Quine's ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’: or The Power of Bad Logic

Philosophical Investigations 18:4 October 1995 ISSN 0190-0536

Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’: or The Power of Bad Logic

Geoffrey Hunter

Quine’s article is probably the most influential single paper published since the war. Its influence is not deserved.

Testimonials:

Quinton: By 1960 [Quine] had converted the ablest younger British philosophers &om the hitherto dominant linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin. (Fontana Biographical Companion to Modern Thought, ed. A. Bullock & R.B. Wooding, 1983, p. 621) [Quine’s Word and Object did not appear until 1960.1

Alex Callinicos: There is little doubt that W.V. Quine is the most influential living philosopher in the English-speaking world . . . Two texts in particular are justly celebrated.

The first, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951), involves the deconstruction of logical positivism . . . Although he agrees with Camap that natural language is defective, and requires ‘regimenta- tion’ to be brought into line with the perspicuous structures of formal logic, Quine rejects his philosophy of language, as stated by the two dogmas. The first is the claim that meaninghl sentences are either analytic, statements such as ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ which are true by virtue of the meaning of their con- stituent words, or synthetic, asserting matters of empirical fact. Quine argues that the concept of analyticity can be reduced only to such equally obscure notions as synonymy. He concludes that no sharp distinction can be drawn between analytic and synthetic. The meanings of the words we use are inseparable from our empirical belief%.. The second dogma concerns the manner in which we determine these meanings . . . [Quine] denies , . . that sentences can be verified individually, invoking Duhem to show that the truth or falsity of each sentence can be established only in conjunction with our entire system of belief%..

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One implication of this argument is a holist theory of meaning, such that the sense of an individual sentence is determined by its place in the network of sentences constituting a given language . . . If the truth or filsity of a sentence depends on that of all the other sentences of a language, then we may well choose to pro- tect a favoured hypothesis from rehtation by an inconvenient observation, provided that we are prepared to make the necessary adjustments elsewhere in our belie& . . . The underdetermination of theory by evidence reappears in the first chapter of Word and Object (1960) . . .

These arguments . . . are part of a distinctive philosophical approach, one that treats philosophy as a branch of natural science concerned to explain the capacity of certain primates to construct very complex conceptual structures on the basis of the sensory inputs they receive . . . This naturalism . . . helps to explain his profound hostility to any attempt to account for linguistic behav- iour by attributing to speakers inner and unobservable mental states. The data on which our theories of language are built can only be behavioural - speakers’ overt dispositions to assent to or dissent &om sentences. Hence Quine’s suspicion of such occult properties as synonymy and analyticity, and of intensional discourse . . . There can be no doubting the force and elegance of Quine’s arguments. (Thinkers 4 the Twentieth Century, ed. E. Devine, M. Held, J. Vinson, G. Walsh, Firethom Press, 1985, p. 460)

David Papineau: I

What is the difference between science and philosophy? Thirty years ago the orthodox Oxford answer was that, where science accumulates facts, philosophy analyses concepts. But W.V. Quine’s argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction has shown us that this answer will not do. Science itself depends on conceptual innovation as much as on simple data-gathering. And philosophy cannot manage without at least some substantial assumptions about human beings and the world they inhabit. The dismantling of the barrier between science and philosophy has cast a number of familiar philosophical problems in a new light . . . (Review in the Times Hisher Education Supplement 19/9/86)

Stephen Stich: Recent years have been witness to extraordinary developments in American philosophy, among which perhaps the most encouraging has been the maturation of the seeds planted by Dewey more than a half century ago. Dewey advocated the wholesale rejection of boundaries separating philosophy &om the sciences, and in one domain afler another those boundaries have indeed begun to dis- solve. (Review in Philosophical Review January 1987)

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I1 Very brief summary of ‘Two Dogmas’

First part (Sections 1-4)

Quine asks whether there is a genuine distinction between so-called analytic and so-called synthetic statements.

He considers accounts of analyticity in terms of the notions of

self-contradiction meanings definition synonymy semantical rules

Each account he rejects on the ground that the terms in which the account is given presuppose in one way or another the very notion to be explained.

He concludes the 4th Section with: ‘A boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of fiith.’

Second part (Sections 5 and 6) ‘Our statements about the external world hce the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.’

‘The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.’ ‘Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make

drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.’ ’The considerations which guide [a man] in warping his sci-

entific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.’ [That is, it is a matter of what we find works, rather than a matter of truth.]

111 ‘A few. . . little ones . . . in the evening. . .’ I am indebted to Isaiah Berlin for telling me about an exercise in Greek he had to do at school. He was required to put into Greek a piece about two men, one a believer, the other a sceptic, who dis- agreed about the existence of hippogryphs. Worn down by the sceptic’s arguments the believer was finally reduced to saying: ‘Well, would you allow that there are a few . . . little ones . . . in the evening?’ Quine starts off as a sceptic about the existence of analytic

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truths, but quite quickly allows that there are a few, little ones, in the evening.

In Section 1: ‘Statements which are analytic by general phdo- sophical acclaim . . . fall into two classes. Those of the first class, which may be called logically true, are typlfied by:

(1) No wnmanied man is mamed.

The relevant feature of this example is that it not merely is 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, com- prising “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.’

Later: ‘The major difficulty lies not in the first class of analytic statements, the logical truths, but rather in the second class, which depends on the notion of synonymy.’

