Chapter 5 – The Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Quine argues that both of these beliefs are wrong

One: a belief in a big difference between analytic truths and synthetic truths Analytic: grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact Synthetic: grounded in fact

Two: a belief in reductionism, that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience

Analyticity

Definition #1: statements whose denials are self-contradictory- This doesn't help because the definition of self-contradictoriness requires the

definition of analyticity

Definition #2 (Kant): a statement that attributes to its subject no more than is already conceptually contained in the subject

- Problem is it doesn't explain what "contains" means; and limits itself to subject-predicate form

Definition #3 (Kant): a statement is analytic when it is true by virtue of meanings and independent of fact

(1) Logically true: No unmarried man is marrieda. This is not merely true as it stands, but remains true under any and all

reinterpretations of 'man' and 'married.'(2) No bachelor is unmarried.

a. This can be turned into a logical truth by putting synonyms in for synonyms, e.g. 'unmarried man' for 'bachelor'

Except then you have to describe what is meant by 'synonymy'!

Definition #3a: the analytic statements in (2) reduce to those in (1) "by definition", since 'bachelor' is defined as an 'unmarried man'

- But defined according to whom? In the dictionary? "Certainly the 'definition' which is the lexicographer's report of an observed synonymy cannot be taken as the ground of the synonymy."

Definition #3b: the synonymy of any two forms consists of their interchangeability in all contexts without change of truth value

- But what about: 'Bachelor' contains less than ten letters- You can try to get around this by just enclosing it in quotes and treating that as

a "word", and saying you can't talk about things within that. But even if you can, you still run into the problem of if things are cognitively synonymous:

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o I am not quite clear on his argument here, but basically he tries to show that the definitions of cognitively synonymous and analytic are circular. (158) ?blatty???

o Interchangeability is meaningless until relativized to a language whose extent is specified in relevant respects.

o And then once you have an extensional language, interchangeability is no longer a guarantee of the right kind of cognitive synonymy: you can't rule out the possibility that the extensional agreement of 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' rest on meaning rather than accidental matters of fact, like 'creature with a heart' and 'creature with kidneys'

Okay, let's forget about synonymy, it sucks.- Is "Everything green is extended" analytic? He thinks not, but the problem

isn't with not understanding the meanings, but rather with understanding analyticity.

- Look at artificial languages for clarity: a statement S is analytic for a language L.

o Make a list of all analytic statements L0o Then try to capture it in a rule; it doesn't work, because you don't know

what about those statements the rule is attributing analyticity to!o Explaining for various statements only varies for that specific

statement.o Semantic rules: are those that you try to induce, but then he argues that

that doesn't add explanatory value (it is just an arbitrary way of grouping statements)

Verification theory of meaning: the meaning of a statement is the method of empirically confirming it

- Thus entities are synonymous only if they are alike in how they are confirmedo How do you determine how "alike" they are?

- Radical reductionism: set the task of setting a sense-datum language and showing how to translate the rest of significant discourse into it

o Carnap's treatment of physical objects "fell short in principle": his explanation of how science works (the empirical process) could not be translated into his sense-datum discourse

- The verification theory of meaning relies on a less extreme form of reductionism, namely that: to each statement there is associated a unique range of possible sensory events such that the occurrence of any of them would add to the likelihood of truth of the statement, and that there is associated another unique range of possible sensory events whose occurrence would detract from that likelihood.

o He says that our statements about the external world fact the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.

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Chapter 6: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

(65) Words don't have any one thing in common that makes us use the same word for all, but rather in all instances of that concept, they are related to one another in certain ways.

(66) Games: have a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes in detail

(67) Characterize the similarities as "family resemblances". Works with number, too.

(68) You can define the concept of number logically, you can also define it non-logically. (i.e. games don't need to have formal rules in order to be played)

(69) We describe games to people by saying "this and similar things are called games". Not by giving a formal definition.

(70) It's silly to say that if a concept like "game" is uncircumscribed, then you don't know what you mean by a "game" – obviously he does, and we do.

(71) Even if it's a "concept with blurred edges", sometimes all we need is indistinctness. A general definition can be misunderstood as often as relying on someone to induce from examples.

(73) Difference between seeing as a "general leaf shape" vs. an example of a leaf. All depends on the way it is being used.

(74) Seeing things in a different way means you use it differently, with different rules. (e.g. a cube as a plane figure, vs. a cube as 3D)

(75) Concept of a game – is that the same as an unformulated definition? Can the 'concept of a game' be completely expressed in all the explanations he could give?

(76) Drawing a sharp boundary of a word, though possible, is not accurate, because it shouldn't have one at all.

(77) The degree that a sharp picture can resemble a blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness.

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