preliminary version
11/25/2004
[citations for Quine article
need to be correlated to
reading online]
Realism, Analytic Philosophy and Quine
Realism in the 19th and 20th centuries: Realism is the view that there is something that exists outside the mind and causes the mind to know this stuff as objects in the world. In the 19th century realism was an empirical approach that was associated with Christianity and common sense and was displaced by idealism. Pragmatism was, in part, an effort to overcome the realist-dualist divide by formulating a third approach that would be simultaneously mind-driven and object discovering. In the 20th century realism, in reaction to idealism and not satisified with pragmatism, disentangled itself from religion, aligned itself firmly with science—thus retaining its empirical orientation--and was sometimes willing to challenge common sense. In so doing it became increasingly technical and remote from ordinary understanding.
Indigenous American Efforts
The Realist Reaction to Royce
Twentieth-century realism, unlike the nineteenth century one that idealism had vied against, was much reduced in scope and focus. The earlier one had been a part of a total view of reality and a way of life. The new realism was a movement within academic philosophy, limiting itself to the concerns of philosophers as philosophers.
One can trace this realism to the work of James, reviews by various ones of Royce's books, and the origins of British analytic philosophy in the work of Bertrand Russell ( 1872-1970) and George Edward Moore (1873-1958); But the triggering event was the 1910 manifesto, "The Program and First Platform of Six Realists." Philosophical disagreement, they contended, was due to the use of imprecise language and the failure of philosophers, unlike scientists, to cooperate in research. Accordingly, they proposed a collaborative program of research that would set the language and guiding principles of investigation and apply this agreed upon ideas and careful language to "a program of constructive work" (Campbell, unpublished manuscript, p. 124). This manifesto, and a subsequent book, soon became the focus of discussion among academic philosophers, and thus a three-way debate was joined of idealists, pragmatists and realists.
This new realism was unable to sustain itself in the ensuing debate, due in part to disagreements among its proponents and their inability to answer their external critics on the problem of error and illusion. They asked how one could know that what was regarded as knowledge was actual knowledge rather than an illusion. But the nascent movement quickly developed a response to this. In 1916 Roy Wood Sellars (1880-1973) published Critical Realism, which led to a new cooperative volume, Essays in Critical Realism: A Co-operative Study of the Problem of Knowledge (1920). Among the authors were Sellars, George Santayana, and Arthur O. Lovejoy.
Sellers, like Santayana, was willing to declare himself a materialist and, also, like Santayana, was not anti-religious. But where Santayana was quick to withdraw from teaching and society, spending his later, but very active, years as a wandering solitary figure in Europe, Sellars participated in public life and taught at the University of Michigan for forty-five years. That he was able to enjoy a successful career at a state university as a philosophical materialist is telling. When George Sylvester Morris (1840-1889) and Dewey taught at Michigan in the 1880s, the philosophy department, according to a colleague in the Latin department, was “pervaded with a spirit of religious belief” (Dykhuizen, p. 47). Dewey, by the time Sellars was declaring himself to be a materialist, had come to share roughly similar views about reality and religion. Both, for instance, signed the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, the initial draft of which had been prepared by Sellars.
Arthur O. Lovejoy
Lovejoy (1873-1962), a feared and respected critic, taught at Johns Hopkins from 1910 to 1938. In 1908 he published “Thirteen Pragmatisms,” in which he distinguished thirteen distinct meanings of “pragmatism,” thus establishing himself both as critic of pragmatism and a careful, precise thinker. A co-founder of the American Association of University Professors, Lovejoy also developed the “history of ideas” approach in his Great Chain of Being (1936). But what is worthy of some notice here is his presidential address at the sixteenth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1916—“Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophy.” He thought that it was scandalous that philosophers so readily accepted disagreement among themselves. They should rather, like scientists, aspire to overcome disagreement by a much more careful, collaborative effort than which was then the case. Problems should be isolated and attacked piecemeal by many investigators who have developed a common terminology. What was most important was that philosophers should attempt to avoid the “overlooked consideration.” Only by adopting this attitude could they leave behind the “good, old fashioned, casual, disconnected, individualistic, disorganized, and essentially amateurish way” that then prevailed” (Philosophical Review 26.139).
Lovejoy’s proposal was neither universally accepted nor implemented precisely as he wished. But the attitude recommended by him became the ideal not only of realists such as himself but the analytic philosophers, who practiced a rigorous examination of philosophical problems by a careful examination of language. Philosophy became not just academic but highly specialized and technical. That which was considered to be within the grasp of every college senior in the nineteenth century became remote from the concerns and abilities of most educated persons in the last half of the twentieth century.
Randall’s Report
European influences.
Cambridge: Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein
Logical Positivism: The Vienna Circle
Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951)
1. Why this is a great philosophical essay:
· Significant problem: look at the philosophers who accepted what Quine will deny (Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Carnap)
· Quine interprets them charitably, restating Kant acc. to his apparent intent and not his verbal formulation
· Clear, explanatory
2. Background: Foundationalism
· Rationalists from Plato to Descartes to Kant to Frege think there are essences or meanings to which the philosopher has privileged access or in which s/he has particular interest
· But even empricists think, in addition to the real objects that exist independently of us, there are mathematical objects and relations.
· Thus both are realists of one sort or another and even empiricists accept the distinction between analytic and synthetic.
3. Quine undermines both but his immediate target is empiricism: in the first four sections he goes after meaning; in the last two he goes after reductionism or representationalism.
4. Meaning/Analyticity
· Meaning is not to be confused with naming (occurs primarily with singular terms) or extension (general terms) [21-22]
· But the real issue is analyticity [22]
1) Analytic as logically true: No unmarried man is married.
2) Analytic statements that depend on synonymy: No bachelor is married.
· The problem is with the second class for the notion of synonymy is problematic [23].
· One can't solve it by making use of definition, for definition relies on synonymy 24-27].
· Interchangeability/salva veritate: but "bachelor" and "unmarried" are not interchangeable; so let's talk about "cognitive synonymy" without making use of analyticity; but we can't do so [27-32].
· Back to analyticity [32-36]
· NOTE conclusion [36-37]: Truth depends both on language and extralinguistic fact; no sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic; to think so is unempirical.
5. NEXT TIME