1.e.: There aren’t any analytic truths - or, at least, only a few, little ones, in the evening.

It is true that in Section 6 Quine claims that so-called logical laws may be amended, citing a proposed revision of the law of excluded middle to simplift quantum mechanics. But even if that proposal could be sustained, that would show only that the so-called law of excluded middle wasn’t a law of logic after all - and nothing would have been done to show that the great bulk of so-called logical laws could, even in principle, be amended.

[E.g. From No X s are Ys you may validly infer No Ys are X. From Every X is a Y and every Y is a Z you may validly infer Every

X i s a Z ]

IV The Socratic Fallacy

That is, arguing fiom

You can’t define the word X to

You don’t know what the word X means.

[Ignore the historical question whether Socrates or the ‘Socrates’ of the early Platonic dialogues committed this fallacy. Just treat the name as a usefid label.] 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1995

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Quine has a variant of this fallacy in his ‘Two Dogmas’: he argues fiom

You cannot give a non-circular verbal characterization of an alleged concept X

to Your belief that there is a concept X is an unempirical dogma, a metaphysical article of faith.

If this argument were valid, among our unempirical dogmas would be our belief that there are such concepts as truth, colour, virtue,finite.

Cf Plato, Republic 336d (Thrasymachus), 337a-b (Socrates). [Here ‘Thrasymachus’ commits the mistake, and ‘Socrates’ points it out.]

V

Because Quine commits hs variant of the Socratic Fallacy, his arguments that we have considered so far fail utterly to establish that a distinction between analytic and synthetic is uncritical or ill- grounded.

But there is a cluster of Quine’s arguments we haven’t yet looked at in detail, namely arguments intended to make us doubt the utility or meaningfblness of talk about the meanings of expressions. These arguments come in two different versions, viz. (1) In the version of ‘Two Dogmas’ that appeared in The Philosophical Review January 1951; (2) In the shortened version of ‘Two Dogmas’ published in Quine’s From A hgical Point Of View, where in addition there are references in a footnote to some pages in other papers in that collection. [Note: The version most kquently published in anthologies is Version 2 without thefootnote or the material it refers to.]

Let us look then at what Quine says about meaning and meanings in ‘Two Dogmas’.

(I am at present concerned only with Sections 1-4: Sections 5 and 6 will be dealt with later.)

Paragraph on p. 22 of original version, beginning ‘The Aristotelian notion’:

What is this ‘modern notion of intension or meaning’ of which Quine speaks? Certainly the word ‘intension’, in Sir William Hamilton’s use, is modem (mid nineteenth century). But ‘meaning’?

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Is that a modem notion? The big Oxford dictionary cites someone speaking in the year 1303 of the meaning of something said. And of course long before that Biblical and classical commentators writing in Latin or Greek had raised questions about the meaning of words and passages in the texts they were commenting on.

Quine goes on to speak briefly of Aristotelian essences and concludes ‘Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced fiom the object of reference and wedded to the word.’

If the suggestion is that the notion of meaning is historically later than Aristotle’s theory of essence, it needs some defence, though it may be true. Did the Greeks before Aristotle have a substantival expression meaning ‘the meaning [of a word or expression]’, as opposed, for example, to ‘the object s imied [by an expression]’? Even if they did not, characters in Aristophanes and Plat0 raise questions about what expressions mean. And it does seem a bit far-fetched to suppose that whenever people ask to be told the meaning of a word they are committed to a ghost of the Aristotelian theory of essences.

The paragraph in reprinted versions beginning ‘For the theory of meaning’ replaces three paragraphs in the version that appeared in The Philosophical Review. Since Quine’s attitude to meaning is crucial for understanding ‘Two Dogmas’, I give both versions in full (A and B below):-

A . Philosophical Review, January 1951, p p . 22-23

‘For the theory of meaning the most conspicuous question is as to the nature of its objects: what sort of things are meanings? They are evidently intended to be ideas, somehow - mental ideas for some semanticists, Platonic ideas for others. Objects of either sort are so elusive, not to say debatable, that there seems little hope of erecting a fruitfil science about them. It is not even clear, granted meanings, when we have two and when we have one; it is not clear when linguistic forms should be regarded as synonymous, or alike in meaning, and when they should not. If a standard of synonymy should be arrived at, we may reasonably expect that the appeal to meanings as entities will not have played a very usehl part in the enterprise.

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of meaning is sharply separated fiom 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.

‘The description of analyticity as truth by virtue of meanings started us off in pursuit of a concept of meaning. But now we have abandoned the thought of any special realm of entities called meanings. So the problem of analyticity confi-onts us anew.’

B. From A Logical Point of View, 1980 printing, p. 22

‘For the theory of meaning a conspicuous question is the nature of its objects: what sort of things are meanings? A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated &om the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing 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 entities, may well be abandoned.’

A footnote to that paragraph refers us to two other passages in From A Logical Point Of View. Here are those passages (C and D below):-

C . From ‘On what there is’ (1948)

‘However, McX hits upon a different stratagem. “Let us grant,” he says, “this distinction between meaning and naming of which you make so much. Let us even grant that ‘is red’, ‘pegasizes’, etc. are not names of attributes. Still, you admit they have meanings. But these meanings, whether they are named or not, are s t i l l universals, and I venture to say that some of them might even be the very things that I call attributes, or something to much the same purpose in the end”.

