ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 26
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| 5. The Verification Theory and Reductionism (cont.)
|
| But the dogma of reductionism has, in a subtler and more tenuous form,
| continued to influence the thought of empiricists. The notion lingers
| that to each statement, or each synthetic 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 also another unique range of possible sensory events
| whose occurrence would detract from that likelihood. This notion is of
| course implicit in the verification theory of meaning.
|
| The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement,
| taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation
| at all. My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap's doctrine of
| the physical world in the 'Aufbau', is that our statements about the external
| world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a
| corporate body.*
|
|*This doctrine was well argued by Duhem [Pierre Duhem, 'La Theorie Physique:
| Son Object et Sa Structure', Paris, 1906, pp. 303-328]. Or see Lowinger
| Armand Lowinger, 'The Methodology of Pierre Duhem', Columbia University
| Press, New York, NY, 1941, pp. 132-140].
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 40-41.
|
| 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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