The idea of indeterminacy of meaning has more than a
whiff of smoke-filled cafés on the banks of the Seine about it, though
Quine’s arguments
What is is the difference between the language of Newtonian mechanics and the language of relativistic mechanics.) Carnap holds that there is no one correct language
At least as Quine sees the matter, the use of the Principle of Tolerance also requires that
analytic sentences be on an entirely different epistemological footing from synthetic sentences. Synthetic sentences are answerable to evidence;
analytic sentences are a matter of the choice of language, which does not require theoretical justification.
eg I have heard what you have said and in my view you are a bigot (opinion which does not require theoretical justification. equally 'you are no more that a moral crusader' (opinion) as Quine says, ‘we don’t in general know how we learned a word eg 'bigot'’
One such step, which is emphasized in Quine’s later work, is the mastery of what he calls observation categoricals. These are sentences of the form “Whenever X happens, Y happens”, where the variables are to be replaced by observation sentences. (E.g. “Whenever there’s smoke, there’s fire.”) It is plausible to suppose that a child who has learnt the observation sentences can come by a mastery of the relevant observation categorical. The observation sentences are what Quine calls occasion sentences, true on some occasions and false on others, whereas the observation categoricals are eternal sentences, true or false once for all. Quine suggests that we can think of observation categoricals as a plausible first step into mastering eternal sentences, which make up our serious theoretical knowledge.
Quine speculates that the sound of the word “Fido” may have something of the same effect as the sight of the beast, inclining our learner to assent to “Dog” and thus to “Fido is a dog”. It is notable that there is a sort of use-mention confusion operating here, if Quine’s suggestion is correct. Language is learned by confusion and “short leaps of analogy” rather than by “continuous derivation” (1975c, 178–9); indeed a holistic language cannot be learnt without such leaps
On the issue of the admissibility of predicates, Quine’s physicalism is more complicated. The requirement here is that the difference between a predicate’s being true of a given object and its being false of it should, in all cases, be a physical difference: “nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of microphysical states…. physics can settle for nothing less
s a relation between the believer and a sentence, understood to be, in the usual case, in the language of the ascriber (not the language of the believer, where the languages differ).
in Quine’s account of language and how it is learned. The connection is easily seen: to call an object fragile is to say that it would break if it were dropped onto a hard surface from a significant height.
idea of de re necessity, which he sees as requiring “Aristotelian essentialism”
The claim that a given person has such a disposition is thus a claim about the state of a physical object.
De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intentional statements, associated with the intentional operators in many such statements. ... The literal translation of the phrase "de dicto" is "about what is said", whereas de retranslates as "about the thing"
The belief idiom, however, also lends itself to use in other cases, where there is no fact of the matter. These are not merely cases in which we have no evidence. They are case in which no behavioural tests which we might have carried out would have supplied evidence, cases in which there simply is nothing in the subject’s neurophysiology, and hence nothing in their actual or potential behaviour, which would decide the matter. Quine puts the point like this:
as Quine sees the matter, requires the capacity to reidentify the object over time and changing circumstances: if a dog is barking then it—that very same dog—is hungry; hence the importance of pronouns.
Regimented theory also has no place for mental entities, most obviously minds, if those are taken to be distinct from physical entities. The qualification is important. Many mental entities can be admitted as special cases of physical objects.
mall to justify the magnitude of the departure from our ordinary views
s: “…a fenced ontology is just not implicit in ordinary language…. Ontological concern is not a correction of a lay thought and practice; it is foreign to the lay culture, though an outgrowth of it
at our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors’ (Quine, 1990, 19)
t science is in the same line of business as ordinary knowledge but does it better
But then some observers may know that the circumstances are of this deceptive kind and not be disposed to assent, while others have no such knowledge and are disposed to assent. The moral of this is that assent, even to observation sentences, is not a mere response to stimulation; the responder’s internal state (their having ancillary knowledge, or not) may also play a role.
Quine’s version of the analytic-synthetic distinction is not an epistemological distinction.
One apparently clear conception of meaning is that the meaning of a sentence is given by the experiences which would confirm it;
If we think of meaningfulness as a matter of having a meaning then we may think that our words cannot be meaningful unless there are meanings
Quine’s argument for this position relies on holism. This is the claim that most of our sentences do not have implications for experience when they are taken one-by-one, each in isolation from the others. No statement is immune to revision.
What has experiential implication is, in most cases, not an individual sentence but a larger chunk of theory.
Quine claims that holism shows that most of our sentences are not justified by the relation of the individual sentence, considered in isolation, to experience. Almost always, what matters is the relation to experience of some larger chunk of theory (and, in principle, although perhaps never in practice, of the theory as a whole). This means that the correctness of a given claim is almost never settled simply by gathering empirical evidence.