‘For McX, this is an unusually penetrating speech; and the only way I know to counter it is by refusing to admit meanings. However, I feel no reluctance toward rehsing to admit meanings,

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for I do not thereby deny that words and statements are meaningfil. McX and I agree to the letter in our classification of linguistic forms into the meaningful and the meaningless, even though McX con- strues meaningfulness as the having (in some sense of ‘having’) of some abstract entity which he calls a meaning, whereas I do not. I remain fiee to maintain that the fact that a given linguistic utterance is meaningfil (or signijcant, as I prefer to say so as not to invite hypostasis of meanings as entities) is an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact; or, I may undertake to analyze it in terms directly of what people do in the presence of the linguistic utterance in question and other utterances similar to it.

‘The useful ways in which people ordinarily talk or seem to talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy. What is called giving the meaning of an utterance is simply the uttering of a synonym, couched, ordinarily, in clearer language than the original. If we are allergic to meanings as such, we can speak directly of utterances as sigmfkant or insignificant, and as synonymous or heteronymous one with another. The problem of explaining these adjectives “significant” and “synonymous” with some degree of clarity and rigor - preferably, as I see it, in terms of behavior - is as difficult as it is important. But the explanatory value of special and irreducible intermediary entities called meanings is surely illusory.

‘Up to now I have argued that we can use singular terms sign& candy in sentences without presupposing that there are the entities which those terms purport to name. I have argued hrther that we can use general terms, for example, predicates, without conceding them to be names of abstract entities. I have argued hrther that we can view utterances as significant, and as synonymous or heteronymous with one another, without countenancing a realm of entities called meanings . . .’

D. From ‘The problem ofmeaning in linguistics’ (1951)

‘. . . Meanings . . . purport to be entities of a special sort . . . ‘Let us then look back to the lexicographer, supposed as he is to

be concerned with meanings, and see what he is really trafficking in if not in mental entities. The answer is not far to seek the lexicographer, like any linguist, studies linguistic forms. He differs fiom the 0 Blackwell Pubhhrhcn Ltd. 1995

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so-called formal linguist only in that he is concerned to correlate linguistic forms with one another in his own special way, namely, synonyms with synonyms. The characteristic feature of semantical parts of linguistics, notably lexicography, comes to be not that there is an appeal to meanings but that there is a concern with synonymy.

‘What happens in this maneuver is that we fm on one important context of the bafEng word “meaning”, namely the context “alike in meaning”, and resolve to treat this whole context in the spirit of a single word “synonymous”, thus not being tempted to seek meanings as intermediary entities. But, even supposing that the notion of synonymy can eventually be provided with a satisfactory criterion, s t i l l this maneuver only takes care of the one context of the word “meaning” - the context “alike in meaning”. Does the word also have other contexts that should concern linguists? Yes, there is certainly one more - the context “having meaning”. Here a parallel maneuver is in order: treat the context “having meaning” in the spirit of a single word, “sigtllficant”, and continue to turn our backs on the supposititious entities called meanings.

‘. . . The grammarian and the lexicographer are concerned with meaning to an equal degree, be it zero or otherwise: the grammarian wants to know what forms are significant, or have meaning, while the lexicographer wants to know what forms are synonymous, or alike in meaning. If it is urged that the grammarian’s notion of significant sentences should not be viewed as resting on a prior notion of meaning, I applaud; and I say the lexicographer’s notion of synonymy is entitled to the same compliment. What had been the problem of meaning boils down now to a pair of problems in which meaning is best not mentioned; one is the problem of making sense of the notion of si&icant sequence, and the other is the problem of making sense of the notion of synonymy. What I want to emphasize is that the lexicographer had no monopoly on the problem of meaning. The problem of sigtllficant sequence and the problem of synonymy are twin offspring of the problem of meaning.’

Passages A, B, C and D constitute Quine’s entire argument up to the end of Section 1 for not giving any hrther consideration to accounts of analyticity in terms of meaning. Since the most popular account of analytic propositions among philosophers both in 1950 and now would be something along the following lines,

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Analytic propositions are true propositions that are true simply and solely in virtue of the words that occur in them having the meanings they do (or having the meanings they are made to have by the user) and not in virtue of any other facts [N.B. the penulti- mate word],

it matters a good deal to Quine’s argument whether his reasons for giving no further consideration to such an account are any good. So let us examine his arguments.

Passage A

Quine’s arguments:-

1. Meanings are intended to be either mental ideas or Platonic ideas. Both sorts of ideas are elusive, so there seems little hope of erecting a him science upon them.

2. It is not even clear, granted meanings, when we have two and when we have one.

3. It is not clear when linguistic forms should be regarded as synonymous and when they should not. ‘If a standard of synonymy should be arrived at, we may reasonably expect that the appeal to meanings as entities will not have played a very usefd part in the enterprise.’

4. The only business of the theory of meaning is with the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements. ‘Meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.’

So, according to Quine, we need give no further consideration to accounts of analyticity in terms of meanings.

To 1.

A) Quine sees the choice as between Camap’s ‘Fido’-Fido theory of meaning and some sort of stimulus-response theory, and plumps for the latter. He never considers accounts of meaning as use/function/job, although publications giving such accounts were available before 1951 (e.g. Ryle’s review of Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity came out in January 1949. Quine gave his paper orally at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Toronto Q Bkckwell F’ubluhm Lcd. 1995

Ceofiey Hunter 315

in December 1950.). Those accounts do not identify meanings either with psychological entities or with Platonic entities.

