Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
Our reading for this week is “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine 1951). This is another monster of a paper. It also represents a change of topic, though, as you will see, there is plenty of overlap between this and what we have seen in Frege and Russell (and, to some extent, Locke and Mill as well).
Before getting into the details, I want to be very clear about something: there are parts of this paper you will not understand. That is okay. Do your best. There are things you haven’t read that he assumes his reader will have read.
Setting the Stage
The paper begins by announcing that “modern empiricism” rests on two “dogmas”, and both are “ill-founded”.
So, to set the stage, I will briefly explain what he means by “modern empiricism”, and then briefly go over the two dogmas.
Modern Empiricism
Empiricism is a view in Epistemology, the area of philosophy concerned with questions about knowledge:
- Empiricism
- Sense experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge.
In opposition to the empiricists stand the rationalists:
- Rationalism
- Reason is also a legitimate source of knowledge.
Here is a famous quote from Francis Bacon, characterizing the difference between the two:
The empirical philosophers are like pismires1: they only lay up and use their store. The rationalists are like the spiders: they spin all out of their own bowels. (Bacon 1625, ii. §21)
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were prominent empiricists, while Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were prominent rationalists. (This way of organizing things is due to Kant, who saw his own position as a grand resolution of the conflict.)
In this debate, the empiricists tout the success of experimental science, while the rationalists argue that even experimental science presupposes logic and mathematics, and we know those through reason, not sense experience.
In the early 20th century, it appeared that Frege and Russell had given us the tools needed to reduce mathematics to logic—some details still needed to ironed out, but the reduction was near complete. Meanwhile, their protégé, Wittgenstein, argued that logical truths are “tautologies”—empty truths that have no real content, and instead just record something about our decisions about how to use words. Combine these two ideas, and a response to the rationalist emerges: math is just logic, and logic is empty. All genuine knowledge—knowledge of propositions that are not mere tautologies—comes from experience.
At the same time, a second idea developed alongside this: the Verificationism Theory of Meaning. Recall that Frege says that each meaningful sentence expresses a sense, and that sense determines its truth value. Frege says various things about what these senses are—he calls them thoughts and says that every speaker can grasp them—but their exact nature remains mysterious. The Verificationist Theory of Meaning resolves this mystery: the meaning, or sense, of a sentence just is its verification conditions—that is, the observational conditions in the sentence would be true.
This explains why most of the things metaphysicians and theologians say is literally nonsense. When a metaphysician says, “The world is a progressive realized community of interpretation” (Josiah Royce) or “Time is the moving image of eternity” (Plato) or “Nothing noths” (Heidegger), they utter sentences that have no verification conditions. Such sentences fail to express a sense—they are literally nonsense.
This is the basic package Quine has in mind when he talks of the “modern empiricists”. Most immediately, he is thinking of Rudolf Carnap. There are stretches in this paper that dive deep into the details of Carnap’s view. Obviously, it is going to be difficult for you to follow that, since you have not read any Carnap. (Carnap is very much worth reading, but also quite challenging!) For a more accessible taste of the sort of view he has in mind, you might read some of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1946).
The Two Dogmas
So much for “modern empiricism.” Hopefully that is enough for you to see how an epistemic view—empiricism—can get wrapped up in views about language of the sort developed by Frege and Russell.
Quine says that modern empiricism rests on two “dogmas”. “Dogma” is an interest word choice here: a dogma is an authoritative but ungrounded principle. To accept such principles without grounds is to be “dogmatic.” Dogmatism is typically seen as an epistemic error or vice, to be avoided.
Here is his statement of the first “dogma”:
One [dogma] is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.
We saw this terminology before, in Frege, who used it when unpacking his claim that statements of the form ‘\(a=a\)’ and ‘\(a=b\)’ differ in cognitive value:
\(a=a\) holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labeled analytic, while statements of the form \(a=b\) often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori (Frege 1948, 209).
And it loomed large in my brief overview of “modern empiricism”, above, where truths of mathematics and logic were dismissed as empty tautologies not dependent on matters of fact.
Here is his statement of the second “dogma”:
The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.
