The Pursuit of Truth, Quine
Quine on Evidence:
"From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input. How have we done it?" Pg. 1
"Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. One major purpose is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment. Prediction can be purpose too, but my present point is that it is the test of a theory, whatever the purpose." Pg. 2
Quine on "Observation Sentences":
It should "command the subject's assent or dissent outright", and it should have "intersubjectivity: unlike a report of a feeling, the sentence must command the same verdict from all linguistically competent witnesses of the occassion." Otherwise, an observation sentence cannot provide evidential support for science. They are "occasion sentences: true on some occasions, false on others." "The requirement that it command a verdict outright is what makes it a final checkpoint. The requirement of intersubjectivity is what makes science objective." Pg. 3 -5
These sentences provide "the link between language, scientific or not, and the real world that language is all about." Pg. 5
"It is precisely [the] sharing of words, by observation sentences and theoretical sentences, that provides the logical connections between the two kinds of sentences and makes observation relevant to scientific theory. Retrospectively those once innocent observation sentences are theory-laden indeed...Seen holophrastically, as conditioned to stimulatory situations, the [observation] sentence is theory-free; seen analytically, word by word, it is theory-laden. Insofar as observation sentences bear on science at all, affording evidence and tests, there has to be this retrospective theory-lading along with the pristine holophrastic freedom from theory. To impugn their observationality thus retrospectively is to commit what Firth (p. 100) called the fallacy of conceptual retrojection." Pg. 7
"The scientist has a backlog of accepted theory, and is considering a hypothesis for possible incorporation into it." Pg. 9
"A generality that is compounded of observables in this way -- 'whenever this, that' -- is what I call an observation categorical...It is a generality to the effect that the circumstances described in the one observation sentence are invariably accompanied by those described in the other." Pg. 10
"Pure observation lends only negative evidence, by refuting an observation categorical that a proposed theory implies." Pg. 13 It can never provide proof of the truth asserted.
On Consistency with Backlog Theory:
The maxim of minimum mutilation: "the maxim constrains us, in our choice of what sentences of S [a set of purported truths] to rescind [after we are confronted with a failed observational categorical], to safeguard any purely mathematical truth; for mathematics infiltrates all branches of our system of the world, and its disruption would reverberate intolerably...[We have an] unstated policy of shielding mathematics by exercising freedom to reject other beliefs instead." Pg. 15
"Call an observation categorical analytic for a given speaker if, as in 'Robins are birds', the affirmative stimulus meaning for him of the one component is included in that of the other. Otherwise synthetic. Call a sentence or set of sentences testable if it implies some synthetic observation categoricals...Then the empirical content of a testable sentence or set of sentences for that speaker is the set of all the synthetic observation categoricals that it implies, plus all synonymous ones. I add the synonymous ones so that merely verbal variation will not obstruct sameness of content." Pg. 16-17
"I am of that large minority or small majority who repudiate the Cartesian dream of a foundation for scientific certainty firmer than the scientific method itself...I approach it as an input-output relation within flesh-and-blood denizens of an antecedently acknowledged external world, a relation open to inquiry as a chapter of the science of that world...I call the pursuit naturalized epistemology." Pg. 19
"Insofar as theoretical epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of theoretical science, so normative epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of engineering: the technology of anticipating sensory stimulation." Pg. 19
The watchword of empiricism: nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu. [me: this is not entirely true, insofar as Genes also record information about the world. A more precise watchword: information about the external world must be received to be got.]
Five virtues of hypothesis: conservatism, generality, simplicity, refutability, and modesty.