B) If Quine’s argument were any good, it would apply to numbers as well as meanings, for numbers look like Platonic entities, if any things do - yet there is a perfectly good science of numbers.

To 2 .

A) Note ‘granted meanings’. What puts Quine in a position to grant or not grant meanings? People have talked for centuries about the meanings of words and have understood each other so talking.

B) Is it really never clear when we have two meanings and when we have not? Lexicographers may have doubts in some cases, but they aren’t always in doubt.

To 3 .

A) Is it really never clear when two expressions are synonymous and when they are not? E.g. is there any doubt that ‘gorse’ and ‘furze’ are synonymous, or that ‘courage’ and ‘bravery’ are, or ‘perambula- tor’ and ‘baby-carriage’, or ‘memento’ and ‘souvenir’? Is there any doubt that ‘anecdote’ and ‘antidote’ are not synonymous? ‘Compose’ and ‘comprise’? ‘Contemptible’ and ‘contemptuous’, ‘ingenious’ and ‘ingenuous’, ‘perpetrate’ and ‘perpetuate’, ‘disinter- ested’ and ‘uninterested’, ‘militate’ and ‘mitigate’, ‘refhe’ and ‘deny’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘barbaric’, ‘oral’ and ‘verbal’?

B) What is meant by ‘If a standard of synonymy should be arrived at’? We already have perfectly good ways of telling whether or not two expressions are synonymous.

C) It is perfectly true that in considering whether or not two expressions are synonymous you will appeal to the judgment of competent users of the language or languages, and that you will not say much, if anything, about ‘meanings as entities’. But does it fol- low &om that that all accounts of analyticity in terms of meanings deserve no brther consideration? Of course not.

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To 4 .

A) We raise questions about the meaning of ‘arete’ in Greek, or the meaning of the word ‘imagination’, or the meaning of the word ‘this’, or the meaning of the proper name ‘W.V. Quine’, where we don’t expect to find exact synonyms in Enghsh. When the big Oxford Dictionary says of ‘good’ that it is ‘The most general adjec- tive of commendation’, it is not giving a synonym. That is, questions about meaning are not always to be answered by the pro- duction of synonyms - or analytic truths.

B) Why ‘obscure’? Outside philosophy we talk of the meanings of words, and are understood. ‘A single bullet did the job. The caribou sank on the snow with a broken spine, and the Indians left the sledge and raced downhill to the gralloch’ (John Buchan, Sick Heart River, p. 270). What is the meaning of the word ‘gralloch’ there? That question is perfectly intehgible to you, even if you don’t know the answer.

That is all we have in Passage A by way of argument fiom Quine for not going on to consider any hrther the notion of meaning. None of his arguments is any good. Now let us consider the other passages. Passage B is wholly contained within Passage A - except that the claim in the original version that ‘the business of the theory of meaning [is] simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements’ is weakened in the reprinted versions to ‘the primary business . . .’ So we still haven’t got any good arguments. What of Passages C and D? Both say the same things: ‘I rehse to admit or countenance meanings. Instead of talking about expressions having meanings, we can talk about them being significant, and instead of talking about expressions having the same meaning or different meanings, we can talk about them being synonymous or heteronymous. That is all that is needed for serious work. In particular, we do not need to think or talk about meanings as abstract entities.’ Compare: ‘I refuse to admit or countenance functions/ uses/jobs. Instead of talking about tools having hnctions or uses or jobs, we can talk about them as being functional or useful, or as jobbing, and instead of talking about tools having the same or dlfferent hnctions, we can talk of them being equihnctional or aliofunctional. That is all that is needed for serious work. In particular, we do not need to think or talk about functions or uses or jobs as abstract entities.’ But why shouldn’t we talk about the hnction of a hammer or a carburetor or a transistor as

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an abstract entity? You can see a hammer being used, but thefirrution ofa hammer is not anything you see, touch, taste, hear or smell. Since the meaning of a word is its function/use/job, and a job is an abstract entity, so is the meaning of a word. Plato showed long ago (Sophist 242-251) that it is not part of the meaning of ‘exists’ that everydung that exists is perceptible. Even if, as Tarski put it, to you ‘inimicus Plato’, I hope that, again as Tarski put it, to you ‘sed magis inimica falsitas.’ We have already seen also (‘To 4. A)’ above) - and in Version 2 Quine concedes the point - that not all questions about what the meaning of a word is can be answered by giving a synonym.

The explanation for Quine’s failure to consider reasonable theories of meaning is partly (1) the influence of Carnap on him and partly (2) Quine’s theory that philosophy is a branch of science (which he deduces fiom his rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction: cf. Papineau and Stich in section 1 above).

(1) Quine is reacting against Carnap and hs ‘Fido’-Fido theory of meaning. Carnap looms so large in his sights that Quine doesn’t see anything else. Rylean and Wittgensteinian accounts of meaning are not in his field of vision at all. Since they are in essentials right, that is rather a defect in Quine.

(2) As for Quine’s theory that philosophy is a branch of science, I shall say more about that later (section IX).

