The Linguistic Turn provides a rich and representative introduction to the entire historical and doctrinal range of the linguistic philosophy movement. In two retrospective essays titled "Ten Years After" and "Twenty-Five Years After," Rorty shows how his book was shaped by the time in which it was written and traces the directions philosophical study has taken since. "All too rarely an anthology is put together that reflects imagination, command, and comprehensiveness. Rorty's collection is just such a book."-- Review of Metaphysics (...) Richard Rorty is University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

Jennifer Hornsby offers here detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation. In her distinctive view of questions about the mind's place in nature she argues for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism.

Carnap, Quine, and Putnam held that in our pursuit of truth we can do no better than to start in the middle, relying on already-established beliefs and inferences and applying our best methods for re-evaluating particular beliefs and inferences and arriving at new ones. In this collection of essays, Gary Ebbs interprets these thinkers' methodological views in the light of their own philosophical commitments, and in the process refutes some widespread misunderstandings of their views, reveals the real strengths of their (...) arguments, and exposes a number of problems that they face. To solve these problems, in many of the essays Ebbs also develops new philosophical approaches, including new theories of logical truth, language use, reference and truth, truth by convention, realism, trans-theoretical terms, agreement and disagreement, radical belief revision, and contextually a priori statements. His essays will be valuable for a wide range of readers in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

_Conjectures and Refutations_ is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

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)

One of the most important philosophers of recent times, Morton White has spent a career building bridges among the increasingly fragmented worlds of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. From a Philosophical Point of View is a selection of White's best essays, written over a period of more than sixty years. Together these selections represent the belief that philosophers should reflect not only on mathematics and science but also on other aspects of culture, such as religion, art, history, law, (...) education, and morality.White's essays cover the full range of his interests: studies in ethics, the theory of knowledge, and metaphysics as well as in the philosophy of culture, the history of pragmatism, and allied currents in social, political, and legal thought. The book also includes pieces on philosophers who have influenced White at different stages of his career, among them William James, John Dewey, G. E. Moore, and W. V. Quine. Throughout, White argues from a holistic standpoint against a sharp epistemological distinction between logical and physical beliefs and also against an equally sharp one between descriptive and normative beliefs.White maintains that once the philosopher abandons the dogma that the logical analysis of mathematics and physics is the essence of his subject, he frees himself to resume his traditional role as a student of the central institutions of civilization. Philosophers should function not merely as spectators of all time and existence, he argues, but as empirically minded students of culture who try to use some of their ideas for the benefit of society. (shrink)

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)

Mathematics poses a difficult problem for methodological naturalists, those who embrace scientific method, and also for ontological naturalists who eschew non-physical entities such as Cartesian souls. Mathematics seems both essential to science but also committed to abstract non-physical entities while methodologically it seems to have no place for experiment or empirical confirmation. The chapter critically reviews a number of responses naturalists have made including logicism, Quinean radical empiricism, and Penelope Maddy’s variant thereof and suggests some further problems both for ontological (...) and for methodological naturalists. (shrink)

This cogent and knowledgeable critique of the tradition of modern analytic philosophy focuses on the work of its central figures -- Russell, Carnap, and Quine -- and finds it wanting. In its place, Hao Wang unfolds his own original view of what philosophy could and should be. The base of any serious philosophy, he contends, should take as its point of departure the actual state of human knowledge. He explains the relation of this new tradition to mathematical logic and reveals (...) the crucial transitions and mistakes in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy that make a new approach so compelling.Equally at home in philosophy and mathematics, Wang is uniquely qualified to take on the task of critically examining modern philosophy. He carefully traces the path of ideas from Russell and Wittgenstein through the Vienna Circle to modern British and American philosophy, and makes use of his familiarity with the profound thought of Kurt Gödel with whom he has had numerous discussions. He also presents the broader significance of Russell's philosophy, provides a comprehensive and unified treatment of Quine's work in logic and in philosophy, and delineates what is common between Carnap and Quine. (shrink)

Naturalism - the thesis that all facts are natural facts, that is the facts that can be recognised and explained by a natural science - plays a central role in contemporary analytical philosophy. Yet many philosophers reject the claims of naturalism. The essays in this anthology explore the difficulties of naturalism by revealing the ambiguities surrounding it, as well as the tensions that exist among its critics.

Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake, there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine's argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine's work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. (shrink)

Quine’s argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine’s argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher’s quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake as there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine’s argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine’s work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. -/- . (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an 'extreme holism' to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish (...) three ways in which Quine's early holism can be said to be wide-scoped and show that he has never changed his mind about any one of these aspects of his early view. Instead, I argue that Quine's apparent change of mind can be explained away as a mere shift of emphasis. (shrink)

Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant (...) ambivalence”. In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive. (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)

W. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet, even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first decades of his career. After identifying three (...) commitments supporting his naturalism—viz. empiricism, holism, and realism—I piece together the evolution of Quine’s position by examining the origins of these commitments one by one, showing how his early views gradually evolved into the mature naturalistic position that would have such an enormous impact on post-war analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Review of PENELOPE MADDY. Naturalism in Mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine's empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using (...) Gärdenfors and Makinson's logic of belief revision based on epistemic entrenchment, we argue that Katz wrongly assumes that the constitutive principles are *statements* within a holistic empiricist's theory of the world. Instead, we show that constitutive principles are best seen as *properties* of a holistic empiricist's theory of scientific inquiry and we submit that, without Katz's mistaken assumption, the paradox cannot be formulated. We argue that our perspective on the status of constitutive principles is perfectly in line with Quinean orthodoxy. In conclusion, we compare our findings with van Fraassen's [2002] argument that we should think of empiricism as a stance, rather than as a doctrine. (shrink)

Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation demonstrate the existence and help to explain the rationale of restraints upon what we can say and understand. In particular they show that there are logical truths to which there are no intelligible alternatives. Thus the standard view that the truths of logic and mathematics differ from "synthetic" statements in being true solely by virtue of linguistic convention--Which requires for its plausibility the existence of intelligible alternatives to our present logical truth--Is opposed directly, (...) And not by the espousal of "a more thorough pragmatism". This raises problems about possibility and conceptual novelty. (shrink)

That some propositions are testable, while others are not, was a fundamental idea in the philosophical program known as logical empiricism. That program is now widely thought to be defunct. Quine’s (1953) “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and Hempel’s (1950) “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning” are among its most notable epitaphs. Yet, as we know from Mark Twain’s comment on an obituary that he once had the pleasure of reading about himself, the report of a death can (...) be an exaggeration. The research program that began in Vienna and Berlin continues, even though many of the specific formulations that came out of those circles are flawed and need to be replaced. (shrink)

In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article's appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine's brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim that this thesis does not follow (...) from the logical point that Duhem and Quine made about the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis testing, and that the thesis should be rejected. \\\ [Peter Hylton] Section I of this essay discusses Quine's views about reference, contrasting them with those of Russell. For the latter, our language and thought succeed in being about the world because of our acquaintance with objects; the relation of reference-roughly, the relation between a name and its bearer-is thus fundamental. For Quine, by contrast, the fundamental relation by which our language comes to be about the world, and to have empirical content, is that between a sentence and stimulations of our sensory surfaces; reference, while important, is a derivative notion. Section II shows how this view of reference as derivative makes possible the notorious Quinean doctrine of ontological relativity. Section III raises the issue of realism. It argues that somewhat different notions of realism are in play for Quine and for Russell-for Russell, objects, and our knowledge of objects, play the fundamental role, while for quine objectivity and truth are fundamental, with ontology being derivative. (shrink)

One of the important philosophical advantages stemming from study of the historical development of philosophical movements and traditions is the insight that comes from observing the logical out-working of a set of ideas over a period of time that far exceeds the lifetime of any individual thinker. An Aristotle or a Hegel may develop a philosophical mode of thought in an almost unbelievably comprehensive way, but no individual can grasp all the implications and ramifications of his philosophical vision, no matter (...) how monumental his powers may be. Many individuals, however, working over many years within the same framework of ideas can accomplish what no one of them alone could achieve. It is often said that philosophy is not an experimental science, and, in an obvious sense, this is true. But it is not entirely true. We can view the history of a tradition like Platonism, for example, or Augustinianism, as a vast experiment made by many thinkers with a set of ideas in which each thinker, building on what has gone before, seeks to develop further the basic premises of the position, proposing new logical alternatives, correcting errors, meeting objections, discovering further implications, and consolidating the results. In the case of a profound tradition, nothing less than this extended historical dialectic of ideas suffices to make plain what the basic position implies. Moreover, since climates of opinion change, the proponents of a given view will find that, in the course of time, new opponents appear, raising questions and posing problems that could not easily have been envisaged by the thinker who started the tradition. Sometimes these objections prove fatal and the tradition comes to an end; sometimes the objections are successfully overcome and the position finds new life and a more viable form of expression. The history of a tradition, therefore, is an indispensable resource for philosophical understanding. (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)

This chapter provides broad coverage of the notion of logical consequence, exploring its modal, semantic, and epistemic aspects. It develops the contrast between proof-theoretic notion of consequence, in terms of deduction, and a model-theoretic approach, in terms of truth-conditions. The main purpose is to relate the formal, technical work in logic to the philosophical concepts that underlie reasoning.

Proper understanding of Quine's texts is a necessary prerequisite for evaluating his arguments. Quine is a scientist. [AL 1/29/2004].

Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology.