Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is thought of by most analytic philosophers
as the watershed moment in the destruction of logical positivism. He may have
been the first major post-linguistic turn philosopher to identify themself as a
pragmatist (and here I'm not counting his Harvard colleague Morton White in the
equation). Replaying the death agonies of logical positivism is a good way of
seeing where Pirsig's philosophy ties in with the professional dialectic, and
that paper is a must read in that sense.
What Quine wanted to do was purify empiricism, which in its post-linguistic
turn phase is what logical positivism was supposed to be a form of. Analytic
philosophers, ever since somebody thought it would be brilliant to turn to the
study of the way we use words (whether mainline positivists like Rudolph Carnap
and A.J. Ayer or Oxford/ordinary-language philosophers like P.F. Strawson and
Gilbert Ryle), thought their job was to study "meaning," to find the meanings
of words, display how meaning was created, etc. "Conceptual analysis" became
what philosophers thought they did, what their special provenance was in
relation to the other disciplines. It promoted the thought that, since science
was the empirical discipline, science would tell us about the stuff of the
world, but philosophy would explain to science what their words meant.
How empiricial is that? is roughly the thought that motivated Quine. The very
idea of "conceptual analysis" was of basically an a priori discipline, an
activity where one didn't have to study anything in the world, but could just
sit in your armchair and figure the stuff out--just like Descartes' problems of
other minds and the external world. But wasn't the motivation behind logical
positivism the destruction and avoidance of pointless metaphysical problems,
weird things like whether there was anything going on outside your door ("leave
your office" would have been G.E. Moore's reply), which are specifically
produced by a kind of armchair speculation that required no input from the
world?
Quine's first dogma was the analytic/synthetic distinction, something Kant had
made up at the spur of the moment in the First Critique as a way of splitting
the difference between the Rationalists and Empiricists (only so named because
of Kant's work). Kant's distinction became the basis of the distinction
between statements whose meaning and truth was derived _only_ in virtue of
their relationship to other statements ("analytic statements" such as "All
bachelors are single") and statements whose meaning and truth one not only
needed other statements, but also participation of the world to figure out
("rocks fall to the earth," the truth of which can only be determined by a
synthesis of the meanings of each individual word and then looking out into the
world). Science would do the "looking out into the world" bit, but they would
need someone to help them with the other bit, the analytic statements you don't
need experiments for. This, for someone like Quine, basically just looks like
a Rationalist throw-back, a haven for the Cartesian speculation the
sober-minded English Empiricists had wanted to throw cold water over.
By ditching the first dogma, we eliminate the basis for an armchair, a priori
discipline like "conceptual analysis," thus putting us back on the path of a
thorough-going empiricism. Quine, it is largely thought, didn't quite make it
by himself, however. His second dogma, reductionism, was the pernicious
reduction of knowledge statements to sensations, or "immediate experience."
Pirsigians shouldn't be fooled by the term into thinking that Quine's dogma
swings at Pirsig. Radical empiricism was supposed to be as much a purification
of the terms of empiricism as the post-positivist dialectic was. Quine,
though, didn't in the end mean the end of that dogma was much as he should
have. He erects in his work the idea of "observation sentences" as opposed
other sentences, and the latter end up playing the same role as before. And
then there's Quine's over-bearing scientism, his penchant for saying that
everything can/should be reduced to physics, the only language that "limns the
world."
Philosophers dissatisfied with Quine's tack at reductionism have increasingly
turned to Wilfrid Sellars, a by comparison neglected figure that I believe
recently has been receiving a substantial reappreciation (primarily motivated
by the rise of Robert Brandom and John McDowell). Sellars' seminal "Empiricism
and Philosophy of Mind" was produced at just about the same time as Quine's
"Two Dogmas," but received much less attention. Sellars' enemy in that paper
is what he calls the Myth of the Given, the idea that there is a bald
experience given to our minds that we simply add the hairplugs of language to.
This was the attack Quine should have made on reductionism, but didn't.
Sellars, too though, didn't quite make it to a pure empiricism. He, too, liked
to talk about science as the end all be all, and his way of making the point
was a distinction between our manifest image of the world and the scientific
image of the world. The manifest one was the fake one that, while not
reducible to the scientific one, needed to be dealt with properly in the face
of the true, scientific image--and philosophy could help with its "conceptual
analysis."
Rorty liked to say that it was almost as if Sellars and Quine were only able to
reject the one dogma of the other, and needed their respective second one to
retain their self-image as analytic philosophers. Donald Davidson, Quine's
greatest pupil, helped ditch the whole damn thing and finally set us on the
path of a fully purified empiricism. He called the third, and hopefully last,
dogma of empiricism the scheme/content distinction. This distinction
underlayed the others and its motivation was to call into question the idea
that language was a kind of scheme we layed on top of experienced content.
This, too, was a Kantian relic, that between what he called "concepts" and
"intuitions," such that one could say, "thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind."
This is what Kant meant by the mind constituting the world--the world's there,
sure enough, but its only presentation to us is by virtue of our mind's
constitution of it in our own mind. (Carefully compare to Pirsig's discussion
of Kant in ZMM.) But this raises the Cartesian spectare again, that we are
trapped in our own minds, maybe knowing that there are other ones out there,
but not knowing whether we are constituting the world in just the same way--if
we are using different conceptual schemes, we might be living in different
worlds. Please Obi-philosophy Kenobi--tell us what our conceptual schemes are
and how they constitute. Davidson's ditching of the scheme/content distinction
again destroys the basis for an armchair, speculative discipline and thrusts us
all back into the same world, the one no one has ever really left.
The punchline to the story is that whereas Quine wanted to be both an
empiricist and a pragmatist, Davidson isn't sure what's left of either once we
pull the underpinnings out. Rorty and Hilary Putnam, the two most prominent
post-linguistic turn self-identified pragmatists, themselves have wondered
explicitly about what is left of empiricism once one ditches all the dogmas of
positivism, though they think the core insights of James and Dewey untouched.
Even more weird is Brandom calling his Sellarsian inferentialism a kind of
rationalism--a much different sort than the 17th century Europeans, but the
resurrection of the title bearing out how much damage Brandom thinks Locke's
confusion of causation with justification caused philosophy.
I think it an open question as to whether retro-pragmatists like David
Hildebrand are right about there being an important line to be drawn between
classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and neopragmatists like Rorty and
Putnam, one roughly centering around the "radical empiricism" of the former
set, and supposed lack there-of in the latter. I still tend to think that
there's simply an unimportant line between the classical tendency to talk about
experience and the neo tendency to talk about language, with no further major
philosophical implications.
Be that as it may, reading Quine or Sellars or Davidson can help one figure out
what kind of empiricist one wants to be by helping see what the destruction of
logical positivism pans out to mean. I've made this suggestion before, but
there is an excellent collection of essays by Putnam called "The Collapse of
the Fact/Value Dichotomy," the first three of which set out the older
Empiricist Background, take you through Quine, and then address the
implications to the positivist doctrine of emotivism, that values are somehow
less real--the primary concern of Pirsigians. It is a great way into Quine and
these related issues, whatever one ultimately thinks about the linguistic turn.
Matt
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