ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 21
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| 4. Semantical Rules (concl.)
|
| It might conceivably be protested that an artificial language L
| (unlike a natural one) is a language in the ordinary sense 'plus'
| a set of explicit semantical rules -- the whole constituting, let
| us say, an ordered pair; and that the semantical rules of L then
| are specifiable simply as the second component of the pair L. But,
| by the same token and more simply, we might construe an artificial
| language L outright as an ordered pair whose second component is the
| class of its analytic statements; and then the analytic statements of L
| become specifiable simply as the statements in the second component of L.
| Or better still, we might just stop tugging at our bootstraps altogether.
|
| Not all the explanations of analyticity known to Carnap
| and his readers have been covered explicitly in the above
| considerations, but the extension to other forms is not hard
| to see. Just one additional factor should be mentioned which
| sometimes enters: sometimes the semantical rules are in effect
| rules of translation into ordinary language, in which case the
| analytic statements of the artificial language are in effect
| recognized as such from the analyticity of their specified
| translations in ordinary language. Here certainly there
| can be no thought of an illumination of the problem of
| analyticity from the side of the artificial language.
|
| From the point of view of the problem of analyticity the notion of an
| artificial language with semantical rules is a 'feu follet par excellence'.
| Semantical rules determining the analytic statements of an artificial language
| are of interest only in so far as we already understand the notion of analyticity;
| they are of no help in gaining this understanding.
|
| Appeal to hypothetical languages of an artificially simple
| kind could conceivably be useful in clarifying analyticity,
| if the mental or behavioral or cultural factors relevant to
| analyticity -- whatever they may be -- were somehow sketched
| into the simplified model. But a model which takes analyticity
| merely as an irreducible character is unlikely to throw light on
| the problem of explicating analyticity.
|
| It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic
| fact. The statement "Brutus killed Caesar" would be false if the world had
| been different in certain ways, but it would also be false if the word
| "killed" happened rather to have the sense of "begat". Thus one is
| tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is
| somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual
| component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable
| that in some statements the factual component should be null;
| and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its
| a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic
| and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn.
| That there is such a distinction to be drawn at
| all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists,
| a metaphysical article of faith.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 35-37.
|
| 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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