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Monday, August 18, 2008 - 3:36pmSanction this postReply
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What do Objectivists think of Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy? I know Quine is on Objectivism's crap list, but I also know Objectivists tend to agree with him that the dichotomy is bunk, so if we can limit discussion just to his take on the analytic/synthetic dichtomoy, I'd be curious to hear Objectivists' responses.

His critique can be found in his essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." There's a brief wiki article summarizing it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_dogmas. It's not the best wiki. The article is not for the faint of heart! If I need to, I'll try to explain his view here. Hopefully it won't come to that.


Jordan

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008 - 9:56amSanction this postReply
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Great topic for discussion, Jordan!

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

2006 Lecture of B. John Bayer

“Understanding 20th Century Philosophy: The Case of Quine”

 

ABSTRACT

The late W. V. Quine was one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th century, and the story of his philosophy in many ways represents the decline of 20th-century philosophy. This course surveys and evaluates central points of Quine's philosophy. Lecture One presents the views of Quine's philosophic predecessors, the logical positivists, who advanced a brand of empiricism which Quine would later seek to purify. Lecture Two presents Quine's famous criticisms of the positivists' version of empiricism, as presented in his article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." His argument for erasing the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is discussed, along with his proposal that empiricism become more pragmatic. Lecture Three presents the implications of this pragmatism, showing how Quine's principles are co-opted by advocates of skepticism and postmodernist relativism, and how this leads to the destruction of philosophy and science.

 

About Dr. Bayer (scroll down for papers)

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Necessary Factual Truth

 

by Gregory Browne

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Historical Note


Post 2

Saturday, August 23, 2008 - 9:37amSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Stephen. Doesn't look like this topic is getting much traction.

Jordan

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Saturday, August 23, 2008 - 10:28amSanction this postReply
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You suggest discussing Quine, but you wait for other people to do so. Try presenting his argument, and contrasting it within it within the context of his thought with the Objectivist position. I'm sure there would be a response.

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Saturday, August 23, 2008 - 9:40pmSanction this postReply
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But then I wouldn't be asking a question. I'll try to present his argument if it comes to that. I rather it wouldn't. It's not the type of thing that is easy to summarize. But time permitting, I might give it a shot if this thread continues to drift.

Jordan

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Saturday, August 23, 2008 - 11:13pmSanction this postReply
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I only have a bachelor's in philosophy. My advisor was interested in Rand, and read ItOE. He mentioned that Quine had a similar disagreement with the dichotomy. That's the closest I ever got to Quine. You'd have to ecxplain his specific argument to me, because, since I am just not generally interested in mid-level philosopher of the late modern period, I'm not going to bother to look him up, or even have his argument on hand. I think that will be the case for most non-academics here. I do feel perfectly qualified to comment, in a formal way, once I hear his argument. But I'm relying on you to put that forth if you want a discussion.

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Sunday, August 24, 2008 - 5:44amSanction this postReply
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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

Willard Van Orman Quine

1951, 1961

 

"The Laws of Logic"

Arthur Pap

1962

 

The Limits of Logical Empiricism: Selected Papers of Arthur Pap

Alfons Keupink and Sanford Shieh, editors

2005

 

"Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence"

Ernie Lepore

1995

 

"Analyticity Reconsidered"

Paul Boghossian

1996

 

Papers on Analyticity

Keith Korcz’s Epistemology Research Guide

 

The Cambridge Companion to Carnap

Richard Creath and Michael Friedman, editors

2007

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 8/25, 4:17am)


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Sunday, August 24, 2008 - 9:45amSanction this postReply
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Fair enough, Ted. Time pending, I'll try to give summarizing Quine a shot. Thanks, Stephen, for posting the references. One of them actually gives one of the better summaries of Quine's view, which I'll try to incorporate into my own synopsis.

Jordan

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Sunday, August 24, 2008 - 4:24pmSanction this postReply
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Jordan, I think Stephen has done it. I'll respond later.

Post 9

Sunday, August 24, 2008 - 6:50pmSanction this postReply
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Cool.