In passing, Kant, who introduced the term ‘analflc’ in the tech- nical sense we are concerned with, gave one account of it in terms of self-contradiction. It is a little surprising that Quine dismisses that account so quickly, given that he uses the notion of self-contradiction without explanation or qualm in his own work on formal logic.

Conclusion so far: Up to the end of Section 4 Quine hasn’t produced any good argument to justify his claim that no decent account of analyticity can be given in terms of meaning. There remain Sections 5 and 6.

VI

‘The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science’ (Quine): or, What is. true isn’t new, and what is new isn’t true.

Section 5 ends with the sentence quoted above. So far as I can see, there is no actual argument for that claim. (Quine says such things as

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‘My countersuggestion . . .’, ‘My present suggestion . . .’, ‘What I am now suggesting. . .’)

What does that sentence mean? ‘You cannot understand any empirical statement unless you understand the whole of science’? If it does mean that, it just isn’t true. To understand ‘The headed paper is in the top drawer’ or ‘It is raining’ or ‘We have been invited to dinner’ or many other utterances, pretty plainly you don’t have first to understand ‘the whole of science’, whatever that is.

Quine refers to Duhem. Here is what Duhem says (La Thtorie Physique: Son Objet, Sa Structure, 1906, in the Enghsh translation by P.P. Wiener, under the title The Aim and Structure $Physical Science, originally Princeton University Press, page numbers &om the paper- back, Atheneum, New York, 1962):

‘Between the phenomena really observed in the course of an experiment and the result formulated by the physicist there is inter- polated a very complex intellectual elaboration . . . What the physicist states as the result of an experiment is not the recital of observed facts, but the interpretation and the transposing of these facts into the ideal, abstract, symbolic world created by the theories he regards as established . . . We must enquire very caremy into the theories which the physicist regards as established and which he used in interpreting the facts he has observed. Without knowing these theories it is impossible for us to understand the meaning he gives to his own statements . . .’ (Eng. tr. pp. 153,159)

‘Physics is not a machine which lets itself be taken apart; we cannot try each piece in isolation and, in order to adjust it, wait until its solidity has been carefully checked. Physical science is a system that must be taken as a whole; it is an organism in which one part cannot be made to hnction except when the parts that are most remote fiom it are called into play, some more so than others, but all to some degree.’ (pp. 187-8)

‘Physics . . . is a symbolic painting in which continual retouching gives greater comprehensiveness and unity, and the whole of which gives a picture resembling more and more the whole of the experimental ficts, whereas each detail of this picture cut off and isolated fiom the whole loses all its meaning . . .’ (pp. 204-5)

‘Go into this laboratory; draw near this table crowded with so much apparatus: an electric battery, copper wire wrapped in silk, vessels filled with mercury, coils, a small iron bar carrying a mirror. 0 Blackwell PubUlcn Ltd. 1995

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An observer plunges the metahc stem of a rod, mounted with tub- ber, into s m a l l holes; the iron oscillates and, by means of the minor tied to it, sends a beam of light over to a celluloid ruler, and the observer follows the movement of the light beam on it. There, ho doubt, you have an experiment; by means of the vibration of this spot of light, this physicist minutely observes the oschtions of the piece of iron. Ask him now what he is doing. Is he going to answer: ‘I am studying the oscillations of the piece of iron carrying this mirror’? No, he will tell you that he is measuring the electrical resis- tance of a coil. If you are astonished and ask him what meaning these words have, and what relation they have to the phenomena he has perceived and which you have at the same time perceived, he will reply that your question would require some very long explanations, and he will recommend that you take a course in electricity.’ @. 145)

‘Let us take another example. Regnault is studying the compressibility of gases; he takes a certain quantity of gas, emloses it in a glass tube, keeps the temperature constant, and measures the pressure the gas supports and the volume it occupies.

‘There you have, it will be said, the minute and exact observation of certain phenomena and certain facts. Certainly, in the hands and under the eyes of Regnault, in the hands and under the eyes of his assistants, concrete facts were produced; was the recording of these facts that Regnault reported his intended contribution to the advancement of physics? No. In a sighting device Remault saw the image of a certain surface of mercury become level with a certain line; is that what he recorded in the report of his experiments? No, he recorded that the gas occupied a volume having such and such a value. An assistant raised and lowered the lens of a cathetometer until the image of another height of mercury became level with the hairline of the lens; he then observed the disposition of certain lines on the scale and on the vernier of the cathetometer; is that what we find in Regnault’s memoir? No, we read there that the pressure supported by the gas had such and such a value. Another assistant saw the thermometer’s liquid oscdlate between two line-marks; is that what he reported? No, it was recorded that the temperature of the gas had varied between such and such degrees.

‘Now, what is the value of the volume occupied by the gas, what is the value of the pressure it supports, what is the degree of temperature to which it is brought? Are they three concrete objects? No,

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they are three abstract symbols which only physical theory connects to the facts really observed.

‘In order to form the first of these three abstractions, the value of the volume of the enclosed gas, and to make it correspond with the observed fact, namely, the mercury becoming level with a certain line-mark, it was necessary to calibrate the tube, that is to say, to appeal not only to the abstract ideas of arithmetic and geometry and the abstract principles on which they rest, but also to the abstract idea of mas and to the hypotheses of general mechanics as well as of celes- tial mechanics which justif) the use of the balance for the comparison of masses; it was necessary to know the specific weight of mercury at the temperature when the calibration was made, and for that its specific weight at 0’ had to be known, which cannot be done without involving the laws of hydrostatics; to know the law of the expansion of mercury, which is determined by means of an apparatus where a lens is used, certain laws of optics are assumed; so that the knowledge of a good many chapters of physics necessanly precedes the formation of that abstract idea, the volume occupied by a certain gas.