"A sentence's claim to scientific status rests on what in contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction." Pg. 20
On the possible collapse of empiricism if extra input by telepathy or revelation was discovered to be possible: "It is idle to bulwark definitions against implausible contingencies." Pg. 21
"True sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise." Pg. 31
"When we move beyond sensible bodies and proceed to posit atoms, electrons, quarks, numbers, classes, and relations, our imagination is bolstered by analogies in varying degrees. The insensible particles were easily taken in stride, as resembling sensible bodies except in size; but physics has been progressively sapping that analogy. Light waves rest on a tenuous analogy; unlike water waves, they are not waves on or in anything. The more tenuous these aids to the imagination, the less odd ontological relativity may seem. When we get to the positing of numbers and other abstract objects...we are indebted to some fruitful confusions along the way. Language and science are rooted in what good scientific language eschews. In Wittgenstein's figure, we climb the ladder and kick it away." Pg. 34-5.
"[W]ords can still be said to owe their meaning to their roles in sentences." pg. 37
"The quest for a clear and substantial notion of meaning should begin with an examination of sentences." Pg. 37
"Predicted utterances convey no news." Pg. 38
"In 'perceives that p' and 'believes that p' we have two among many idioms of propositional attitude." Pg. 67
"A neurological rendering of 'Tom perceives that it is raining', applicable to all such occasions merely on Tom's part, would already be formidable even if Tom's neural make-up were known in detail...further...a neurological rendering of 'perceives that it is raining', applicable to all comers, would be out of the question...Yet each perception is a single occurrence in a particular brain, and is fully specifiable in neurological terms once details are known. We cannot say the same for a belief, which can be publicly shared, but we can say somewhat the same for the instance of the belief in a single believer. The period during which I go on believing that the earth rotates is distinguished from my earlier stages by at least some verbal dispositions, which must reside in some distinctive quirks in my nervous system." Pg. 70-1
"Perceptions are neural realities, and so are the individual instances of beliefs and other propositional attitudes insofar as these do not fade out into irreality altogether...I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events. The keynote of the mental is not the mind; it is the content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'. Pg. 71
"Its irreducibility is all the more reason for treasuring it: we have no substitute. At the same time there is a good reason not to try to weave it into our scientific theory of the world to make a more comprehensive system. Without it science can enjoy the crystalline purity of extensionality: that is, the substitutivity of identiy and more generally the interchangeability of all coextensive terms and clauses, salva veritate...As long as extensional science can proceed autonomously and self-contained, with no gaps of causality that intensional intrusions could serve to close, the sound strategy is the linguistic dualism of anomalous monism." Pg. 71-2
He nonetheless encourages efforts "to reclaim territory from the intentional side...Whatever is thus reclaimed is better understood for the reclaiming." Pg. 72
"The sublimity of necessary truths turns thus not quite to dust, but to pretty common clay." Pg. 73
"Champions of modal logic mean necessity to have an objective sense, as if to say metaphysical necessity or physical necessity. But then it must make sense to think of a thing's essence, comprising those properties that it has necessarily." Pg. 74
"A similar second-order role is cut out, then, for 'possibly'. Since it simply means 'not necessarily not', 'possibly' marks its sentence as one that the beliefs or working assumptions of concerned parties do not exclude as false. Thanks to our overwhelming ignorance, the realm of possibility thus conceived is vaster far than that of necessity. It is the domain of all our plans and conjectures, all our hopes and fears." Pg. 74
"We see the archaic dominance of mentalism in a preference for final cause over efficient cause as a mode of explanation...This predilection for explanation by final cause is evident still today in people who seek the meaning of life. They want to explain life by finding its purpose." Pg. 75
"Necessity, then, would be a projection of the subjective sense of constraint, or abridgment of capability [possibility]." Pg. 75
Darwin reduced final cause in biology to efficient cause through his theory of natural selection. [me: unless there is, in the natural history (ontogeny) of selective outcomes, a common thread that characterizes and sorts the set of "biological entities", or even better, the set of "A-theoretical biological successes" -- something algorithmic.]
"'Fragile' and 'soluble' are physical predicates on a par with others, and the dispositional form of the words is just a laconic encoding of a relatively dependable test or symptom. Breaking on impact and dissolving on immersion are symptomatic of fragility and solubility." pg. 76
"What are true or false...are propositions."