Jordan

Post 10

Monday, August 25, 2008 - 10:56amSanction this postReply
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From Quine's "Two Dogmas ..." essay:

... it may indeed be conceded (if only for the sake of argument) that rationality is involved in the meaning of the word 'man' while two-leggedness is not; but two-leggedness may at the same time be viewed as involved in the meaning of 'biped' while rationality is not.

Thus from the point of view of the doctrine of meaning it makes no sense to say of the actual individual, who is at once a man and a biped, that his rationality is essential and his two-leggedness accidental or vice versa. Things had essences, for Aristotle, but only linguistic forms have meanings. Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Isn't there error in those words? If there is, then is the error properly attributed to Quine -- or to the champions of the "doctrine of meaning" (or both, if "Quine" and "champions of the doctrine of meaning" have the same extension / referent -- even if they mean different things)?

;-)

Ed


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Monday, August 25, 2008 - 1:52pmSanction this postReply
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Ed,

I don't understand your comment. Well, I don't understand Quine's point in that first paragraph excerpt you quoted either, so that doesn't help.

Jordan

Post 12

Monday, August 25, 2008 - 2:09pmSanction this postReply
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Oh, I think I get it now, having read the quote in context. Quine is comparing Aristotle to the Doctrine of Meaning advocates (DoMs). Quine is pointing out how DoMs don't have a way of figuring out what attribute is essential for an *actual* individual. Could be rationality, could be two-leggedness; DoMs don't have a way of figuring this out.

If I have this right, and I'm not sure I do, then it resembles Sciabarra's critique of non-objectivist philosophies that commit themselves to the extremely difficult position that either no attributes can be essential or they all are.

Jordan

Post 13

Monday, August 25, 2008 - 2:51pmSanction this postReply
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Ok. Here is one of the best summaries I've found of Quine's Two Dogmas. The summary could use some more examples and still gets a bit opaque, but it's way better than wading through Quine's essay, which I find incredibly challenging. The intro and the first section are, I think, most useful.

Jordan
 

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

Curtis Brown
Philosophy of Language

Quine's "Two Dogmas" is a concerted attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction. At first this might seem to be a fairly easily dispensable part of the positivist picture. But Quine shows that it is in fact crucial to the positivist view that theoretical sentences are definable in terms of observation sentences, and thus also to their defense of reductionism and foundationalism.

Criticism of specific accounts of analyticity

Quine's attack consists of two main components. There is, first of all, his discussion of various attempts to characterize the distinction precisely. (This occupies sections 2-5 of the article.) Here are a few of the twists and turns of this discussion. Which sentences are analytic? Perhaps:

(1) those which can be transformed into logical truths by substituting synonyms for synonyms.

But this simply presupposes the notion of synonymy, which is just as much in need of explanation as the notion of analyticity it is supposed to explain. So we might try:

(2) those which are true by definition (= those which can be turned into logical truths by substitution of definitions for the terms they define).

But now we need to know what constitutes a definition. If we want our definitions to accurately reflect actual usage, then we will need to make sure that the definitions only define words in other terms with which they are synonymous: but in that case we are presupposing the notion of synonymy. (Incidentally, Gilbert Harman has used an analogy which is useful in understanding this part of Quine's argument. We may see Quine as arguing that there is no sure-fire way of distinguishing those linguistic regularities that are due to the meanings of our terms and those that are due to our beliefs. We all believe very firmly that cats are animals. But there may be no criterion by means of which to determine whether this is because we think being an animal is part of the meaning of 'cat', or whether whether it is just because the fact that cats are animals is a particularly obvious empirical truth. As Harman puts it, there is no distinction between our mental dictionary and our mental encyclopedia: we just have a bunch of beliefs about cats, with no sharp line between those true in virtue of meaning and those true because of the facts.) Of course, we can simply choose to use one expression as an abbreviation for a longer and more cumbersome one, as we use 'NOW' to abbreviate 'The National Organization for Women'. Even Quine might concede that it is analytic that NOW is a national organization, for instance. But (a) we very rarely use expressions explicitly and exclusively as abbreviations, so this phenomenon certainly cannot provide a general account of analyticity; (b) even in such seemingly obvious cases, it is not entirely clear that there are any analytic truths; for instance, NOW might go international, or perhaps shrink to a single state, without changing its name; again, it might decide its goals are to avoid any sort of discriminatory treatment, whether of women, of men, of racial minorities, or whatever; in such a case it would no longer be an organization specifically for women, but for purposes of recognition it might still retain its familiar name. Thus, even in cases where a certain expression begins as a mere abbreviation, it is likely to take on a life of its own.

