The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (75 page)

It is instructive, however, that this issue exercises him at all. A hard-core naturalist, one might think, should never have felt the tug of ecumenism in the first place. Yet Quine certainly does. He feels it from the outset; and he continues to feel it even once he has settled against ecumenism. There is, he senses, an invidiousness in regarding one account as true and another as nonsense even though there is no cosmically telling between them and even though it is nothing but a kind of historical accident that one of them has our allegiance rather than the other. So he salves his conscience by reminding us that we can change our allegiance. The sectarian, he tells us,

is as free as the ecumenist to oscillate between the two [accounts]…. In his sectarian way he does deem the one [account] true and the alien terms of the other meaningless, but only so long as he is entertaining the one [account] rather than the other. He can readily shift the shoe to the other foot. (
Pursuit of Truth
, p. 100)

This is not to concede, along with the ecumenist, that both accounts should be regarded as true. It is not even to concede that both accounts
can
be regarded as true. But it
is
to concede that
each
account can be regarded as true. And, as Quine himself admits, to concede this is but one terminological step away from conceding ecumenism. After all, sectarians and ecumenists alike are agreed that, whichever account has our allegiance, we are free to pay the other account every compliment we can short of giving it too our allegiance. The question whether this includes dignifying the other account with the label ‘true’ seems to ‘simmer down, bathetically, to a question of words’ (
Pursuit of Truth
, pp. 100–101).
²³

Here, I suggest, we see a dim recognition on Quine’s part of something for which I shall argue in §8: that, contrary to the letter of the loose formulation of his naturalism that I ventured in the previous section, and contrary to the spirit of any decent formulation of it, the way of science is not ‘the’ way to make sense of things, because, in particular, it is not the way to make sense of making sense of things. His naturalism does not serve him well in making sense of his naturalism – despite all that he claims on behalf of it. More of this later.

Meanwhile, we should consider what motivates his naturalism, this driving force in his philosophy. Can it be derived from other, yet more basic ‘isms’ that he embraces? Not really.
²⁴
To an extent Quine is impressed by the sheer success that the natural sciences have enjoyed, indeed the quite
spectacular
success that they have enjoyed, when it comes to predicting the future and thereby controlling and modifying the environment. Here he shows his affinity to the American pragmatist tradition that extends back to Peirce, James, and Dewey and whose very defining feature might be said to be the view that success is the yardstick for assessing different ways of making sense of things.
²⁵
But whatever the success of the natural sciences, Quine does not think that there is any serious alternative to naturalism.
²⁶
Given that the natural sciences, in their current form, embody our best efforts hitherto to determine the general character of reality, they
must
be our point of departure for any further enquiry into its general character, including any further enquiry that has our own methods and principles of enquiry as part of its focus. They must be our point of
departure
: they may not be our destination. In a hundred years’ time we may look back on our current beliefs and see them as fundamentally mistaken. But if so, then this will be because we have got there from here, and this in turn will be because we have done the only thing we can do starting from here, namely use the methods and principles of the natural sciences in their current form. If we were to step outside our current beliefs altogether, in an effort to raise questions about how they stand in relation to reality, then we should have no basis for any further progress. This is the purport of the famous ‘ship’ image that Quine so frequently invokes, an image due to the logical positivist Otto Neurath and captured by him in a quotation that Quine uses as an epigraph for his book
Word and Object
:

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry dock and reconstruct it from its best
components. (Neurath (
1983
), p. 92)
²⁷

4. Some Distinctions Rejected …

I indicated in §1 that there are elements in Carnap’s logical positivism that Quine rejects. So far there has been no real evidence of this. We have seen him developing Carnap’s ideas, but not yet seriously opposing them. How does he do so?

One useful way of broaching this question is to pick some basic kind of entity postulated by current physics and then to consider a statement to the effect that such entities exist. Take the statement that there are quarks, for instance. Now, what is Quine’s attitude to this statement? He regards it as a fundamental truth about reality; at the same time he concedes that physics may later make him reconsider and regard it as a falsehood instead. That is the only attitude he believes he
can
take, given his (provisional) naturalism. Very well, what is Carnap’s attitude to the statement? He regards it, at least on its most natural interpretation, as a decision, or, better, as the announcement of a decision, to adopt a particular linguistic framework, neither true nor false. The question whether there are quarks is for Carnap most naturally interpreted as an external question, not an internal question (see §2 of the previous chapter). Here, certainly, is a point of disagreement.

The fact is that Quine sees no rationale for Carnap’s external/internal distinction. When the forces of the world impinge on people’s surfaces, they sometimes hit back by making noises and marks on paper. They produce statements that record their conception of what is going on. And there are various dimensions of assessment for these statements. Two in particular are pertinent to this issue. One is with respect to truth. The other is with respect to desiderata in the systems of classification involved: power, elegance, economy, clarity, user-friendliness, and suchlike.
²⁸
But there is neither need nor justification, in Quine’s view, for keeping these separate, for seeing the latter as bearing on a choice of framework and the former as bearing on assertions made within the framework. If people respond to their sense experience by claiming that there are quarks, or that there are positive integers, or that the number of quarks in the solar system is less than some specified positive integer, then, in each case, they are simply asserting how they take things to be. Their classifications may or may not have the aesthetic-cum-utilitarian virtues advertised above, and other classifications may have these virtues to a greater or lesser extent. But what these people have claimed is in each case straightforwardly true or false. (See e.g. ‘Two Dogmas’, §6, and
Word and Object
, §56.)

