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Quine, analytic/synthetic distinction

Quine, analytic/synthetic distinction

Harvey
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Posted 07/11/07 - 12:13 AM: Subject: Quine, analytic/synthetic distinction	#1
I've read Two Dogmas of Empiricism, but it seems to me that any definition, if pushed far enough as Quine pushes this one will rely on either some undefined notion, or necessarily be circular. Is there something wrong with accepting the distinction as primitive? After all, it's easy enough to understand what we "mean" by the distinction. Also what was Quine's motivation for rejecting this distinction? If I could understand his overall philosophical motivation, perhaps I could understand better why he would want to do away with this notion (and indeed, the notion of primitive "meaning" being associated with ideas which Quine seemed to dislike so much. After all, a theory of meaning may give new ground to plant the distinction in, and meaning afterall, seems fairly tenable as a primitive notion). Also, what is the current status of the distinction?

nosos
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Posted 07/11/07 - 12:40 AM:	#2
Harvey wrote: Is there something wrong with accepting the distinction as primitive? After all, it's easy enough to understand what we "mean" by the distinction. It’s easy enough to understand what we mean by the proposition “the world is flat” yet that doesn’t mean we ought to accept it as the basis for physical exploration. Do you think there’s a way to separate the idea that all propositions are either true in virtue of meaning alone or true in virtue of the way the world is from the metaphysical baggage of logical positivism? If so then the perhaps there is a case for making an analytic distinction (in the sense of a distinction for the purposes of analysis) while accepting that there’s no metaphysical basis for this. I don’t see how it’s useful though.
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Harvey
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Posted 07/11/07 - 10:17 AM:	#3
nosos wrote: It’s easy enough to understand what we mean by the proposition “the world is flat” yet that doesn’t mean we ought to accept it as the basis for physical exploration. Certainly the analytic/synthetic distinction is more grounded intuitively than the world being flat. Of course, if asked why, I would have to appeal to meanings, but Quine seems to find this unacceptable. Of course, "meanings" are in need of clarification, but it seems more plausable as to accept meanings while admitting they are in need of clarification, then to do away with them entirely (analogous to how epistemology does business even with no universally accepted solution to Gettier's problem). nosos wrote: Do you think there’s a way to separate the idea that all propositions are either true in virtue of meaning alone or true in virtue of the way the world is from the metaphysical baggage of logical positivism? If so then the perhaps there is a case for making an analytic distinction (in the sense of a distinction for the purposes of analysis) while accepting that there’s no metaphysical basis for this. I don’t see how it’s useful though. As an example, perhaps "meaning" can be considered an epistemic notion, or a problem in philosophy of mind, or "fuzzy" mental pictures. This is speculation I admit, but it seems meanings of terms/propositions are "there" (eperienced in some sense...), and to try to do away with them would disregard a fundamental aspect of experience.

Mr.Hume
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Posted 07/12/07 - 06:33 PM:	#4
Harvey wrote: I've read Two Dogmas of Empiricism, but it seems to me that any definition, if pushed far enough as Quine pushes this one will rely on either some undefined notion, or necessarily be circular. Is there something wrong with accepting the distinction as primitive? After all, it's easy enough to understand what we "mean" by the distinction. Also what was Quine's motivation for rejecting this distinction? If I could understand his overall philosophical motivation, perhaps I could understand better why he would want to do away with this notion (and indeed, the notion of primitive "meaning" being associated with ideas which Quine seemed to dislike so much. After all, a theory of meaning may give new ground to plant the distinction in, and meaning afterall, seems fairly tenable as a primitive notion). Also, what is the current status of the distinction? The approach of restricting meaning to empirical verification is one that has been advocated by many of the classical philosophers, most notably to my mind, St. Augustine, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and others. However, philosophers that adopted such a view differed as to what the most fundamental vehicle of meaning was. For example, while it seems that Hume believed individual words to be the bearers of meaning, Frege thought that individual words only have meaning by virtue of their contribution to the individual sentences that we understand. This was what the positivists accepted as they tried to provide a successful empirical criteria for individually meaningful sentences. Although Quine took this to be an advance, he thought it was still problematic. With his positive view of meaning, he tries to advance the idea that individual sentences are only meaningful by virtue of the contribution they make to our understanding of empirical theories as a whole. In other words, understanding a sentence strongly depends on, and is impossible without, a body of background theoretical beliefs about one's world. Since such theoretical beliefs are 'underdetermined' by our empirical data, it is always possible, in principle, that other theoretical beliefs inconsistent with those one's own culture happens to accept could be adopted to explain the same data with more or less the same pragmatic success - such as predictive power, say. This makes meaning culture-sensitive, and heavily dependent on ones body of theoretical beliefs that 'fit' empirical data. Knowing a little bit about Quine's positive doctrine could imply the following motivation for his argument from circularity in 'two dogmas': To show that if we take it that the bearers of meaning are individual sentences - as did the logical positivists - then we run into circularity; for when we say that an analytic sentence is one that is necessarily true by definition, we cannot define necessarily true sentence without depending on the notion of analyticity. In fact, Quine goes on to show that the notions, 'necessity', 'analyticity', and 'a prioricity', are all mutually dependent on each other. Instead of trying to resolve this problem while working within the commonly accepted views about meaning, he decides to abandon it altogether in favor of his positive doctrine, which gives primacy to no specific beliefs - such as the analytic/synthetic distinction - instead drawing attention to the importance of a culture's entire body of theoretical beliefs. Quine seems to believe that no beliefs are entirely immune from revision, but that some enjoy more security because of how central they are to the entire body of theoretical beliefs. To communicate this, he appeals to the analogy of ones body of beliefs being like a web that touches empirical data only at it's outer parts. I'm not so sure if my entry helped. You might want to read the two chapters on Quine in volume 1 of a recently published series by Scott Soames, entitled 'Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century'.

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