‘More complex by far and more intimately tied up with the most profound theories of physics is the genesis of that other abstract idea, the value of the pressure supported by the gas. In order to define and measure it, it has been necessary to use ideas of pressure and of force of cohesion that are so delicate and so difficult to acquire; it has been necessary to call for the help of Laplace’s formula for the level of a barometer, a formula drawn &om the laws of hydrostatics; it has been necessary to bring in the law of the compressibility of mercury whose determination is related to the most delicate and controversial questions of the theory of elasticity.

. . . ‘What Regnault did is what every experimental physicist neces-

sarily does; that is why we can state the following principle whose consequences will be developed in the remainder of this book:

‘An experiment in physics is the precise observation of phenomena accompanied by an interpretation of these phenomena; this interpretation substitutes for the concrete data really gathered by observation abstract and symbolic representations which correspond to them by virtue of the theories admitted by the observer.’ (pp. 145-7)

What has happened is that Quine has unwisely extended Duhem’s defensible thesis about the language of mathematical physics to every- thing we say, ignoring Duhem’s own remark: 0 Bhckwcll Pubwen Ltd 1995

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The characteristics which so clearly distinguish the experiment in physics from common experience, by introducing into the for- mer, as an essential element, a theoretical interpretation excluded from the latter, also mark the results arrived at by these two sorts of experience. (Part 11, ch. IV; p. 147 of the Eng. trans.)

VII

‘I didn’t really mean it’; or ‘It’s just a matter of emphasis’; or ‘There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back’ (Austin)

In the ‘Foreword, 1980’ to a revised edition of his From A Logical Point Of View Quine writes:

The holism in ‘Two dogmas’ has put many readers off, but I think its fault is one of emphasis. All we really need in the way of holism, for the purposes to which it is put in that essay, is to appreciate that empirical content is shared by the statements of science in clusters and cannot for the most part be sorted out among them. Practically the relevant cluster is indeed never the whole of science; there is a grading of€, and I recognized it, citing the example of the brick houses on Elm Street.

Here Quine has at least confined his theory to the statements of science; but the theory thus restricted - and qualified by ‘for the most part’ - is a far cry fi-om his original claims.

In the Schilpp volume on Quine (1986) we even get this: ‘Still I must caution against overstating my holism. Observation sentences do have their empirical content individually, and other sentences are biased individually to particular empirical content in varying degrees. I was urging this already in “Two Dogmas’’, as witness the brick houses in Elm Street. . . . I see extreme holism itself as “pure legalism” ’ (Reply to Putnam, p. 427). And this: ‘The primary reference for my holism is “Two Dogmas”. The holism for which I declared in broad lines in that context exceeded what was needed in controversion of Dogma 2, the dogma that credits each synthetic sentence with a separable empirical content. To controvert that dogma we need only argue that many scientific sentences inseparably share empirical content. The holism also exceeded what was needed against Dogma 1, the analytic-synthetic distinction. For the use that I made of it there, it would suffice to argue that many sentences that are synthetic by popular philosophical acclaim can be held true

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come what may, and many that are analytic by acclaim can be declared false when a theory is being adjusted to recalcitrant evidence. . . . An observation sentence, finally, is in a compartment by itself. It, at least, has its own separate empirical content.’ (Reply to Jules Vuillemin, pp. 619, 620)

VIII ‘Any statement can be held true come what may’

Can it? Try holding true ‘There is an elephant in this room now’ or ‘London wasn’t bombed in WW2’. People have held true all sorts of falsehoods, including Quine’s paper. But what does that show? That there is a serious possibility that the statements might be true? Of course not. What conceivable philosophical interest is there in the possibility that some foolish, ignorant or mad person might hold such things true and appeal to other falsehoods to justi9 himself? And if all Quine means is that those statements don’t involve any contradiction, then that (a) is scarcely news, (b) doesn’t need a theory to support it, and (c) provides no reason for thinking that there is a serious possibility that they are true.

The antidote to this sort of stuff is to be found in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, Lecture X.

So Alex Callinicos’ comment ‘There can be no doubting the force and elegance of Quine’s arguments’ and David Papineau’s claim that Quine’s argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction has shown us that a commonly made distinction between philosophy and science will not do are both wrong.

IX Philosophy and science

Quine’s claim that the accepted distinction between analytic and synthetic won’t do, because any statement could be abandoned in the hce of recalcitrant experience, puts all statements in the same basket in that respect, and opens the way for philosophers to maintain that philosophy is just a branch of science. Callinicos does just that; Papineau implies it. Stich, in the continuation of the testimo- nial I quoted at the end of Section I, is rather engagingly pleased at being taken seriously by scientists: ‘Nowhere is this development more pronounced than in contemporary cognitive science, where psychologists, neuro-scientists, linguists and computer scientists have 0 Blackwell Publishen Ltd. 1995

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increasingly accepted philosophers as full partners in their venture. The surest sign of this acceptance is the fact that even the philosophical critics of cognitive science are taken seriously, not only by fellow philosophers, but also by large numbers of cognitive scientists whose training is in other disciplines.’