Commenting on the Truth as Disquotation:
'Snow is white' is true if an only if snow is white.
To ascribe truth to the sentence is to ascribe whiteness to snow; such is the correspondence, in this example. Ascription of truth just cancels out the quotation marks. Truth is disquotation. Pg. 80
"Semantic ascent serves also outside of logic. When Einstein propounded relativity, disrupting our basic conceptions of distance and time, it was hard to assess it without leaning on our basic conceptions and thus begging the question. But by semantic ascent one could compare the new and old theories as symbolic structures, and so appreciate that the new theory organized the pertinent data more simply than the old. Simplicity of symbolic structures can be appreciated independently of those basic conceptions." Pg. 81
"The truth predicate is an intermediary between words and world. What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world's being as the sentence says." Pg. 81
"One might accordingly relinquish the law of the excluded middle and opt rather for a three-valued logic, recognizing a limbo between truth and falsity as a third truth value...But a price is paid in the cumbersomeness of three-valued logic. Alongside 'not', which sends truths into falsehoods, falsehoods into truths, and now limbo into limbo, there would be a truth function that sends truths into limbo, limbo into falsehoods, and falsehoods into truths; also three more such one-place truth functions, playing out the combinations -- as contrasted with a single one, negation, in two-valued logic. When we move out to two-place truth functions (conjunction, alternation, and their derivatives), proliferation runs amok. It can still be handled, but there is an evident premium on our simple streamlined two-valued logic." Pg. 92
"The question that motivates the quest beyond disquotation can perhaps be phrased thus: if to call a sentence true is simply to affirm it, then how can we tell whether to affirm it?...The more sympathetic answer is a general analysis of the grounds of warranted belief, hence scientific method." pg. 93
"What the empirical under-determination of global science [i.e., there is insufficient possible evidence to clinch the system] shows is that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world." Pg. 102
"From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input. How have we done it?" Pg. 1
"Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. One major purpose is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment. Prediction can be purpose too, but my present point is that it is the test of a theory, whatever the purpose." Pg. 2
Quine on "Observation Sentences":
It should "command the subject's assent or dissent outright", and it should have "intersubjectivity: unlike a report of a feeling, the sentence must command the same verdict from all linguistically competent witnesses of the occassion." Otherwise, an observation sentence cannot provide evidential support for science. They are "occasion sentences: true on some occasions, false on others." "The requirement that it command a verdict outright is what makes it a final checkpoint. The requirement of intersubjectivity is what makes science objective." Pg. 3 -5
These sentences provide "the link between language, scientific or not, and the real world that language is all about." Pg. 5
"It is precisely [the] sharing of words, by observation sentences and theoretical sentences, that provides the logical connections between the two kinds of sentences and makes observation relevant to scientific theory. Retrospectively those once innocent observation sentences are theory-laden indeed...Seen holophrastically, as conditioned to stimulatory situations, the [observation] sentence is theory-free; seen analytically, word by word, it is theory-laden. Insofar as observation sentences bear on science at all, affording evidence and tests, there has to be this retrospective theory-lading along with the pristine holophrastic freedom from theory. To impugn their observationality thus retrospectively is to commit what Firth (p. 100) called the fallacy of conceptual retrojection." Pg. 7
"The scientist has a backlog of accepted theory, and is considering a hypothesis for possible incorporation into it." Pg. 9
"A generality that is compounded of observables in this way -- 'whenever this, that' -- is what I call an observation categorical...It is a generality to the effect that the circumstances described in the one observation sentence are invariably accompanied by those described in the other." Pg. 10
"Pure observation lends only negative evidence, by refuting an observation categorical that a proposed theory implies." Pg. 13 It can never provide proof of the truth asserted.