General argument against analyticity

The second component of Quine's critique, found in sections 5 and 6 of "Two Dogmas," consists of a general argument against the possibility of analyticity. We may perhaps distinguish in these sections two related lines of argument.
  1. First, Quine makes the point that evidence confirms or disconfirms not particular sentences, taken by themselves, but rather collections of sentences; to put it another way, evidence confirms or disconfirms not just a specific hypothesis, but a whole theory. It takes a good many sentences together to generate any specific predictions about observations; consequently, if a prediction is not borne out, this may be because the hypothesis is false, but it may also be because one of the auxiliary assumptions needed to generate the prediction is false.

    Now, on the positivist account, meaning is a matter of observational consequences. If sentences do not have observational consequences individually, then they do not have meanings individually either. In that case the notion of an analytic sentence, a sentence true solely by virtue of its meaning, simply does not make sense.
  2. The second line of thought is this. According to the positivist view, an analytic sentence is one which is confirmed by anything. It is, we might say, vacuously confirmed.
        Now, if we accept Quine's first point, then we can no longer speak of a particular sentence being confirmed or disconfirmed taken by itself. But we
        might still understand an analytic sentence as one immune from disconfirmation: we could say that a sentence is analytic if we would continue to
        regard it as true regardless of the evidence.

        But Quine's response to this is that there is no special class of sentences which we will hold true come what may. We could hold any sentence to be
        true regardless of the evidence, if we changed our views about enough other sentences; on the other hand, we do not, or should not, regard any
        sentence as "immune from revision," since there may be circumstances in which the best way to revise our overall theory is to give up some sentence
        which had previously seemed unshakeable--even "definitions."

[remaining portion of this essay is omitted]

                                                                             (http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/language/quine_two_dogmas.html)
 
 
 
 


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Monday, August 25, 2008 - 3:35pmSanction this postReply
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Well, here's an even better summary. It really is. Rather than reproduce it here in whole, please just click here.

Jordan


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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 7:11amSanction this postReply
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Jordan,

At times it appears I'm arguing against Quine and, at times, against the author of your last link ...


==================
... he moves on to other problems with Kant's definition:

(a) it [analyticity] is restricted to statements of subject/predicate form (are all analytic truths of the form "X is P"?)
==================

But all true statements can be reduced to the proposition that: reality IS some way (rather than another way), that reality IS like this (rather than not like this), etc. So, in critiquing Kant, Quine errs.


==================
(b) Kant relies on a metaphorical notion of "conceptual containment" that is unexplained
==================

Unlike Quine's criticism of (a), this one sounds both true and relevant.


==================
Lastly, Quine notes, Kant says that analytic propositions are

(c) "true in terms of meanings".

It is here that Quine begins to "dig in". What is meaning?

Quine suggests that many have confused "meaning" with "naming", or "meaning" with "reference". What he means is that there is a difference between the meaning of a term and the extension of the term. Here's an example:

"Mark Twain" and "the man who wrote Huck Finn" actually refer to the same object (the same guy). So they are names for the same person. But they do not have the same meaning. Whereas Mark Twain could not possibly have been anyone but Mark Twain (the person the name refers to) the description "the man who wrote Huck Finn" did not have to refer to Mark Twain.
==================

This criticism presupposes the arbitrary and contradictory mental construction: "true in all possible worlds"-view that had been launched onto mankind by Leibniz. The thinking goes like this:

"But what if reality weren't really like it is "today?" It could have been different, you know. And, in that different reality (the one that we're arbitrarily imagining), someone else could have written Huck Finn."

