ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 23
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| 5. The Verification Theory and Reductionism (cont.)
|
| So, if the verification theory can be accepted as an adequate account
| of statement synonymy, the notion of analyticity is saved after all.
| However, let us reflect. Statement synonymy is said to be likeness
| of method of empirical confirmation or infirmation. Just what are
| these methods which are to be compared for likeness? What, in
| other words, is the nature of the relation between a statement
| and the experiences which contribute to or detract from its
| confirmation?
|
| The most naive view of the relation is that it is one of direct report.
| This is 'radical reductionism'. Every meaningful statement is held to be
| translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience.
| Radical reductionism, in one form or another, well antedates the verification
| theory of meaning explicitly so called. Thus Locke and Hume held that every
| idea must either originate directly in sense experience or else be compounded
| of ideas thus originating; and taking a hint from Tooke we might rephrase
| this doctrine in semantical jargon by saying that a term, to be significant
| at all, must be either a name of a sense datum or a compound of such names or
| an abbreviation of such a compound. So stated, the doctrine remains ambiguous
| as between sense data as sensory events and sense data as sensory qualities;
| and it remains vague as to the admissible ways of compounding. Moreover, the
| doctrine is unnecessarily and intolerably restrictive in the term-by-term
| critique which it imposes. More reasonably, and without yet exceeding
| the limits of what I have called radical reductionism, we may take full
| statements as our significant units -- thus demanding that our statements
| as wholes be translatable into sense-datum language, but not that they be
| translatable term by term.
|
| This emendation would unquestionably have been welcome to Locke and Hume
| and Tooke, but historically it had to await an important reorientation in
| semantics -- the reorientation whereby the primary vehicle of meaning came
| to be seen no longer in the term but in the statement. This reorientation,
| seen in Bentham and Frege, underlies Russell's concept of incomplete symbols
| defined in use; also it is implicit in the verification theory of meaning,
| since the objects of verification are statements.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 38-39.
|
| 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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