On Consistency with Backlog Theory:
The maxim of minimum mutilation: "the maxim constrains us, in our choice of what sentences of S [a set of purported truths] to rescind [after we are confronted with a failed observational categorical], to safeguard any purely mathematical truth; for mathematics infiltrates all branches of our system of the world, and its disruption would reverberate intolerably...[We have an] unstated policy of shielding mathematics by exercising freedom to reject other beliefs instead." Pg. 15
"Call an observation categorical analytic for a given speaker if, as in 'Robins are birds', the affirmative stimulus meaning for him of the one component is included in that of the other. Otherwise synthetic. Call a sentence or set of sentences testable if it implies some synthetic observation categoricals...Then the empirical content of a testable sentence or set of sentences for that speaker is the set of all the synthetic observation categoricals that it implies, plus all synonymous ones. I add the synonymous ones so that merely verbal variation will not obstruct sameness of content." Pg. 16-17
"I am of that large minority or small majority who repudiate the Cartesian dream of a foundation for scientific certainty firmer than the scientific method itself...I approach it as an input-output relation within flesh-and-blood denizens of an antecedently acknowledged external world, a relation open to inquiry as a chapter of the science of that world...I call the pursuit naturalized epistemology." Pg. 19
"Insofar as theoretical epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of theoretical science, so normative epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of engineering: the technology of anticipating sensory stimulation." Pg. 19
The watchword of empiricism: nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu. [me: this is not entirely true, insofar as Genes also record information about the world. A more precise watchword: information about the external world must be received to be got.]
Five virtues of hypothesis: conservatism, generality, simplicity, refutability, and modesty.
"A sentence's claim to scientific status rests on what in contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction." Pg. 20
On the possible collapse of empiricism if extra input by telepathy or revelation was discovered to be possible: "It is idle to bulwark definitions against implausible contingencies." Pg. 21
"True sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise." Pg. 31
"When we move beyond sensible bodies and proceed to posit atoms, electrons, quarks, numbers, classes, and relations, our imagination is bolstered by analogies in varying degrees. The insensible particles were easily taken in stride, as resembling sensible bodies except in size; but physics has been progressively sapping that analogy. Light waves rest on a tenuous analogy; unlike water waves, they are not waves on or in anything. The more tenuous these aids to the imagination, the less odd ontological relativity may seem. When we get to the positing of numbers and other abstract objects...we are indebted to some fruitful confusions along the way. Language and science are rooted in what good scientific language eschews. In Wittgenstein's figure, we climb the ladder and kick it away." Pg. 34-5.
"[W]ords can still be said to owe their meaning to their roles in sentences." pg. 37
"The quest for a clear and substantial notion of meaning should begin with an examination of sentences." Pg. 37
"Predicted utterances convey no news." Pg. 38
"In 'perceives that p' and 'believes that p' we have two among many idioms of propositional attitude." Pg. 67
"A neurological rendering of 'Tom perceives that it is raining', applicable to all such occasions merely on Tom's part, would already be formidable even if Tom's neural make-up were known in detail...further...a neurological rendering of 'perceives that it is raining', applicable to all comers, would be out of the question...Yet each perception is a single occurrence in a particular brain, and is fully specifiable in neurological terms once details are known. We cannot say the same for a belief, which can be publicly shared, but we can say somewhat the same for the instance of the belief in a single believer. The period during which I go on believing that the earth rotates is distinguished from my earlier stages by at least some verbal dispositions, which must reside in some distinctive quirks in my nervous system." Pg. 70-1
"Perceptions are neural realities, and so are the individual instances of beliefs and other propositional attitudes insofar as these do not fade out into irreality altogether...I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events. The keynote of the mental is not the mind; it is the content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'. Pg. 71
