ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 18
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| 4. Semantical Rules (cont.)
|
| The notion of analyticity about which we are worrying is a purported
| relation between statements and languages: a statement S is said to
| be 'analytic for' a language L, and the problem is to make sense of
| this relation generally, that is, for variable "S" and "L". The
| gravity of this problem is not perceptibly less for artificial
| languages than for natural ones. The problem of making sense
| of the idiom "S is analytic for L", with variable "S" and "L",
| retains its stubbornness even if we limit the range of the
| variable "L" to artificial languages. Let me now try to
| make this point evident.
|
| For artificial languages and semantical rules we look naturally
| to the writings of Carnap. His semantical rules take various forms,
| and to make my point I shall have to distinguish certain of the forms.
| Let us suppose, to begin with, an artificial language L_0 whose semantical
| rules have the form explicitly of a specification, by recursion or otherwise,
| of all the analytic statements of L_0. The rules tell us that such and such
| statements, and only those, are the analytic statements of L_0. Now here
| the difficulty is simply that the rules contain the word "analytic",
| which we do not understand! We understand what expressions the
| rules attribute analyticity to, but we do not understand what
| the rules attribute to those expressions. In short, before
| we can understand a rule which begins "A statement S is
| analytic for language L_0 if and only if ...", we must
| understand the general relative term "analytic for";
| we must understand "S is analytic for L" where "S"
| and "L" are variables.
|
| Alternatively we may, indeed, view the so-called rule as a conventional
| definition of a new simple symbol "analytic-for-L_0", which might better
| be written untendentiously as "K" so as not to seem to throw light on the
| interesting word "analytic". Obviously any number of classes K, M, N, etc.
| of statements of L_0 can be specified for various purposes or for no purpose;
| what does it mean to say that K, as against M, N, etc., is the class of the
| "analytic" statements of L_0?
|
| By saying what statements are analytic for L_0 we explain
| "analytic-for-L_0" but not "analytic", not "analytic for".
| We do not begin to explain the idiom "S is analytic for L"
| with variable "S" and "L", even if we are content to limit
| the range of "L" to the realm of artificial languages.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 33-34.
|
| W.V. Quine,
|"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", 'Philosophical Review', January 1951.
| Reprinted as pages 20-46 in 'From a Logical Point of View',
| 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
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