ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 28
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| 6. Empiricism without the Dogmas
|
| The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most
| casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of
| atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made
| fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to
| change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose
| boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at
| the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.
| Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements.
| Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others,
| because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws
| being in turn simply certain further statements of the system,
| certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one
| statement we must re-evaluate some others, which may be statements
| logically connected with the first or may be the statements of logical
| connections themselves. But the total field is so underdetermined by
| its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of
| choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any
| single contrary experience. No particular experiences are
| linked with any particular statements in the interior of
| the field, except indirectly through considerations
| of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 42-43.
|
| 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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