This paper is a critical discussion of Quine’s naturalist credos: (1) physicalism; (2) there is no first philosophy; (3) philosophy is continuous with science; and (4) the only responsible theory of the world as a whole is scientific theory. The aim is to show that Quine’s formulations admit of two readings: a strong reading (often Quine’s own) which is compatible with reductive forms of naturalism but implausible; and a mild reading which is plausible but suggestive of more liberal forms of (...) naturalism. The paper ends by claiming that naturalism is a normative doctrine that is inconsistent by its own lights. (shrink)

Theory of "conceptual pragmatism" takes into account both modern philosophical thought and modern mathematics. Stimulating discussions of metaphysics, a priori, philosophic method, much more.

Starting with the distinction between epistemological and ontological naturalism, this chapter focuses most on Quine’s epistemological naturalism, not the ontological anti-naturalism he thought it leads to. It is argued that naturalised epistemology is not central to Quine’s epistemology. Quine’s key epistemological principle is:- follow the methods of science, and only those. Can Quine demarcate scientific methods from non-scientific ones? The problems which have been raised here, e.g. in the case of mathematics, are considered. A main theme is the relationship between (...) Quine’s naturalism and reductionist forms of ‘scientistic’ naturalism. Quine is generally taken to be an anti-reductionist, unsurprisingly given his explicit anti-reductionist pronouncements from ‘Two Dogmas’ onwards. It is argued that the situation is more complex than this and that key Quinean arguments are driven by a positivistic reductionism he never entirely broke free from. (shrink)

This paper discusses critically W.V. Quine's relation to the tradition of pragmatism. Even though Quine is often regarded as a pragmatist, it is far from clear what his commitment to pragmatism actually amounts to. It is argued that while there are pragmatist elements in Quine's position, this is not sufficient to classify him as a pragmatist in any strong historical sense; indeed, he was not even clear himself what it means to be a pragmatist. It is also shown that neither (...) Quine's philosophy nor pragmatism are as anti-metaphysical as has sometimes been thought. In order to enrich the picture of Quine's place in the pragmatist tradition, some neopragmatist criticisms of his ideas (e.g., by Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty) are also discussed. (shrink)

According to the standard story W. V. Quine ’s criticisms of the idea that logic is true by convention are directed against, and completely undermine, Rudolf Carnap’s idea that the logical truths of a language L are the sentences of L that are true-in- L solely in virtue of the linguistic conventions for L, and Quine himself had no interest in or use for any notion of truth by convention. This paper argues that and are both false. Carnap did not (...) endorse any truth -by- convention theses that are undermined by Quine ’s technical observations. Quine knew this. Quine ’s criticisms of the thesis that logic is true by convention are not directed against a truth -by- convention thesis that Carnap actually held, but are part of Quine ’s own project of articulating the consequences of his scientific naturalism. Quine found that logic is not true by convention in any naturalistically acceptable sense. But he also observed that in set theory and other highly abstract parts of science we sometimes deliberately adopt postulates with no justification other than that they are elegant and convenient. For Quine such postulations constitute a naturalistically acceptable and fallible sort of truth by convention. It is only when an act of adopting a postulate is not indispensible to natural science that Quine sees it as affording truth by convention ‘unalloyed’. A naturalist who accepts Quine ’s notion of truth by convention is therefore not limited to accepting only those postulates that she regards as indispensible to natural science. (shrink)

In comparing his conception of empiricism with that of other like-minded philosophers at the end of his 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,' W. V. Quine famously emphasized the broader scope of his pragmatist commitment in these terms:Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism.Such remarks have (...) resulted in Quine's work being associated with the American pragmatist tradition, where he is viewed as either continuing or reviving some of the main themes and issues representative of.. (shrink)

Tarski, Carnap and Quine spent the academic year 1940?1941 together at Harvard. In their autobiographies, both Carnap and Quine highlight the importance of the conversations that took place among them during the year. These conversations centred around semantical issues related to the analytic/synthetic distinction and on the project of a finitist/nominalist construction of mathematics and science. Carnap's Nachlaß in Pittsburgh contains a set of detailed notes, amounting to more than 80 typescripted pages, taken by Carnap while these discussions were taking (...) place. In my article, I present a survey of these notes with special emphasis on Tarski's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the passage from typed languages to first-order languages, Tarski's finitism/nominalism, and the construction of a finitist language for mathematics and science. (shrink)

Church has recently proposed a solution of the paradox of analysis as propounded by Langford in which Church makes use of Frege's distinction between the sense (Sinn) of a name and its denotation (Bedeutung). The main purpose of the present note. is to show that a, version of the paradox may be presented which is not directly solved by Church in his review but which, in turn, may be solved by using; another distinction of Frege-that between the ordinary (gewihnlich) and (...) the oblique (ungerade) use of a name. The second part of the note will be concerned with the relative merits of this second distinction of Frege and Quine's related distinction between purely designative occurrences of a name and occurrences which are not purely designative; they will be compared merely with respect to their effectiveness in removing or solving the paradox of analysis. (shrink)