"Its irreducibility is all the more reason for treasuring it: we have no substitute. At the same time there is a good reason not to try to weave it into our scientific theory of the world to make a more comprehensive system. Without it science can enjoy the crystalline purity of extensionality: that is, the substitutivity of identiy and more generally the interchangeability of all coextensive terms and clauses, salva veritate...As long as extensional science can proceed autonomously and self-contained, with no gaps of causality that intensional intrusions could serve to close, the sound strategy is the linguistic dualism of anomalous monism." Pg. 71-2
He nonetheless encourages efforts "to reclaim territory from the intentional side...Whatever is thus reclaimed is better understood for the reclaiming." Pg. 72
"The sublimity of necessary truths turns thus not quite to dust, but to pretty common clay." Pg. 73
"Champions of modal logic mean necessity to have an objective sense, as if to say metaphysical necessity or physical necessity. But then it must make sense to think of a thing's essence, comprising those properties that it has necessarily." Pg. 74
"A similar second-order role is cut out, then, for 'possibly'. Since it simply means 'not necessarily not', 'possibly' marks its sentence as one that the beliefs or working assumptions of concerned parties do not exclude as false. Thanks to our overwhelming ignorance, the realm of possibility thus conceived is vaster far than that of necessity. It is the domain of all our plans and conjectures, all our hopes and fears." Pg. 74
"We see the archaic dominance of mentalism in a preference for final cause over efficient cause as a mode of explanation...This predilection for explanation by final cause is evident still today in people who seek the meaning of life. They want to explain life by finding its purpose." Pg. 75
"Necessity, then, would be a projection of the subjective sense of constraint, or abridgment of capability [possibility]." Pg. 75
Darwin reduced final cause in biology to efficient cause through his theory of natural selection. [me: unless there is, in the natural history (ontogeny) of selective outcomes, a common thread that characterizes and sorts the set of "biological entities", or even better, the set of "A-theoretical biological successes" -- something algorithmic.]
"'Fragile' and 'soluble' are physical predicates on a par with others, and the dispositional form of the words is just a laconic encoding of a relatively dependable test or symptom. Breaking on impact and dissolving on immersion are symptomatic of fragility and solubility." pg. 76
"What are true or false...are propositions."
Commenting on the Truth as Disquotation:
'Snow is white' is true if an only if snow is white.
To ascribe truth to the sentence is to ascribe whiteness to snow; such is the correspondence, in this example. Ascription of truth just cancels out the quotation marks. Truth is disquotation. Pg. 80
"Semantic ascent serves also outside of logic. When Einstein propounded relativity, disrupting our basic conceptions of distance and time, it was hard to assess it without leaning on our basic conceptions and thus begging the question. But by semantic ascent one could compare the new and old theories as symbolic structures, and so appreciate that the new theory organized the pertinent data more simply than the old. Simplicity of symbolic structures can be appreciated independently of those basic conceptions." Pg. 81
"The truth predicate is an intermediary between words and world. What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world's being as the sentence says." Pg. 81
"One might accordingly relinquish the law of the excluded middle and opt rather for a three-valued logic, recognizing a limbo between truth and falsity as a third truth value...But a price is paid in the cumbersomeness of three-valued logic. Alongside 'not', which sends truths into falsehoods, falsehoods into truths, and now limbo into limbo, there would be a truth function that sends truths into limbo, limbo into falsehoods, and falsehoods into truths; also three more such one-place truth functions, playing out the combinations -- as contrasted with a single one, negation, in two-valued logic. When we move out to two-place truth functions (conjunction, alternation, and their derivatives), proliferation runs amok. It can still be handled, but there is an evident premium on our simple streamlined two-valued logic." Pg. 92
"The question that motivates the quest beyond disquotation can perhaps be phrased thus: if to call a sentence true is simply to affirm it, then how can we tell whether to affirm it?...The more sympathetic answer is a general analysis of the grounds of warranted belief, hence scientific method." pg. 93
"What the empirical under-determination of global science [i.e., there is insufficient possible evidence to clinch the system] shows is that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world." Pg. 102
posted by John Aristides at 2/03/2009 07:33:00 PM
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