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Matt Holzapfel
Apprentice
44 Posts |
 Posted - Feb 22 2007 : 4:06:58 PM
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An attempt at analyzing W.V.O. Quine with (somewhat) Heideggerian techniques:
As per our discussion last night about paper topics, and because of a general inclination on my part to post my papers on the forum for public discussion, I’ve decided to put up an example of an analysis from philosophy inspired by Heidegger’s methods. The paper covers many of Quine’s most famous essays and all of his major books from varied points in his career, bringing such breadth to bear on the lessons of a single essay: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” I know several people in the class in particular who know the essay, and it isn’t particularly hard to find or read for those who haven’t taken a look at it yet, should they be interested.
The paper was written for last semester’s Analytic Philosophy course, and of course it isn’t an ideal example of Heidegger’s method. One would have to go to Heidegger for that—and thankfully one can, in one of his dozens of lectures and essays on the history of philosophy that have been translated into English. It is also mostly an analysis of someone else’s position, rather than a re-asking of fundamental questions. But I think it at least shares a concern with the underlying structure of a philosopher’s activity; and this is constituted by the position of certain thoughts vis-à-vis each other, in order to open up a space for less primary philosophic activity—arguments, positions, and so forth—to take place.
Heidegger asks of a philosopher: what can we behold that is unconcealed by his work? What can we behold, from our own perspective, that is concealed by him? How does what is unconcealed structure itself, and how does it prevent certain things form being unconcealed? How does what is concealed prevent itself from being unconcealed, and how does it structure what is unconcealed? It is the occurrences on this level that motivate philosophy, and they should be what we’re interested in the most. |
Edited by - Matt Holzapfel on Feb 22 2007 4:09:32 PM |
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Matt Holzapfel
Apprentice
44 Posts |
Posted - Feb 22 2007 : 4:08:08 PM
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The philosophy of W.V. Quine is conducted in all its breadth of interest by two guiding doctrines, both of which are said to encompass all knowledge when they themselves are known. The first doctrine is physicalism, where all knowledge is expressible (in principle) by physical science. The second is Quine’s theory of science, where science is conducted as a body of statements in language, and is confirmed or denied holistically by sense data. I will show that these two doctrines are of such a confounded nature, when taken together, that they trip over themselves, and fall into such a tangle such that neither one should be able be able to get back on its feet again.
Before I begin, however, some notes on format are in order. This paper will be rigidly structured into four short sections entitled: Quine’s Theory of Science, Quine’s Physicalism, Quine's Theory of Science and Physicalism Beheld Together, and Concluding Remarks. The first two sections are organized further into subsections that begin with a quotation from Quine. These quotations will serve to establish certain beliefs that Quine held, and also provide something tangible for me to commentate on. The quotations will be reinforced by auxiliary sources from other periods in my subject’s philosophizing, which will be listed at the end of the section.
Section I, Quine’s Theory of Science.
a. Holism
“The totality of our 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 manmade fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be distributed over some of our statements. Reëvauation of some statements entails Reëvauation of others, because of their logical interconnections—the logical laws simply being further statements of the system, certain further elements inside the field…there is much latitude of choice as to which statements to Reëvauation in light of any single contrary experience. No particular expressions are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field.”
“Let me now try to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem particularly germane to sense experience. Such statements, especially germane to particular experience, I picture as near the periphery.”-From “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” [FLPV, page 42-43]
As is quickly identified in the quotation above, natural science is just as much a part of the fabric of our knowledge as anything else—in fact, there is no necessary epistemological division to between science and any other belief, including religious belief. “For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not Homer’s gods…but in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.”[FLPV page 44] Quine says this because, while they may be convenient pragmatic constructions, all divisions that split knowledge into kinds do so as just more statements within the system that can be maintained, or not, ultimately on the basis of experience.
The reliance of our body of beliefs on experience is an important point to realize right away; though certain statements may be placed into the interior by lack of germaneness to any single sense experience they are still put on trial, along with the rest of the statements that one maintains, at the tribunal of sense experience.
