Tom Swann Quine Two Dogmas
version in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edtition
Modern empiricism conditioned by - assumption of cleavage between analytic and synthetic, being truth independant of and dependant on the world - (phenomenalist) reductionism: that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.
they are ill-founded concepts. abandoning blurs the boundary between metaphysics and natural science. shift towards pragmatism.
#1) Background for Analyticity Kant, Hume, Liebniz. analyticity as those p where p could not be true, where ~p is self-contradictory but self-condtradiction itself needs explication. Kant: analyticity is when the predicate is contained in the subject. charitable interpretation: analytic when true by viture of meaning alone and not at all by virtue of fact.
Meaning? not = naming, even for singular terms. singular/ general terms don’t purport to name. true of an entity, many or none. extension. =/ meaning. even for names.
Aristotelian essences the forerunner to meaning. P 22 “meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.”
what are meanings? >>>why think of them as objects? couldn’t it be a form of a verb?<<< “once the theory of menaing is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognising as the primary business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary meanings may well be abandoned.”
two classes of analytic statements. ->those that are logically true —>not merely true but true under any substitution of all elements that are not “logical particles” ->those that can be turned into a logical truth by substituting synonyms for synonyms.
depends on notion of synonymnity which is no less clear than analyticity.
Carnap: analyticity by appeal to “state-descriptions”. truth assignment to all atomic statements. analytic if it comes out true on all state-descriptions. // possible worlds. Quine dismisses the idea as silly metaphor >>>wonder what he was thinking 30 years later when possible worlds became an ontological commitment for nearly everyone?<<<
criterion of analyticity in terms of state-descriptions only works for languages taht don’t have extra-logical synonym pairs >>>In the atomic sentences?<<< A reconstruction at best of logical truth, not of analyticity
major difficulty with the latter, not the former.
#2) Definition analyticity as truth by definition? appeal to dictionary? horse before cart.
not clear what necessary and sufficient conditions for synonymy must be based on use
explication - providing an improvement of some definition that is empirically correct. definitions P25 “may serve interchangeably within the favored contexts but diverge elsewhere” “a definition of explicative kind generates, by fiat, a relation of synonymy between definiendum and definiens which did not hold before.” yet this still relies on pre-existing synonymies. >>>doesn’t acknowledging the possibility of partial perfect match leave the door open against his argument? not sure what he’s doing here. ‘improvement’ i guess for some purpose in some context. but isn;t this to point to interchangeabilities that do obtain in a context?“<<<
explicitly conventional definitions economy of stating relations, economy of vocabulary - ease of talk about the language. formal languages as part of a larger whole, rules of translation not adjunct to one language but as correlations between the two (parts).
#3) Interchangeability in all contexts without change in truth-value gives you synonymity?
but not true that paradigm cases actually match this. bachelor and unmarried man thinks of “bachelor of arts”. puts constraint that we only deal with whole words. new problems of wordhood, but forges ahead
is this strong enough - does it leave out heteronymous expressions that might be interechangeable truth-preservingly? P28 “not concerned here with synonymy in the sense of complete identity in psychological associations or poetic quality… only with what may be called /cognitive/ synonymy.”
can conversely explain cognitive synonymy with analyticity. all and only bachelors are unmarried men necessarily all and only bachelors are unmarried men (this shows interchangeability is sufficient for cognitive synonymy.) interchanging we get: necessarily bachelors are married P30 “but can we condone a language which contains such an adverb? Does the adverb really make sense? To suppose that is does is to suppose that we have already made satisfactory sense of ‘analytic’.” >>>why exactly? he moves quickly here.<<<
the argument is revealed as circular in the sense of a “closed curve in space” P30 considers a basic language of predicate logic. adequate to maths and science generally, except for any counterfactuals or modals that might be involved. extensional language: any two predicates which agree extensionally (are true of [all and only] the same objects) are inter-changeable truth-preservingly.
therefore in an extensional language, extensionality is no guarentee to cognitive significance of desired type. no guarentee that not true in virtue of meaning rather than just how extensions should happen to line up.
“for most purposes extensional agreement is the nearest approximation to synonmy we need care about” interchangeability in a language involving “necessarily” does provide sufficient condition for analyticity, but this term itself needs to be interpreted, and Quine can’t see how but other than by appeal to analyticity.
maybe it’s a wrong turn to tyr to explain cognitive synonymy first. how about trying analyticity via something else? then: cognitive synonymy is interchangability analyticity-preservingly.
