes seen as the great “post-positivist” defeater of the
logical positivists
but he was essentially a logical positivist himself.
e.g., “Our channel of continuing information about the world is the
impact of molecules and light rays on our sensory receptors; just this
and some kinaesthetic incidentals.”
— W. v. O. Quine, “In praise of observation sentences”, The Journal of Philosophy, 1993; XC: 107–116,p. 108
“So far as evidence goes . . . our ontology is neutral. Nor let us imagine
beyond it some inaccessible reality. The very terms `thing' and `exist'
and `real', after all, make no sense apart from human conceptualization.
Asking after the thing in itself, apart from human conceptualization, is
like asking how long the Nile really is, apart from our parochial miles or
kilometers.”
— W. v. O. Quine, “In praise of observation sentences”, The Journal of Philosophy, 1993; XC: 107–116,p. 113
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
1951; revised 1961
“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas.
One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are
analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and
truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.”
— W. v. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1961, http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html, viewed 12/2/2008
And this is not just a dogma of empiricism.
Quine is not completely opposed to the analytic/synthetic
distinction.
In fact he seems to believe in exactly the same distinction as
Hume used in his Fork.
Unlike Hume, he thinks this is bad news for empiricism.
“The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful
statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer
to immediate experience.”
From analyticity to meaning
“Kant's intent . . . can be restated thus: a statement is analytic when it is
true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact.”
— W. v. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1961, http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html, viewed 12/2/2008
But Quine is dubious that that's the case
except in the case of logical analyticity . . .
Two types of analyticity (at least not four any more)
“(1) No unmarried man is unmarried. . . .
is not merely true as it stands, but remains true under any and all
reinterpretations of `man' and `married'. If we suppose a prior inventory
of logical particles, comprising `no', `un-', `not', `if', `then', `and',
etc., then in general a logical truth is a statement which is true and
remains true under all reinterpretations of its components other than the
logical particles.”
— W. v. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1961, http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html, viewed 12/2/2008
Quine has nothing bad to say about this type of analyticity.
But this is the whole of the “relations of ideas” side of Hume's
fork (I think — Hume is not very clear about this) and
It's all that Russell and Carnap need for their reductionist
programs!
And Quine explicitly agrees with this!
A complicating factor is that this rst type of analyticity depends
on logic, and logic may be a moving target.
Quine agrees with Russell
“With regard to the word “synthetic”, the precise de nition is dif cult,
but for our purposes we may de ne it negatively as any proposition
which is not part of mathematics or deductive logic, and is not deducible
from any proposition of mathematics or deductive logic. Thus it
excludes not only `2 and 2 are 4' but also `two apples and two apples
are four apples'.”
Two types of analyticity (at least not four any more)
“(1) No unmarried man is unmarried.”
“(2) No bachelor is married. . . .
can be turned into a logical truth [only] by putting synonyms for
synonyms . . . by putting `unmarried man' for its synonym `bachelor'.”
This is Quine's target.
— Betrand Russell, “Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits”, Allen and Unwin, 1948, p. 516
So his question is whether we can judge sameness of meaning.
He thinks not.
Meaning
The argument against meaning
“For the theory of meaning the most conspicuous question is as to the
nature of its objects: what sort of things are meanings?
“Meanings . . . purport to be entities of a special sort: the meaning of an
expression is the idea expressed.
A felt need for meant entities [!] may derive from an earlier failure to
appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct.”
Now there is considerable agreement among modern linguists that the
idea of an idea . . . is worse than worthless for linguistic science. I think
the behaviorists are right in holding that talk of ideas is bad business
even for psychology.”
This is criticism of Frege and Russell.
“Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of
reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of
meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of
statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may
well be abandoned.”
Linguists do not say that, and didn't in 1951 either. Some
psychologists did (in 1951).
— W. v. O. Quine, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics”, in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1961,
pp. 47–48
Note the almost complete lack of argument for this . . .
A restricted type of synonymy
“we are not concerned here with synonymy in the sense of complete
identity in psychological associations or poetic quality; indeed no two
expressions are synonymous in such a sense.”
So perhaps it's not surprising that non-logical synonymy turns
out to be suspect.
— W. v. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1961, http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html, viewed 12/2/2008 — and all the rest of the
quotes are also from this
Can synonymy be de ned?
“There are those who nd it soothing to say that the analytic statements
of the second class reduce to those of the rst class, the logical truths, by
de nition;
`bachelor,' for example, is de ned as `unmarried man.'
But how do we nd that `bachelor' is de ned as 'unmarried man'?
Who de ned it thus, and when?
Are we to appeal to the nearest dictionary, and accept the
lexicographer's formulation as law?
Clearly this would be to put the cart before the horse.
The lexicographer is an empirical scientist, whose business is
the recording of antecedent facts”
I think this is dead right . . . although again not argued for!
Quine didn't have to argue for all his views, but you do!
Why de nition doesn't give us synonymy
Interchangeability
If the empirical lexicographer “glosses `bachelor' as `unmarried man' it is
because of his belief that there is a relation of synonymy between these
forms, implicit in general or preferred usage prior to his own work.”
“A natural suggestion . . . is that the synonymy of two linguistic forms consists
simply in their interchangeability in all contexts without change of truth value . . .
So?
Note that synonyms so conceived need not even be free from vagueness, as
long as the vaguenesses match.
Why can't he (or she) discover real synonymies from people's
behaviour?
But it is not quite true that the synonyms `bachelor' and 'unmarried man' are
everywhere interchangeable salva veritate.
Especially if behaviourism is right?
Truths which become false under substitution of `unmarried man' for `bachelor'
are easily constructed with help of `bachelor of arts' or `bachelor's buttons.' ”
And even more easily now: `con rmed bachelor'.
Extensionality
“Suppose now we consider a language containing just the following
materials. There is an inde nitely large stock of one-place predicates
(for example, `F' where `Fx' means that x is a man) and many-placed
predicates (for example, `G' where `Gxy' means that x loves y) . . .”
“Such a language can be adequate to classical mathematics and indeed
to scienti c discourse generally, except in so far as the latter involves
debatable devices such as contrary-to-fact conditionals or modal
adverbs like `necessarily'. [!!] . . .
Now [in] a language of this type . . . any two predicates which agree
extensionally (i.e., are true of the same objects) are interchangeable
salva veritate. . . .
therefore, interchangeability salva veritate is no assurance of cognitive
synonymy of the desired type.”
“Empiricism without the dogmas” — the web of belief
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual
matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic
physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, [!] is a man-made fabric
which impinges on experience only along the edges. . . .
A con ict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in
the interior of the eld. Truth values have to be [and can be]
redistributed over some of our statements. . . .
But
the total eld is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions,
experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements
to re-evaluate . . .
No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in
the interior . . . except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium
affecting the eld as a whole.
[So] it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual
statement — especially [or only?!] if it be a statement at all remote from
the experiential periphery”
“Empiricism without the dogmas” — conclusions
“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of
science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light
of past experience.
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as
convenient intermediaries — not by de nition in terms of experience,
but simply as irreducible posits . . .
Ontological questions, under this view, are on a par with questions of
natural science. . . .
Some issues do, I grant, seem more a question of convenient
conceptual scheme and others more a question of brute fact. The issue
over there being [mathematical sets] seems more a question of
convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or
brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have
been urging that this difference is only one of degree.”