To extend Quine’s metaphor, our language delimits a certain space for us to form beliefs in the margins of experience, but this space is constantly being prodded, kneaded, and mashed by experience insofar as it, as a whole, disagrees with experience; experience is constantly moving—we are constantly having new experiences—and as it moves, the shape that is formed within the contours of our experience must move with it. Neither science, nor religion, nor even the logical laws can be held firm in this movement, except insofar as they stay in a place that is safe, at least, from most conceivable human experience.
As we move on to the following sections, it is also important to note that Quine’s characterization of science is one made up entirely of language, experience, and postulated objects, which aren’t exactly linguistic constructions, but they are decided upon by language. What Quine understands by these two terms, language and experience, will now be shown.
See also: [WB, chapter 2] and “Speaking of Objects” [OR, page 16-17].
b. Language as Behavior
“Language is a social art which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people’s overt behavior under publicly recognizable circumstances. Meanings, therefore, those very models of mental entities, end up as grist for the behaviorist’s mill. Dewey was implicit on the point: ‘meaning is not a psychic existence; It is primarily a property of behavior’…Further along he expanded the point thus: ‘language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship.’
“There are two parts to knowing a word. One part is being familiar with the sound of it and being able to reproduce it. This part, the phonetic part, is achieved by observing and imitating other people’s behavior, and there are no important illusions about this process. The other part, the semantic part, is knowing how to use a word. This part, even in the paradigm case, is more complex than the phonetic part. The word refers, in the paradigm case, to some visible object. The learner has now not only to learn the word phonetically, by hearing it from a another speaker; he also has to see the object.”-From Ontological Relativity [OR, page 26-28]
Quine’s theory of language reflects his philosophical roots in behaviorism and the philosophy of John Dewey. It is, in fact, a behaviorist theory of language and here at least is told explicitly through quotations from Quine’s honored predecessor. In Ontological Relativity, Quine seems to renege on his old crusade against meaning, and in fact offers a theory of meaning of his own—though certainly not a theory that will satisfy those of his opponents who abhorred the thought of a meaningless world.
At any rate, Quine’s theory of language isn’t hard to see. We learn to speak by imitating others, and our speech is impressed into a particular language (and ontology) only by a communal acceptance of rules that, as he will say in the problem of meaning in linguistics, are governed merely by “bizarreness reactions.” This extends not only to the formation of words, but also what they mean. If I point to an apple and say ‘orange,’ the only thing making me wrong are competent speakers of the language that I am trying to speak. Without them, as long as I have what English speakers call an apple in mind (colloquially speaking), the word ‘orange’ will do just fine for an apple—as would any other sound or gesture I could make.
As such, language doesn’t have an existence that is independent of our relations with other human beings, as is reflected in the Dewey quotation. It is the co-incidence of a sound or gesture two or more people actually make to designate an apple that gives apple meaning, and we can only know of this co-incidence through perceiving certain things (sounds in the paradigm cases of the phonetic part, and sights in the paradigm case of meaning.) These, as we shall see, are best explained by physical science.
See also: [WO, chapter 9]
Section II, Quine’s Physicalism.
a. The Reduction of Mental to Physical
“…any subjective talk of mental events proceeds necessarily in terms that are acquired and understood through their associations, direct and indirect, with the socially observable behavior of physical objects. If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be just that the posting of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory. But if a certain organization of theory is achieved by thus positing distinctive mental states and events behind physical behavior, surely as much organization could be achieved by positing merely certain correlative physiological states and events instead…
Lack of a detailed physiological explanation of the states is scarcely an objection to acknowledging them as states of human bodies, when we reflect that those who posit the mental states and events have no details of appropriate mechanisms to offer, nor what with their mind-body problem, prospects of any. The bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?”-[WO, page 264].
