ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 29
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| 6. Empiricism without the Dogmas (cont.)
|
| If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of
| an individual statement -- especially if it is a statement at all remote from
| the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek
| a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience,
| and analytic statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held
| true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the
| system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in
| the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending
| certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same
| token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law
| of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum
| mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift
| and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or
| Darwin Aristotle?
|
| For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances
| from a sensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion
| without metaphor. Certain statements, though 'about' physical
| objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to
| sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to
| some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially
| germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery.
| But in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a
| loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of
| our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event
| of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant
| experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our
| system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick
| houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the
| same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences
| to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by
| re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs,
| along with kindred statemnts. A recalcitrant experience can,
| I have urged, be accommodated by any of various alternative
| re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total
| system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our
| natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as
| possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these
| specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs.
| These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper
| empirical reference than highly theoretical statements
| of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements
| may be thought of as relatively centrally located within
| the total network, meaning merely that little preferential
| connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 43-44.
|
| 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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