The fact that physicists accept number-theorists as fi l l partners in their work doesn’t mean that number theory is a natural science or that the proposition that there are infinitely many primes might be abandoned in the fice of recalcitrant experience.

There is a radical difference between what philosophers do, for the most part, in their professional lives and what physicists or chemists or botanists or zoologists or geneticists or oceanographers or metallurgists do, for the most part, in theirs. Of course in any decent theoretical science there will be conceptual work to do, and the conceptual work may be helped by the work of philosophers (as witness Einstein’s acknowledgment of his debt to Hume’s and Mach’s philosophical work in the thinking that led to the Special Theory of Relativity): but s t i l l the difference between philosophy and science is not a matter of mere administrative convenience: we really are doing very different things. What I practice in my professional life is not science. I believe the same is true of most other philosophers in their practice, no matter what theories they hold about the nature of philosophy. When I find myself expounding some scientific theory in a class, I know that, for the time being, I am taking a break from philosophy; and when a student devotes a large part of an essay to expounding some genuinely scientific theory, I know that either he is trying to avoid the hard work of engagmg in philosophy or he has lost sight of the philosophical problem.

Given the prestige and fund-raising capacity of science, there is a standing temptation for phdosophers to claim that what they are engaging in is science. But the temptation should be resisted, because the claim isn’t true.

X Examples of the consequences of Quine

Here is Paul Churchland’s book, Matter and Consciousness (1984), sub- titled ‘A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind’. Of 160 pages, 40 are devoted to scientific expositions (‘Near the surface of the earth’s oceans, between three and four billion years ago, the

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324 Philosophual Investigations

sun-driven process of purely chemical evolution produced some self-replicating molecular structures . . .’. It sounds just like H.G. Wells’ Outline of History), including pages of diagrams of the brain. Herbert Spencer would have nodded in agreement, since for him as for Churchland philosophy is just very general science. (I should make it clear that I put science among the greatest of human achievements. And I am not encouraging the philosopher to be ignorant of science. My objection is to the implied claim that these scientifk expositions, with their very familiar diagrams, have some part to play in the solution of philosophical problems about the mind.)

Another recent book, Language and Reality (1987) by Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny, shows what happens when you take philosophy to be a science and hold, as those authors do, that philosophical explanations must be given in ‘naturalistic, typically causal, terms’ @. 32). To paraphrase them: ‘How is language related to the world? Why, causally, of course: how else could it be?’ Here is their account of the meaning of proper names:-

‘The basic idea of causal theories of reference . . . is that a term refers to whatever is causally linked to it in a certain way . . .

‘How is a person able to use “Einstein” to designate a physicist he has never met . . . ? This problem divides in two. 1. How do we explain the introduction into the language of “Einstein” as a name for Einstein? . . . This requires a theory of rejeer- erne jxing. Our theory of reference furing looks to the causal grounding of a name in an object. 2. How do we account for the social transmission of the name “Einstein” within the linguistic community? . . . To explain t h i s we need a theory of reference bowowing. We shall offer a causal theory of t h i s also.

‘The basic idea of the causal theory of grounding is as follows. The name is introduced ostenrively at a formal or informal dubbing. This dubbing is in the presence of the object that will fiom then on be the bearer of the name. The event is perceived by the dubber and probably others. To perceive something is to be causally affected by it. As a result of this causal action, a witness to the dubbing, if of suitable linguistic sophistication, will gain an ability to use the name to designate the object. Any use of the name exercising that ability designates the object in virtue of the use’s causal link to the object: 0 Bhchuell Publuhen Ltd 1995

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. . . In short, those present at the dubbing acquire a semantic ability that is causally grounded in the object.

‘The basic idea of the causal theory of reference borrowing is as follows. People not at the dubbing acquire the semantic ability &om those at the dubbing. This acquisition is also a causal . . . process. The name is used in conversation. Hearers of the conversation, if of suitable linguistic sophistication, can gain the ability to use the name to designate the object. The exercise of that ability will designate the object in virtue of a causal chain linlung the object, those at its dubbing, and the user, through the conversation.

‘A name not only has a reference (usually), it has sense . . . We identify the sense of a name with the type of causal chain linking uses of the name to its bearer. . . . The reference of a name is determined by the appropriate causal chains and, in virtue of that, by its sense. . . . The causal theory . . . is a complete theory of meaning for names.’ (pp. 55-6)

Suppose the causal story is true. Does it answer the question

(1) ‘What is the meaning of the name?’?

It seems rather to be answering different questions, viz.

(2) ‘How did a given proper name come to get its meaning?’ (3) ‘How was, or is, knowledge of its meaning transmitted?’

Compare:

(2’) ‘How did the first egg-timer/tin-opener/transistor come to get its fbnction?’

and

(3’) ‘How was, or is, knowledge of the hnction(s) of an egg- timer/tin-opener/transistor transmitted?’

Both those questions are different tiom (1 ’) ‘What is the fbnction of an egg-timedtin-opener/transistor?’

and in order to know the answer to (1‘) you do not need to know the answers to (2’) or (3’).

It does not help, either, to be told at the end of the causal story that ‘we identify the sense of a name with the type of causal chain linlung uses of the name to its bearer’. That is a wholly new sense of ‘sens’e’, and it has got nothing to do with what we ordmanly understand by ‘meaning’.