It is important to note that if anything, Quine’s position on this matter is derived from his pragmatism rather than excused by it, and does not require the actual attainment of total physical knowledge. We moderns should all agree that mental states in some sense rely on brain states, and brain states are in principle reducible to bio-chemistry, which is in principle reducible to chemistry, which is in principle reducible to physics. Science hasn’t actually achieved these principles and indeed their achievement is conceded as humanly impossible; however, Quine certainly maintains, perhaps contradictorily but by no means atypically, that they are still possible in principle, whatever that means. Perhaps this is a holdover of “logical possibility” or “necessary truth” that Quine never extricated from his beliefs, but it is nonetheless an important part of those beliefs.
The faith that mental states are, in principle, reducible to physical states is all that Quine needs to do away with talk of mental states altogether, never mind the details of actually accomplishing such a reduction. We must remember that Quine’s pragmatism is always presented alongside his behaviorism. Talk of mental events is prompted by observable behavior and a corresponding correlation, in communal language, of certain words to that behavior. These words, in turn, refer to some object that is only there to expedite our prediction of future experience by past experience, which, as Quine will repeatedly stress in the context of Carnap’s aufbau, is only accomplishable by postulated objects and not with direct appeals to sense experience.
Yet, as we see further down in the paragraph, according to Quine mental states don’t really help much when it comes to predicting future experience or organizing theory. As a result there is no harm done in simply replacing them with correlative physical states, which are certainly as clear or clearer the murky realm of the mind that has confused people for thousands of years.
At the very least our ontological commitment is lessened, and with physiological states there is the potential for progress to be made where there is seemingly no hope for mental states.
See also: “Naturalism; Or, Living Within One’s Means” [QE, page275] and [TT, page 93, page 97-98].
b. The Priority of Physics
“If the physicist suspected that there was nay event that did not consist in a redistribution of elementary particles allowed for by his physical theory, he would seek a way of supplementing his theory. Full coverage in this sense is the very business of physics, and only of physics.
Anyone who will say, 'Physics is all very well in its place' –and who will not?—is already then committed to a physicalism of at least the nonreductive, nontranslational sort stated above. Hence my special deference to physical theory as a world version, and to the physical world as the world.”
Quine’s total physicality is partially from the very definition he would give it in this context, and partially by the inadequacy of talk of mental phenomenon, which we discussed above. What else could there be except elementary particles? And what else could describe those particles except physical laws? Perhaps other facets of science describe fuzzy aggregates of elementary particles and their interactions, but what they are really talking about physics, and physics could do it better if we could do physics better.
As far as talk of non-physical things—i.e. things that aren’t made up of particles—either they are to be reduced to absurdity ala “the fat man in the doorway,” or they are to be found in the mind. The second option is clearly inadequate because Quine has already shown that talking about minds ought to be discarded right away. This leaves no place for anything but physics and imprecise shorthand.
See also: “On What There Is” [FLPV, page 16-17]
c. Sense Experience is Externally Definable in terms of physics
“…the relevance of sensory stimulation to sentences about physical objects can as well (and better) be explored and explained in terms directly of the conditioning of such sentence or their parts to physical irritations of the subject’s surfaces.” [WO, page 245]
We need not dwell on this passage for long, as it is fairly self-explanatory in light of the above. Quine’s motivation in saying such a thing was to offer a more consistent, thorough physicalism, and in some impossible sense move his empiricism into the world by talking about an object in the world (“the subject’s surfaces”) rather than—the subject himself. But it is not nearly enough, as we shall see.
See also: “Epistemology Naturalized” [OR page 82-83]
Section III, Quine's Theory of Science and Physicalism Beheld Together.
As we’ve shown above, according to Quine it is both the case that language and experience can be reduced to physics, and that physics can be reduced to language and experience. The former two were shown in section I, subsection b and section II, subsection c respectively; meanwhile, the latter was shown by section I, subsection a. When these two reductions are juxtaposed, we see the full problem of an empiricist physicalism; the mind cannot be removed from the picture, but it has to be.
