ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 30
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| 6. Empiricism without the Dogmas (cont.)
|
| As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as
| a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past
| experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation
| as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience,
| but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the
| gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical
| objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error
| to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the
| physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.
| Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.
| The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most
| in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device
| for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.
|
| Positing does not stop with macroscopic physical objects.
| Objects at the atomic level are posited to make the laws of
| macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience,
| simpler and more manageable; and we need not expect or demand
| full definition of atomic and subatomic entities in terms of
| macroscopic ones, any more than definition of macroscopic things
| in terms of sense data. Science is a continuation of common sense,
| and it continues the common-sense expedient of swelling ontology to
| simplify theory.
|
| Physical objects, small and large, are not the only posits.
| Forces are another example; and indeed we are told nowadays that
| the boundary between energy and matter is obsolete. Moreover, the
| abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics -- ultimately
| classes and classes of classes and so on up -- are another posit in the
| same spirit. Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with
| physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences
| in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.
|
| The over-all algebra of rational and irrational numbers is
| underdetermined by the algebra of rational numbers, but is
| smoother and more convenient; and it includes the algebra
| of rational numbers as a jagged or gerrymandered part.
| Total science, mathematical and natural and human,
| is similarly but more extremely underdetermined
| by experience. The edge of the system must be
| kept squared with experience; the rest, with
| all its elaborate myths or fictions, has as
| its objective the simplicty of laws.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 44-45.
|
| 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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