ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 24
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| 5. The Verification Theory and Reductionism (cont.)
|
| Radical reductionism, conceived now with statements as units,
| set itself the task of specifying a sense-datum language and
| showing how to translate the rest of significant discourse,
| statement by statement, into it. Carnap embarked on this
| project in the 'Aufbau'.
|
| The language which Carnap adopted as his starting point was not
| a sense-datum language in the narrowest conceivable sense, for
| it included also the notations of logic, up through higher set
| theory. In effect it included the whole language of pure
| mathematics. The ontology implicit in it (that is, the
| range of values of its variables) embraced not only
| sensory events but classes, classes of classes, and
| so on. Empiricists there are who would boggle at
| such prodigality. Carnap's starting point is
| very parsimonious, however, in its extralogical
| or sensory part. In a series of constructions in
| which he exploits the resources of modern logic with
| much ingenuity, Carnap succeeds in defining a wide array
| of important additional sensory concepts which, but for his
| constructions, one would not have dreamed were definable on
| so slender a basis. He was the first empiricist who, not
| content with asserting the reducibility of science to
| terms of immediate experience, took serious steps
| toward carrying out the reduction.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", p. 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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