The consequences of this are quite serious. Once experience and language have been so reduced, as we’ve shown they can be, to just so many particles that are describable by physical laws, we find that a miniscule smattering of particles (the number of particles involved in what we call speech and language) somehow contains the entire rest of the particles in the universe. What’s more, the physical laws themselves are so contained inside a small constituency of themselves. The entire thing falls into a heap that is closer to Leibniz’s community of monads than the revision of positivism that it seems, on the surface, to represent.
It should be said, however, that Quine recognizes the fundamental cleavage of his philosophizing, and divides it into what he calls the epistemological conceptual scheme and the physicalistic conceptual scheme; from “On What There Is”: “Here we have two competing conceptual schemes, a phenomenalistic one and a physicalistic one. Which should prevail? Each has its advantages in simplifying our over-all reports. By bringing together scattered sense events and treating them as perceptions of one object, we reduce the complexity of our stream of experience to a manageable conceptual simplicity.”[FLPV, page 17] Yet the full import of this division is not said by Quine; nor does he appreciate that the subsequent development of his philosophy from the comparatively early essay “On What There Is” is such that it actually breaks down the convenient barrier between the two schemata, and brings them into unavoidable conflict.
The division between physics and phenomenon that develops in Quine’s work is not just the convenient use of two schemata for different situations—two different hats to wear, if you will, that should not be worn at the same time. Rather, it is a case where the terms for two different schemata form each other’s definitions, and what is built on the basis of those definitions goes on to contradict what they are defined by. Both could be salvaged, according to a Quinean response—but only by revising the logical laws that are at the very center of Quine’s beliefs.
Section IV, Concluding Remarks.
In light of the above, we have only to ask ourselves what remains of the Quinean philosophy, and where to proceed from it. Happily, the dust does not settle upon a ruin. Indeed, the only things ruined are physicalism and empiricism: Physicalism, because of language and experience, which cannot be reduced. Empiricism, because a head long look into experience alone, without the other dimensions, shows only the bare physicalism that tries, with ignorance, to reduce lacking to mimicking, and the self to nothing at all.
We have learned only these small facts, that physics does not reduce every being to its mere particles, or conversely that we must have some things—namely, language and experience—that are not reducible to physics. But how does our field of force expand, once these external bonds, the given of empiricism and language qua experience, have been taken away? Where does the shape expand once all that was compressing it to being just so is removed? And where does what is re-moved go to, once it is re-moved?
The answer is that with nothing to contain it, it expands on into the full flowing of its world as world and nothing else but world; it becomes just the everything that is answered in reply to the question of what there is. Meanwhile, the constraints of experience and language return back into the metaphor in which they are in fact already contained—the metaphor of the space, or the field, or the shape—the ex-plaination. They are within as well, but only in such a way that they give an internal limit, or in other words, a dimensionality, to the shape and its internal divisions. And so it is shown that the encompassing metaphor encompasses everything that tries to encompass, even when one tries to encompass everything.
Being remains. Language remains. Truth remains. But being is no longer the mere postulation of an ontological populated with entities-cum-expedience, necessary for the interpretation of sense experience. Language is no longer mere prompting of behavior that is entirely divorced from meaning. And Truth remains, too; but it is no longer the assignment of meaningless (T/F) truth values, as has been held over from the discredited positivist dualism of analytic apriori and synthetic apriori, despite Quine’s own collapsing of that particular distinction. And if we have being, language and truth we have everything—and it has us. |
Edited by - Matt Holzapfel on Feb 22 2007 4:13:02 PM |
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Matt Holzapfel
Apprentice
44 Posts |
Posted - Feb 22 2007 : 4:10:02 PM
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Bibliography
[FLPV] Quine, Willard Van Orman. From a Logical Point of View. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2003.
[OR] Quine, Willard Van Orman. Ontological Relativity & Other Essays. New York, New York: Columbia UP, 1969.
[QE] Quine, W. V. O. Quintessence. Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine. (Belknap Press 2004).
[TT] Quine, Willard Van Orman. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: Harvard UP, 1981.
[WB] W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian. The Web of Belief. 2d ed. (New York: Random House, 1978).
[WO] Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960.
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An Attempt at Analyzing W.V.O. Quine
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