ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 27
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| 5. The Verification Theory and Reductionism (concl.)
|
| The dogma of reductionism, even in its attenuated form, is intimately
| connected with the other dogma -- that there is a cleavage between
| the analytic and the synthetic. We have found ourselves led,
| indeed, from the latter problem to the former through the
| verification theory of meaning. More directly, the one
| dogma clearly supports the other in this way: as long
| as it is taken to be significant in general to speak
| of the confirmation and infirmation of a statement,
| it seems significant to speak also of a limiting
| kind of statement which is vacuously confirmed,
| 'ipso facto', come what may; and such
| a statement is analytic.
|
| The two dogmas are, indeed, at root identical. We lately reflected
| that in general the truth of statements does obviously depend both
| upon language and upon extralinguistic fact; and we noted that
| this obvious circumstance carries in its train, not logically
| but all too naturally, a feeling that the truth of a statement
| is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual
| component. The factual component must, if we are empiricists,
| boil down to a range of confirmatory experiences. In the
| extreme case where the linguistic component is all that
| matters, a true statement is analytic. But I hope we are
| now impressed with how stubbornly the distinction between
| analytic and synthetic has resisted any straightforward
| drawing. I am impressed also, apart from prefabricated
| examples of black and white balls in an urn, with how
| baffling the problem has always been of arriving at
| any explicit theory of the empirical confirmation of
| a synthetic statement. My present suggestion is that
| it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak
| of a linguistic component and a factual component in the
| truth of any individual statement. Taken collectively,
| science has its double dependence upon language and
| experience; but this duality is not significantly
| traceable into the statements of science taken
| one by one.
|
| The idea of defining a symbol in use was, as remarked, an advance
| over the impossible term-by-term empiricism of Locke and Hume.
| The statement, rather than the term, came with Bentham to be
| recognized as the unit accountable to an empiricist critique.
| But what I am now urging is that even in taking the statement
| as unit we have drawn our grid too finely. The unit of empirical
| significance is the whole of science.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 41-42.
|
| 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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