Wittgenstein and Quine both battle against the philosopher’s must, but in quite different ways.
Consider W’s battle against the solipsist’s must — that there must be no experiences besides his own:
Now the man whom we call a solipsist and who says that only his own experiences are real, does not thereby disagree with us about any practical question of fact…For he would say that it was inconceivable that experiences other than his own were real. He ought therefore to use a notation in which such a phrase as “A has real toothache” (where A is not he) is meaningless…The solipsist…is not stating an opinion; and that’s why he is so sure of what he says. He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression.
(BB pp. 59,60)
Compare Q on the universal realist’s must – that for every concrete object there must be an abstract object (a universal) which the conrete one instantiates:
It is only by assuming the cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths that he [Carnap, but Wittgenstein too, no doubt] is able to declare the problem of universals to be a matter not of theory but of linguistic decision…I grant that one’s hypothesis as to what there is, e.g., as to there being universals, is at bottom just as arbitrary or pragmatic a matter as one’s adoption of…a new system of bookkeeping. Carnap [and Wittgenstein too, no doubt] in turn recognizes that such decisions, however conventional, “will nevertheless usually be influenced by theoretical knowledge.” (Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, §2) But what impresses me more than it does Carnap is how well this whole attitude is suited also to the theoretical hypotheses of natural science itself, and how little basis there is for a distinction.
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences…It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for conlcuding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
(The Ways of Paradox, p.132)
For W, the philosopher’s propositions do not express disagreement over practical matters of fact, rather, they express dissatisfaction with our ordinary form of expression. For Q, on the other hand, if the solipsist or the realist aren’t expressing opinions, then neither is the scientist positing electrons, nor the archaeologist positing dinosaurs, etc.
Both seek to undermine the special place of philosopher’s propositions as traditionally conceived – to my mind, W’s tack is the far more attractive, promising, inspiring, and inspired. Opinions to the contrary?
June 4, 2008 at 11:21 am |
If I am understanding Q (which I may not be), then I disagree with him. It seems like he wants to divide the world into facts and conventions. I’m fine with this. But then he seems to want to say that the distinction between the two is of a degree, not kind: black facts and white conventions give a grey sweater and – what’s more – unraveling the sweater yields neither black nor white threads. It must be simple for Q, then, to conclude that if the solopsist is not expressing an opinion (i.e. he is adopting a convention), then neither is the scientiest nor the archeologist expressing opinions (i.e. they are adopting a convention). I disagree.
I think it is pretty easy to identify “facts” as opposed to “conventions” and – in fact – I have trouble wrapping my head around a middle ground. It is not that I think that facts and conventions are different in their essences, but rather in their operation. For example, if we express a “fact” then it makes sense to contradict it. “There is a frog on my shoulder” (a fact). We can investigate this claim and agree or disagree with it. A convention (or a grammatical proposition), on the other hand, cannot be similarly contradicted. “Every rod has a length” (a convention). No amount of investigation will convince one that a rod does not have a length.
So, if there is no way of proving it false that thereare electrons, then the scientists are positing a convention. But if we can look under a microscope and say, “look, there are the electrons right there,” or “I told you there weren’t going to be any electrons,” then the scientist is positing a fact.
Basically, I disagree that there are no black or white threads. I think that there are, and I cannot imagine what the grey thread would look like. Well – I can imagine that it would be grey, but not much else.
June 5, 2008 at 2:26 am |
“It seems like he wants to divide the world into facts and conventions.”
I don’t know what you must’ve been thinking when you said this, but if it meant very much to you to say this, then there might be a problem, which you already seem to be aware of when you say, “Basically, I disagree that there are no black or white threads.” Quine, in a very straightforward sense, doesn’t want to divide the world into facts and conventions.
“I think it is pretty easy to identify ‘facts’ as opposed to ‘conventions’ and – in fact – I have trouble wrapping my head around a middle ground.”
Quine’s picture of the way “theory meets experience” is supposed to help you wrap your mind around it. But Quine is just fixated on what amounts to Wittgenstein’s own observation that “criteria” are defeasible. From the PI:
Quine takes the fact that our sense impressions (of wet and cold) may lie (about the presence of rain) to squash the hope for a special connection (a criterial connection) between our having those impressions and the truth values of sentences about the rain — any connection, that is, supposedly more special than the connection between barometers falling and the truth values of sentences about the rain.
If Carnap’s analytic/synthetic and Wittgenstein’s grammatical/eperiential distinctions were any good, then, as far as Quine cares, we should be able to, within the experiential sentences, set out exactly which experiences are keyed to which sentences: as if whatever else we believed about the truth of whatever sentence, there were some experiences such that if we had them, that would settle the truth of some synthetic sentence (like the one about the rain). Obviously sentences about the rain aren’t answerable to experience in this way, and, so Quine seems to get what he wants.
There’s more to it, but this is a start, I think, in the way of characterizing Quine’s project in light of Wittgenstein’s PI philosophy. If this is the right way to frame it, I side with W.
June 5, 2008 at 10:57 am |
I don’t have time to respond to the entire thing right now, but my statement about Quine’s desire to separate the world into facts and conventions was just a way to get started. That is, the fabric of our sentences is black with fact and white with convention, but it is not also orange with something else.