ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 25
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| 5. The Verification Theory and Reductionism (cont.)
|
| If Carnap's starting point is satisfactory,
| still his constructions were, as he himself
| stressed, only a fragment of the full program.
| The construction of even the simplest statements
| about the physical world was left in a sketchy state.
| Carnap's suggestions on this subject were, despite their
| sketchiness, very suggestive. He explained spatio-temporal
| point-instants as quadruples of real numbers and envisaged
| assignment of sense qualities to point-instants according
| to certain canons. Roughly summarized, the plan was that
| qualities should be assigned to point-instants in such a
| way as to achieve the laziest world compatible with our
| experience. The principle of least action was to be
| our guide in constructing a world from experience.
|
| Carnap did not seem to recognize, however, that his treatment
| of physical objects fell short of reduction not merely through
| sketchiness, but in principle. Statements of the form "Quality
| q is at point-instant x;y;z;t" were, according to his canons,
| to be apportioned truth vakues in such a way as to maximize
| and minimize certain over-all features, and with growth of
| experience the truth values were to be progressively revised
| in the same spirit. I think that this is a good schematization
| (deliberately oversimplified, to be sure) of what science really
| does; but it provides no indication, not even the sketchiest, of
| how a statement of the form "Quality q is at x;y;z;t" could ever
| be translated into Carnap's initial language of sense data and
| logic. The connective "is at" remains an added undefined
| connective; the canons counsel us in its use but not
| in its elimination.
|
| Carnap seems to have appreciated this point afterward;
| for in his later writings he abandoned all notion of
| the translatability of statements about the physical
| world into statements about immediate experience.
| Reductionism in its radical form has long since
| ceased to figure in Carnap's philosophy.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 39-40.
|
| 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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