I think there’s a lot in this section to question. Why necessarily is to be interpreted via analyticity? Nowdays I think many people would just appeal to possible worlds.<<<
#4) Semantical Rules often said that the difficulty seperating analytic from synthetic is due to the messiness of ordinary language. Quine thinks this is a confusion. analyticity relative to a language. problem remains for artifical languages. from Carnap. different semantical rules. L0: languages with rules that specify by recursion all of the analytic statements. presupposes analycity, doesn’t explain. does allow K = analytic-for-L0. but not analytic-for-LX. another type of semantical rule: these sentences are true. all but not only. analyticity as truth according to a rule. but no progress here: what is a semantical rule? not all true statements that says some statements are true can count, as then all statements would be analytic.
semantical rule compared with postulates P35 “the word ‘postulate’ is significant only relative to an act of inquiry” semantical rule understood as relative to the enterprise of teaching people the truth conditions for a language. “but from this P O V. no one signalization of a subclass of the truths of L is intrinsically more a semantical rule than another” which means all truths are analytic.
“semantical rules determining the analytic statements of an artificial language are of interest only in so far as we already understand the notion of analyticity; they are of no help in gaining this understanding.”
P36 “Appeal to hypothetical languages of an artificially simple kind could conceivably be useful in clarifying analyticity, if the mental or behavioural or cultural factors relevant to analyticity-whatever they may be-were somehow sketched into the simplified model. But a model which takes analyticity merely as an irreducible character is unlikely to throw light on the problem of explicating analyticity” >>>Unannounced entry of such things into his considerations. what is provided by such factors as such that is not provided by anything else?<<<
“it is an obvious fact that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact.” hence temptation to think that truth of a statement is analyzable into a linguistic and a factual component. hence for some statements the factual component is null. but for all its reasonableness, the boundary has not been drawn. a metaphysical article of faith.
#5) The verification theory and Reductionism from Peirce onwards. that the meaning of a statement is the method of empirically confirming or infirming it. an analytic statement is that limiting case which is confirmed no matter what.
pass over meanings as entities and go straight to sameness of meaning.
I got bored at this point, skipped to the last section, will come back here soon as it’s obviously pretty important. Probably more so for my purposes thn the earlier stuff.
#6) Empiricism without the Dogmas
P42 “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs… is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges” >>>shouldn’t it rather be that experience impinges on it?<<< “Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occaisons redjustments in the interior of the field. Truth-values have to be redistributed over some of our statements.” >>>this mixes the metaphor. we don’t antecedently distribute truth-values over all possible beliefs. we don’t even assign to most of them a value representing our agnosticism. most possible beliefs are not even believable for us except at some epistemic distance from us over which work must be done to bring them to our consideration<<<
“Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections - the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements in the field”
how can all statements be logically interconnected, and yet the logical laws, presumably in terms of which they are so connected, also be parts of the field. what could connect the logical laws to all other statements as that which connects all other statements with each other? is looking for something we could call the relativisation of form and content — although I don’t think he’d be concerned about thinking of it in this way.<<<
Total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.
misleading to speak of empirical content of an individual statement - especially if it is a statment at all remote from the experiental fringe. folly to seek a boundary between synthetic and analytic; any statement can be held true come what may, no statement immune to revision.
now let me drop the metaphor certain statements, not thought about sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience, and selectively “but in this relation of”germaneness”, I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our chooseing one statment rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience.”
this means that the “recalcitrant experience” at the end either says nothing new, by picking out those experiences that do cause changes in the web, or it implies that such changes are rational, whereas the idea of “relative likelihood of change” does not seem exclusively or even particularly rational.<<<
we can imagine what it would take to make us inclined to accomodate certain experiences into our system by reevaluating only some small cluster of statements P44 “our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon” whatever smallest changes would accomodate experiences. “these statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements” >>>this being felt is of course not the same as it being the case…<<<
Quine the empiricist: conceptual scheme of science is a tool for predicting future experience “physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries, not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.” does as a matter of fact believe in objects and not Homer’s gods, considers it “a scientific error to believe otherwise”. >>>normative notion!<<< the epistemological difference here is of degree and not kind. ’both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits” “the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience”. >>>as though there were other options available to us?<<<
“objects at the atomic level are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, siompler and more manageable” >>>Ha!<<< “science is a continuation of common sense, and it continues the common-sense expedient of swelling ontology to simplify theory.” >>>what is common-sense here? just the features of the web we happen to have and tend to share, right?<<< P45 “the edge of the system must be kept squared with experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths or fictions, has as its objective the simplicity of laws.” Ontology on part with science. Carnap argues that choosing whether or not to quantify over some thing is a matter of “choosing a convenient language form”. Quine agrees, but thinks the same can be said for scientific hypotheses generally. Carnap preserves the double standard between science and framework only by assuming an absolute distinction between analytic and synthetic, which quine rejects.
questions of scheme down to questions of fact a matter of degree. more thorough going pragmatis. P46 “Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.” >>>What a tease. the pragmatism is that it can be rational only in the sense of pursuing some goals? and Quine is assuming the goal is (should be?) just to maximise and balance simplicity with stength? and yet Quine is giving up on trying to say anything systematic about this? <<<