Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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-- ShaughanLavine - 24 Oct 2005

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The reason this article is so hard to understand is that you don't know Carnap's Aufbau. It is surprisingly illuminating about a lot of Quine's work to read Dear Carnap, Dear Van, which is the correspondence. Lots and lots of what Quine writes is very specifically directed at Carnap. When he says the "effect is a shift toward pragmatism" (193), he doesn't acknowledge C.I. Lewis's pragmatism.

Traditional empiricism, including the empiricism of Carnap, that of C.I. Lewis, that of Mill, of Russell, of Moore, if can be said to be an empiricist, all rely in important respects on the analytic-synthetic distinction. Mill takes words to have meanings. All of them take claims to have an empirical component and a linguistic component. All of them take those to be distinct, separable components of claims.

Quine, confusingly, only discusses the limiting case of "purely" analytic truths, ones in which there is no empirical (synthetic) component. Since empiricists don't really like such things, those aren't the claims empiricists focus on, and so its hard to see how the argument is supposed to go.

To directly confront traditional empiricist, what he must show is that sentences do not have separate analytic (linguistic, mental) and synthetic (empirical) components. That, in addition to lots of other stuff, will mean that there is no such thing as a purely synthetic claim, and so there can be no such thing as purely empirical knowledge. If a sentence had separate analytic and synthetic components, it would be expressible as a conjunction of an analytic sentence and a synthetic one. There are, for the Aufbau, the verification conditions and what is verified:

"The cat is on the mat" is verified by ... and vilified by _.

That is analytic, according to the Aufbau. Certain observations, to be reported using protocol sentences, suffice to, under suitable circumstance, make the sentence 'the cat is on the mat' "highly probable." For example,

I seem to myself to be seeing feline and Kilim sensations that have the experiential relation I associate with on-ness.

This is, of course, lame, since no one ever agreed on what the protocol sentences look like.

For Mill, you don't have verification conditions, you have meanings associated with terms. For Russell you have logically proper names known by acquaintance plus logic.

Hartry Field gave an illuminating example: F=ma (force is mass times acceleration). Therefore, one way to measure mass is by shoving it. Also, F=gmm'/d2 (gravitational force between two objects is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them). Another way to measure mass is by weighing. These methods are logically independent. Call mass measured by the first method inertial mass; by the second, gravitational mass. We now have two truths of Newton's mechanics: mass=inertial mass mass=gravitational mass

Field asks which of these is analytic and which synthetic?

The only way to give Field's question an answer is to stipulate that one of the two is analytic. But that doesn't answer the original question, which was about the term "mass," not about some related term artificially introduced.

Why does that matter? Why not just work with a regimented philosopher's language as proposed by Frege and by Carnap? Because empiricists are making a claim about our actual knowledge. Nothing Quine says argues against the possibility of such a language; it argues against its utility for drawing the desired conclusions, which are, after all, about physical objects, observation, knowledge in more or less their ordinary senses.

So, traditional empiricism is incoherent. Quine takes his replacement view to be a new form of empiricism. What is empirical about it? Some of our reasons for statements are influenced by experience. Some of our other reasons have to do with relations between statements. We adjust our overall system of relations on pragmatic grounds.

Quine then says we could even be led to adjust our logic. That is a bit of a non sequitur since his entire argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction presupposed the notion of logical truth.