[quickphilosophy] Re: Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
- From: wittrsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 20:00:09 -0000
Thanks, much, Larry. I'm looking forward to reading the Rey piece. & please
feel free to post whenever you have a chance--even if it's only intermittently.
We're happy to take whatever you can spare!
W
--- In quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Larry Tapper" <larry_tapper@...> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I'be been lurking but not posting because I haven't kept up with the
> Tractatus readings. And whereof one doesn't know nothing, one should remain
> silent. Or something like that.
>
> Five weeks ago, Walto wrote:
>
> W> Nice post, Ron, but I hope Larry stops in to defend Quine on analyticity
> here...or Budd to defend Fodor.
>
> I didn't get around to jumping in, but I see that analyticity is still a hot
> topic.
>
> I wouldn't call myself exactly a defender of Quine, beacuse his radical
> behaviorism strikes me as a kind of weakly motivated ascetic discipline, if
> not actually a mistake. But I find his work fascinating anyway.
>
> Ron Allen mentioned a long time ago that he thought Grice and Strawson had
> effectively refuted Quine. About this I just want to say that there's a stock
> Quinian answer to that, which is that the strongest arguments advanced by G
> and S appeal to the notion of "meaning change", which puts us smack dab in
> the middle of the evil Circle of Synonymy. An appeal to meaning change cuts
> no ice with someone who thinks that individual word meanings are, as Quine
> puts it, "creatures of darkness".
>
> Also there were plenty of philosophers such as Davidson who read Grice and
> Strwason and still thought Quine had done serious damage to the a/s
> distinction. So we can't really say G and S refuted Quine in the *historical*
> sense.
>
> I think Georges Rey did a nice job in his Stanford article on
> analytic/synthetic:
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/
>
> Rey mentions many points on both sides. Here's one I think is very relevant
> from the point of view of Quine's critics:
>
> -----------------------Rey in Stanford----------------------------
>
> Here, once again, Quine invoked his metaphor of the web of belief, claiming
> that sentences are more or less revisable, depending upon how "peripheral" or
> "central" their position is in the web. The appearance of sentences being
> "analytic" is simply due to their being, like the laws of logic and
> mathematics, comparatively central, and so are given up, if ever, only under
> extreme pressure from the peripheral forces of experience. But no sentence is
> absolutely immune from revision; all sentences are thereby empirical, and
> none is actually analytic.
>
> There are a number of problems with this explanation. In the first place,
> centrality and the appearance of analyticity don't seem to be so closely
> related. As Quine (1960) himself noted, there are are plenty of central,
> unrevisable beliefs that don't seem analytic (e.g. The earth has existed for
> more than five years,, Some people have eyes, Mass-energy is conserved), and
> many standard examples of what seems analytic aren't seriously central:
> "Bachelors are unmarried" and "Aunts are sisters" are notoriously trivial,
> and could easily be revised if someone really cared.
>
> Secondly, it's not mere unrevisability that seems distinctive of the
> analytic, but rather a certain sort of unintelligibility: for all the
> unrevisability of "Some people have eyes," it's perfectly possible to imagine
> it to be false. What's peculiar about the analytic is that denials of it
> often seem unintelligible: we can't seriously imagine a married bachelor.
> Indeed, far from unrevisability explaining analyticity, it would seem to be
> analyticity that explains unrevisability: the only reason one balks at
> denying bachelors are unmarried is that that's just what "bachelor" means!
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is one line of criticism I tend to agree with. It's sometimes said that
> Quine proposed replacing the notion of analyticity with the notion of
> centrality. That would be an attractively simple proposal, but it doesn't
> really seem to work for the reasons Rey gives in the passage quoted above.
>
> As for the case against analyticity, I couldn't put it better than Rey.
>
> This may be a kind of hit-and-run post because I am going off on a one-week
> trip. But I hope it spurs some readers to look at the Rey article, which I
> think does justice to the complexity of the issues.
>
> Best, Larry
>
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