The counter to this argument may look something like this:

"Really??? Someone else, someone who did not have the unique past and unique psychological constructs of Mark Twain, could have -- word for friggin' word -- written Huck Finn???"

The point is to appeal to a reductio ad absurdum (i.e., that it's totally absurd to just presume that another person could have written a very same novel). Could someone else have written Atlas Shrugged?

:-)

Food for thought?

Ed

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 7:24amSanction this postReply
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Here's more analysis from "From a Logical Point of View":

=============
"... it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may.

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending ... logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics ..."
=============

Interpretation:
We get to hold true any statement we want, providing that we maintain internal consistency (coherence), because external consistency (correspondence) doesn't matter -- either the Correspondence Theory of Truth isn't "true" or, even if it is, it isn't "relevant" to epistemology (which deals with something -- e.g., psychological constructions -- besides truth).

Evaluation:
Quine's critique of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy sucks.

Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 8/26, 7:26am)


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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 8:02amSanction this postReply
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Ed Thompson wrote:
"Mark Twain" and "the man who wrote Huck Finn" actually refer to the same object (the same guy). So they are names for the same person. But they do not have the same meaning. Whereas Mark Twain could not possibly have been anyone but Mark Twain (the person the name refers to) the description "the man who wrote Huck Finn" did not have to refer to Mark Twain.
...
Really??? Someone else, someone who did not have the unique past and unique psychological constructs of Mark Twain, could have -- word for friggin' word -- written Huck Finn???"
 Yup. Samuel L. Clemens wrote Huck Finn. :-)


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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 8:12amSanction this postReply
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More on Quine (possibly-relevant peripheral matters):


================
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: "What is there?" It can be answered, moreover, in a word -- "Everything".
--FLPV, 1
================
My critique of Quine's answer is that it's insufficient (doesn't characterize reality, either in whole or in part) and unacceptable (doesn't address or "fit" the nature of the question).


================
To be is to be the value of a variable.
--ML, 224
================
This might be both true and relevant. It reminds me of Rand's dictum that things have got to exist in some measure or degree, even if unspecified.


================
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 ...
--FLPV, 43
================
This could be taken two ways. One is that man's mind is that special tool that accrues knowledge from reality (whereas animals merely react to instant or memorized characteristics of reality). The less generous interpretation though, is that Quine is a solipsist -- i.e., deserving of ridicule rather than sober analysis (because "no true solipsist" ought to be "respected").


================
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- ... simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. ... Moreover, the abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics -- ultimately classes and classes of classes and so on up -- are another posit in the same spirit. Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.
--FLPV, 44
================
Okay, it's undeniably clear. Quine is a solipsist (more properly deserving of ridicule rather than sober analysis).



================
... we adopt ... the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.
--FLPV, 16
================
What would it take for our experience to be considered "ordered" or "non-fragmented"? Ordered in relation to what? Fragmented from what? Solipsism -- by presupposing that we can't even directly perceive real entities -- does not have the answer to these questions.


=================
Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
--TT, 1
=================
Right, Quine, we get it. We could all be just a bunch of brains in a huge vat. Or, alternatively, there could be just one brain, postulating from triggered receptors which are dangling from it, that other things exist.


================
One man's antinomy can be another man's veridical paradox, and one man's veridical paradox can be another man's platitude.
--WP, 25
================
Interpretation:
We get to play epistemology "deuces wild."


=================
I have been accused of denying consciousness, but I am not conscious of having done so. ... consciousness is a state of the body, a state of nerves.
--Q:IPD, 132
=================
Anti-mind physicalist!!!


=================
The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is ... a repudiation of mind. ... described less harshly as an identification of mind with ... states ... of the body.
--Q:IPD, 133
=================
Anti-mind physicalist!!!


Ed

Post 19

Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 8:14amSanction this postReply
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Good one, Merlin J!

Ed

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