Again, this echoes ideas we have already encountered in our reading. Locke says that, “if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas” (“Of Words,” §5). Mill says that “the sun is the cause of day” means “that a certain physical fact, which is called the sun’s presence (and which, in the ultimate analysis, resolves itself into sensations, not ideas) causes another physical fact, which is called day” (“Of Names,” §1). Look at that parenthetical! It suggests that talk of the sun is to be reduced to some sort of talk about sensations.
And, in “On Denoting”, we saw glimpses of Russell’s view, that the only logical proper names are names for objects of direct acquaintance—primarily, the objects we are immediately acquainted with in sensation—and that the only way we are able to talk and think about more complex objects is via description (1905, 479–80, 492–93).
And this idea loomed large in the sketch above about “modern empiricism”. If the meaning of a sentence just is its verification conditions, and its verification conditions are the observational conditions under which it is true, then a sentence about the sun, if it is to be meaningful, must be analyzed in terms of some equivalent sentence about observation conditions—that is, about immediate experience.
Some Notes on Reading Quine
The above was meant to help orient you. Now it is time for you to read the article. Some advice.
First, notice and celebrate the things that are familiar! On the second page of the article (p. 21), you will find Frege’s example of the morning star and the evening star, and Russell’s example of Scott and the author of Waverley. These are old friends! Then you get some new examples—9 is the number of planets; all and only creatures with hearts are creatures with kidneys. Use your understanding of the familiar examples as leverage to help understand the new examples.
Second, Quine is prone to sudden shifts: one moment, he is chasing the question of what meanings are, and the next, he suggests we replace that with a question about synonymy, before then switch to thinking about analyticity. As a reader, you need to keep track of these shifts. He usually says why he is shifting. But he does so quickly. As a reader, you need to slow down, and see if you can understand why he is making these shifts.
Third, he moves fast, and expects you to be thinking along with him. His arguments are dense, his examples are often not made fully explicit, and he does not linger over each point. This passage from pages 27–28 is typical:
A natural suggestion, deserving close examination, is that the synonymy of two linguistic forms consists simply in their interchangeability in all contexts without change of truth value; interchangeability, in Leibniz’s phrase, salva veritate. Note that synonyms so conceived need not even be free from vagueness, as long as the vaguenesses match.
But it is not quite true that the synonyms ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried man’ are everywhere interchangeable salva veritate. Truths which become false under substitution of ‘unmarried man’ for ‘bachelor’ are easily constructed with help of ‘bachelor of arts’ or ‘bachelor’s buttons’. Also with help of quotation, thus:
‘Bachelor’ has less than ten letters.
Such counterinstances can, however, perhaps be set aside by treating the phrases ‘bachelor of arts’ and ‘bachelor’s buttons’ and the quotation ‘’bachelor’’ each as a single indivisible word and then stipulating that the interchangeability salva veritate which is to be the touchstone of synonymy is not supposed to apply to fragmentary occurrences inside a word.
A lot is happening here:
He begins with a suggested account of synonymy: two words or phrases are synonymous just in case one can be substituted for the other in all contexts, without changing the truth value. He does not unpack this for you, or explain why it is “natural suggestion”: he leaves it to you to figure this out, by thinking about examples.
Then, he says something interesting about how this account can handle vagueness. But, again, he does not unpack it for you. It is just a single sentence.
Immediately, he raises an objection. He tells you that counterexamples are “easily constructed with help of ‘bachelor of arts’ or ‘bachelor’s buttons’. But he does not actually construct those counterexamples: again, that’s your job.
He does give you a counterexample that involves quotation, but he does not explain why it is a counterexample. Again, that’s up to you.
Immediately, he offers a response to the counterexamples: first, treat the quoted word ‘bachelor’ surrounded by quotes as itself a “word”, and do the same with ‘bachelor of arts’ and ‘bachelor’s buttons’; second, modifying the proposed account of synonymy to so it does not apply to parts of “words”.
That is a lot, quickly, without much explanation or explication. And this is typical of Quine’s writing style. He is asking a lot of you as a reader. You need to do your best not just to read along, but to think along with him.
Finally, I just want to reiterate what I said above: there are parts of this paper you will not understand. That is okay. Do your best. There are things you haven’t read that he assumes his reader will have read. Still, there is a lot that you are in a good position to understand. Try to follow out the arguments and the examples where and when you can.
Slides
Here are links to the slides:
References
Footnotes
A “pismire” is an ant, specifically, a “pissant”—an ant that, when you squish it, smells of uric acid.↩︎