|
 Philosopher
of the Month
March
2004 - W. V. O. Quine
Chalmers
C. Clark
Willard
Van Orman Quine underscores a primary feature of his philosophy
when he writes: 'We do not adjudicate between our aggregate system
of the world and a rival system by appeal to a transcendent standard
of truth.' Truth, for Quine, is immanent - embedded in our world,
language, and practices.
Quine's
philosophy can be sharply contrasted to that of Descartes. Descartes'
ambition was to complete a philosophy of knowledge based upon the
absolute certainty of 'cogito ergo sum' - I think, therefore I exist.
Try to doubt it and you only affirm it. Descartes thought this exemplar
of knowledge was so certain it would silence 'the most extravagant
suppositions of the skeptics.' After Descartes, the grand ambition
for empiricists and rationalists alike was a complete justification
of our knowledge of the world based on the same absolute certainty
as the cogito.
By
mid-twentieth century, Quine saw Descartes' project as barren and
deeply flawed. A major problem was its radical subjectivity. How
could we justify knowledge of the world from the subjective certainty
that we exist? Instead, Quine sought to ground knowledge outside
the individual, justifying our picture of the world from what C.
S. Peirce called 'a community of inquirers'.
As
an empiricist - one who thinks all knowledge claims are justified
by experience - Quine was committed to the role of sensory experience
in knowledge. But since a single mind has no fixed anchor to halt
inner experience from 'drifting', Quine argued that in a community,
drift would be arrested; we are not apt to drift in the same direction.
Thus publicly reinforced language - and not subjective ideas - could
check the tendency for drift. 'Safety in numbers' rather than subjective
certainty would provide Quine's key to knowledge.
For
Quine, this meant philosophy was no longer a tribunal outside and
above science. 'Unlike Descartes,' Quine wrote, 'we own and use
our beliefs of the moment…until by what is vaguely called scientific
method we change them here and there for the better.' Critics thought
Quine abandoned philosophy for science altogether. Quine said otherwise.
True, there was no longer the grand dichotomy between philosophy
and science, but there were important differences of degree (as
with the more speculative reach of philosophy and greater breadth
of its categories).
To
explain his total image, Quine invoked 'Neurath's boat': A ship
on a landless sea that must be adjusted or repaired piece by piece
as it sails. Similarly, knowledge cannot be snatched from its place
in the world to be rebuilt from the bottom up as Descartes had dreamed.
For Quine, knowledge is an embedded and interrelated field of force
without appeal to the transcendent.
In
Quine's most famous paper, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951), he
challenged the longstanding view that there are truths grounded
in meaning (such as 'all bachelors are unmarried') that are independent
of truths of experience (such as 'water freezes at 32 degrees fahrenheit').
In doing so, he had attacked the distinction between 'analytic'
and 'synthetic' that played such a crucial role with Kant and throughout
modern philosophy.
In
Word & Object (1960) Quine pushed his holistic vision
further with a thought experiment in radical translation - interpreting
a totally unknown language. Quine argued that linguists might produce
translation manuals with terms which are empirically equivalent
- they 'pick out the same scattered portion of the world' - yet
incompatible in meaning. In his famous example, we could never determine
whether it was correct to translate a word used whenever a rabbit
appears -'gavagai' - as 'rabbit' or as 'undetached rabbit part'.
Being empirically equivalent, there is no further fact to decide
between them. So, like different translation manuals, our embedded
view of the world is relative to a frame of reference. Deciding
among equivalent systems of the world turns finally on pragmatic
grounds such as simplicity, refutability, fecundity and generality;
not transcendent metaphysics.
So,
has absolute truth vanished from Quine's philosophy altogether?
Not exactly. While Quine's emerging philosopher 'no longer dreams
of a first philosophy, firmer than science,' we can still satisfy
a longing for the absolute at least in part. For 'within our own
totally evolving doctrine,' Quine reminds us, 'we can judge truth
as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but
this goes without saying.'
Suggested
reading
Quine. W. V. O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.
New York: Columbia.
Quine. W. V. O. 1996. From a Logical Point of View (2nd edition).
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gibson Jr., R. F. 1988. Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination
of W. V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge. Tampa: University of South
Florida Press.
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid April 2004.
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will find ninety-nine other introductions to great thinkers in .
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