Logic and mathematics seem to have a special status because they are independent of experience. They appear to be necessary and not susceptible of refutation by what future experience brings; they appear to be a priori because we know them independent of experience,
The truths of elementary arithmetic are an example: they play a role in almost every branch of systematic knowledge. For this reason, we cannot imagine abandoning elementary arithmetic. Doing so would mean abandoning our whole system of knowledge, and replacing it with an alternative which we have not even begun to envisage. Compare and contrast 'you are a bigot'
to '2 and 2 equals 4'
Difficulty arises from the corrigibility inherent in language
Quine sees all our cognitive endeavours, whether they involve formulating a new language or making a small-scale theoretical change, as having the same very general aim of enabling us to deal with the world better; all such endeavours have the same very general kind of justification, namely, as contributing to that end. In this picture, there is no basis for Carnap’s insistence that philosophy is in principle different from science. Philosophy, as Quine sees it, has no special vantage point, no special method, no special access to truth.
How do we get from stimulus (opinion of 'you are a bigot') to science? Does that sentence attain the scientific standards of clarity and rigour
Quine treats knowledge as embodied in language. Apart from other considerations, language-use is observable and thus subject to scientific inquiry.
Two occasions on which I am driving a car may be almost identical in terms of my stimulation patterns, except that on one occasion I see a red light and on the other I see a green light. As far as my reaction goes, that small difference outweighs all the similarities
A sentence only counts as an observation sentence if there is not am assent/dissent divide.
such mutual attunement can be explained along evolutionary lines
but if someone believes that morality is in some way “objective” or “real,” and that this moral reality requires explanation,
going back and forth between what he calls the “sectarian” and the “ecumenical” responses. The sectarian response is to say that we should not let the existence of the alternative in any way affect our attitude towards our own theory; we should continue to take it seriously, as telling us the unique truth about the world. (We are assuming that the two theories possess all theoretical virtues to equal degree; clearly Quine would say that if one theory were superior in some way then we would have reason to adopt it.) The ecumenical response, by contrast, counts both theories as true. In almost his last word on the subject he suggests that there may be little at stake since the “fantasy of irresolubly rival systems of the world” takes us “out beyond where linguistic usage has been crystallized by use” (1990, 100f). In an even later piece of writing, however, Quine speaks of himself as “settled into the sectarian [attitude]” (1986b, 684f.
What is is the difference between the language of Newtonian mechanics and the language of relativistic mechanics.) Carnap holds that there is no one correct language
At least as Quine sees the matter, the use of the Principle of Tolerance also requires that
analytic sentences be on an entirely different epistemological footing from synthetic sentences. Synthetic sentences are answerable to evidence;
analytic sentences are a matter of the choice of language, which does not require theoretical justification.
eg I have heard what you have said and in my view you are a bigot (opinion which does not require theoretical justification. equally 'you are no more that a moral crusader' (opinion) as Quine says, ‘we don’t in general know how we learned a word eg 'bigot'’
One such step, which is emphasized in Quine’s later work, is the mastery of what he calls observation categoricals. These are sentences of the form “Whenever X happens, Y happens”, where the variables are to be replaced by observation sentences. (E.g. “Whenever there’s smoke, there’s fire.”) It is plausible to suppose that a child who has learnt the observation sentences can come by a mastery of the relevant observation categorical. The observation sentences are what Quine calls occasion sentences, true on some occasions and false on others, whereas the observation categoricals are eternal sentences, true or false once for all. Quine suggests that we can think of observation categoricals as a plausible first step into mastering eternal sentences, which make up our serious theoretical knowledge.
Quine speculates that the sound of the word “Fido” may have something of the same effect as the sight of the beast, inclining our learner to assent to “Dog” and thus to “Fido is a dog”. It is notable that there is a sort of use-mention confusion operating here, if Quine’s suggestion is correct. Language is learned by confusion and “short leaps of analogy” rather than by “continuous derivation” (1975c, 178–9); indeed a holistic language cannot be learnt without such leaps
On the issue of the admissibility of predicates, Quine’s physicalism is more complicated. The requirement here is that the difference between a predicate’s being true of a given object and its being false of it should, in all cases, be a physical difference: “nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of microphysical states…. physics can settle for nothing less
s a relation between the believer and a sentence, understood to be, in the usual case, in the language of the ascriber (not the language of the believer, where the languages differ).
in Quine’s account of language and how it is learned. The connection is easily seen: to call an object fragile is to say that it would break if it were dropped onto a hard surface from a significant height.
idea of de re necessity, which he sees as requiring “Aristotelian essentialism”
The claim that a given person has such a disposition is thus a claim about the state of a physical object.
De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intentional statements, associated with the intentional operators in many such statements. ... The literal translation of the phrase "de dicto" is "about what is said", whereas de retranslates as "about the thing"
The belief idiom, however, also lends itself to use in other cases, where there is no fact of the matter. These are not merely cases in which we have no evidence. They are case in which no behavioural tests which we might have carried out would have supplied evidence, cases in which there simply is nothing in the subject’s neurophysiology, and hence nothing in their actual or potential behaviour, which would decide the matter. Quine puts the point like this:
as Quine sees the matter, requires the capacity to reidentify the object over time and changing circumstances: if a dog is barking then it—that very same dog—is hungry; hence the importance of pronouns.
Regimented theory also has no place for mental entities, most obviously minds, if those are taken to be distinct from physical entities. The qualification is important. Many mental entities can be admitted as special cases of physical objects.
mall to justify the magnitude of the departure from our ordinary views
a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in a particular sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world.
- the doctrine that only one supreme being exists.= monism
s: “…a fenced ontology is just not implicit in ordinary language…. Ontological concern is not a correction of a lay thought and practice; it is foreign to the lay culture, though an outgrowth of it
at our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors’ (Quine, 1990, 19)
the existence of only two states or truth values (e.g. true and false).
"principle of bivalence"
t science is in the same line of business as ordinary knowledge but does it better
But then some observers may know that the circumstances are of this deceptive kind and not be disposed to assent, while others have no such knowledge and are disposed to assent. The moral of this is that assent, even to observation sentences, is not a mere response to stimulation; the responder’s internal state (their having ancillary knowledge, or not) may also play a role.
Quine’s version of the analytic-synthetic distinction is not an epistemological distinction.
One apparently clear conception of meaning is that the meaning of a sentence is given by the experiences which would confirm it;
If we think of meaningfulness as a matter of having a meaning then we may think that our words cannot be meaningful unless there are meanings
Quine’s argument for this position relies on holism. This is the claim that most of our sentences do not have implications for experience when they are taken one-by-one, each in isolation from the others. No statement is immune to revision.
What has experiential implication is, in most cases, not an individual sentence but a larger chunk of theory.
Quine claims that holism shows that most of our sentences are not justified by the relation of the individual sentence, considered in isolation, to experience. Almost always, what matters is the relation to experience of some larger chunk of theory (and, in principle, although perhaps never in practice, of the theory as a whole). This means that the correctness of a given claim is almost never settled simply by gathering empirical evidence.
Logic and mathematics seem to have a special status because they are independent of experience. They appear to be necessary and not susceptible of refutation by what future experience brings; they appear to be a priori because we know them independent of experience,
The truths of elementary arithmetic are an example: they play a role in almost every branch of systematic knowledge. For this reason, we cannot imagine abandoning elementary arithmetic. Doing so would mean abandoning our whole system of knowledge, and replacing it with an alternative which we have not even begun to envisage. Compare and contrast 'you are a bigot'
to '2 and 2 equals 4'
Difficulty arises from the corrigibility inherent in language
Quine sees all our cognitive endeavours, whether they involve formulating a new language or making a small-scale theoretical change, as having the same very general aim of enabling us to deal with the world better; all such endeavours have the same very general kind of justification, namely, as contributing to that end. In this picture, there is no basis for Carnap’s insistence that philosophy is in principle different from science. Philosophy, as Quine sees it, has no special vantage point, no special method, no special access to truth.
How do we get from stimulus (opinion of 'you are a bigot') to science? Does that sentence attain the scientific standards of clarity and rigour
Quine treats knowledge as embodied in language. Apart from other considerations, language-use is observable and thus subject to scientific inquiry.
Two occasions on which I am driving a car may be almost identical in terms of my stimulation patterns, except that on one occasion I see a red light and on the other I see a green light. As far as my reaction goes, that small difference outweighs all the similarities
A sentence only counts as an observation sentence if there is not am assent/dissent divide.
such mutual attunement can be explained along evolutionary lines
but if someone believes that morality is in some way “objective” or “real,” and that this moral reality requires explanation,
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going back and forth between what he calls the “sectarian” and the “ecumenical” responses. The sectarian response is to say that we should not let the existence of the alternative in any way affect our attitude towards our own theory; we should continue to take it seriously, as telling us the unique truth about the world. (We are assuming that the two theories possess all theoretical virtues to equal degree; clearly Quine would say that if one theory were superior in some way then we would have reason to adopt it.) The ecumenical response, by contrast, counts both theories as true. In almost his last word on the subject he suggests that there may be little at stake since the “fantasy of irresolubly rival systems of the world” takes us “out beyond where linguistic usage has been crystallized by use” (1990, 100f). In an even later piece of writing, however, Quine speaks of himself as “settled into the sectarian [attitude]” (1986b, 684f.
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