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Causal theories [in philosophy] get their plausibility because the causal stories told look very probable, at least for certain cases (not for all; not e,g. for ‘37’, a proper name of the number 37). The trouble with them is that they do not answer the question: they do not tell us what the meaning of a proper name (e.g.) is. (Telling us that ‘We identi@ the sense with a type of causal chain’ is like answering the question ‘What is an elephant?’ by telling us a long story in which the word ‘elephant’ does not occur, finishing with ‘We identi@ an elephant with the middle of next week‘.) The same is true of causal theories of application (what it is for a predicate to apply to something, counted by our authors as a ‘referential relation- ship’). That is a major failing in a book entitled Language and Reality. The source of the trouble is the authors’ Quinian view of philosophy as science. The ordinary language philosopher (they would say) is appealing to folk theory.

I do not think that their answer will do. It is not a theory, or a mere opinion, that ‘anecdote’ and ‘antidote’, e.g., have different meanings, or that it is because I know that they do that I do not use ‘anecdote’ when I mean ‘antidote’. As for philosophy being a science, I do not think there is a genuine scientific explanation fiom start to finish of Language and Reality: instead there are many philosophical arguments of the usual sort, what Ryle somewhere called a ‘proprietary brand of hagghng’.

To end on a more optimistic note: It looks as though this sad episode in the history of Anglo-American philosophy is now draw- ing near to its close. In Australia recently I found that one old colleague, whose enthusiastic acceptance of ‘Two Dogmas’ in the 1970s had astonished me, had at last returned to good sense, and few, if any, philosophers still showed any enthusiasm for defending the paper. (I am afraid, however, that outside professional philosophical circles it will probably be thought the very latest thing in philosaphy - for another fifty years.)

Much the best work on Analytic-Synthetic was done by Friedrich Waismann in a series of articles in Analysis, 1949-53, reprinted in his How I See Philosophy.

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Appendx

[wherein you may see that by 1986 Quine had accepted a notion of analyticity in terms of meanings (see passage below begnning ‘I proposed in Roots of Reference . . .’) and had abandoned all the main theses of the second part of his paper (his Sections 5 and 6).]

All &om Lewis E. Hahn & Paul A. Schilpp, eds, The Philosophy of W I/. Quine (1986):-

What I wrote were pieces for occasions. ‘Two Dogmas’ was one such [W.V. Quine, ‘Autobiography’, p. 281

‘Hypostasis of meanings is a red herring. I keep urging that we could happily hypostatize meanings if we could admit synonymy. . . . The point of . . . those passages is that the prior assumption of an unexplained domain of objects called meanings is no way to explain synonymy or anything else. Synonymy, not hypostasis, is the rub. Given synonymy, a domain of meanings is trivially forthcoming for whatever good it may do. . . .

‘Abandoning synonymy as a will-o’-the-wisp . . .’ [WVQ, Reply to William P. Alston, pp. 73, 741

‘. . . There are sentences that we learn to recognize as true in the very process of learning one or another of the component words. “No bachelor is married” is a paradigm case. Anyone who learned Enghsh as his first language, rather than through translation, will have learned “bachelor” through a paraphrase in which manhood and the exclusion of marriage are explicit. Similarly for sentences of the form “If p then p”, “p or not-p”, “not both p and not-p”; to have learned to use the particles “if”, “or”, “and”, and “not” in violation of such sentences is simply not to have learned them.

‘Here, I suggested in The Roots of Reference, is the germ of an intehgible and reasonable notion of analyticity. However, I see little use for it in the epistemology or methodology of science. It con- tributes one worthwhile general insight: that some truths are learned by learning words. . . .’ [WVQ, Reply to Herbert G. Bohnert, PP- 94-51

‘. . . I proposed in Roots ofReference a sense in which logical truth may indeed be said to be grounded in the meanings of the logical particles. It is learned in learning the meaning, or use, of the particles.

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‘We learn the truth hnctions . . . by finding . . . , e.g., that people are disposed to assent to an alternation when disposed to assent to a component. The law that an alternation is implied by its components is thus learned . . . with the word “or” itself; and similarly for the other laws. More generally, I went on to suggest, analyticity might be construed thus in terms of the learning of words; see my reply to Bohnert.

‘. . . I now perceive that the phdosophically important question about analyticity and the linguistic doctrine of logical truth is not how to explicate them: it is the question rather of their relevance to epistemology. . . .’ [WVQ, Reply to Geofiey Hellman, p. 2071

‘. . . Actually my strictures against the notion of meaning are not ontological. They are of a piece rather with my criticism of the notion of analyticity, and they are developed in my doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation. I object to the lack of a reasonably intelligible explication of synonymy, as distinct fiom extensional equivalence. See my reply to Alston.’ [WVQ, Reply to Harold N. Lee, p. 3161

‘In my view observation sentences can indeed “be cognized in isolation, independently of scientific theory as a whole, by the close- ness of their association with” - stimulation.’ [WVQ, Reply to Arnold Levison, p. 3361

‘. . . My thesis of indeterminacy of translation was meant to undermine the traditional uncritical notion of sameness of meaning and hence of meaning.’ [WVQ, Reply to Robert Nozick, p. 3671

See also the quotations &om Quine (in Schilpp) in Section VII above.

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Documents

Quine's ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’: or The Power of Bad Logic