For similar reasons Quine rejects the distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths. In his celebrated essay ‘Two Dogmas’ he identifies the conviction that there is such a distinction as one of two dogmas that
characterize what he calls ‘modern empiricism’, by which he means, pretty much, logical positivism.
²⁹
And he urges that there is no satisfactory way of effecting the distinction. If we say that a statement is analytically true when its truth depends on the rules of some linguistic framework, or when its truth is not sensitive to what reality is like, or when it is true by virtue of meaning alone, or when it can be known to be true independently of sense experience, or when it cannot be denied without violating the principle of contradiction, or when it cannot be denied without betraying a misunderstanding of the language, then in every case we are, in Quine’s view, playing out a variation on the same incoherent theme. We are presupposing that each individual statement has its own meaning, determining, by itself, what is required of reality to make the statement true.

Quine’s view is that, when the forces of the world impinge on people’s surfaces and they hit back by producing statements that record their conception of what is going on, they do so by producing statements that
collectively
record their conception of what is going on. None of their statements makes its own isolable contribution to the story they have to tell.
³⁰
Suppose that, when the forces of the world impinge some more, these people find themselves reconsidering their earlier conception of what is going on. Perhaps they used to claim that all swans are white, and now they find themselves having what seems for all the world like an encounter with a black swan. There are all sorts of ways in which they might accommodate this sense experience. They might simply reject their earlier claim that all swans are white. They might continue to claim that all swans are white and dismiss this apparent counterexample as an illusion of some kind. They might continue to claim that all swans are white,
accept
that here is a black swan, and reject whatever principle they previously took to preclude doing both of these things at once. There is much to be said for or against each of these options, for instance in terms of how easy it would be to implement given its various repercussions. But there is nothing in the meaning of any of the claims these people used to make, considered in isolation, to force them to take one option rather than any other.

So the real object of Quine’s censure, when he rejects the analytic/synthetic distinction, is the idea that each individual statement stands in its own relations of confirmation and confutation with different possible courses of sense experience. And in fact this is the second dogma that he identifies in his essay – though his very talk of ‘two’ dogmas is somewhat belied by his claim that ‘the two dogmas are … at root identical’ (p. 41).
³¹
An analytically
true statement is a statement that is not only confirmed by the actual course of sense experience, but that would have been confirmed by any possible course of sense experience. For Quine that makes no sense. Any statement we accept, even the statement that aunts are female, is just part of our overall account of how things are, and, had our sense experience taken a different course, it would have been a candidate for rejection. Imagine, for instance, that we had discovered some tribe in which we had observed, among the siblings of parents, a very high correlation, but not an exceptionless one, between being female and playing some crucial social role. And imagine that we had found it more convenient, when talking about members of this tribe, to align aunthood with playing this role than with being female. Then, in acceding to this, we would have acknowledged a few male aunts. (It is natural to protest that we would at most have found it convenient to
call
a few people ‘male aunts’, but that this would have involved a change in the meaning of the word ‘aunt’. Indeed, in later writings, Quine himself talks in such terms.
³²
In ‘Two Dogmas’, however, his position is less compromising, and the idea that each expression has its own monadic meaning which it might retain or lose through any change of doctrine is itself part of what is under attack.) Likewise, a synthetically true statement is a statement that, although it is confirmed by the actual course of sense experience, would have been confuted by some other possible course of sense experience. But that too makes no sense for Quine. Any statement we accept we could still have accepted, no matter what course our sense experience had taken, if we had made suitable compensatory adjustments to the rest of
what we accepted, most obviously if we had dismissed any apparent counterevidence as illusory.
^33
,
34

Consider Carnap’s bifurcated treatment of how Euclidean geometry was superseded as a description of physical space. Carnap’s view is that there are two equally legitimate ways of construing the geometries involved in this process – either as linguistic frameworks or as descriptions of physical space proffered within some other linguistic framework – each with its own implications concerning where the division between the analytically true and the synthetically true falls, each with its own implications concerning where the division between the truth-evaluable and the non-truth-evaluable falls, each with its own implications concerning what has been rejected and what has been retained (see §3 of the previous chapter). Quine is able to cut through all of this. On Quine’s view, we used to think that physical space is Euclidean and we now think it is non-Euclidean:
it is as simple as that.

Nor is it just the logical positivists’ distinction that is under attack. There is a long, venerable history of similar distinctions with which Quine would have just as little sympathy:

• Leibniz’ distinction between truths of reasoning and truths of fact

• Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact

• Kant’s original distinction, later appropriated and given sharper formulation by Frege, between analytic truths and synthetic truths
³⁵

• Kant’s distinct distinction, likewise appropriated by Frege, between
a priori
truths and empirical truths