Empiricism has no dogmas. Saying it does is like saying the invisible has two visible aspects- one is that some of us can see stuff, because we aren't blind, and secondly that we can see that something isn't there and thus must be fucking invisible if it actually is there. But this is simply a manner of speaking. The invisible has no visible aspects because it is fucking invisible mate. Empiricism has no dogmas because empiricism aint dogmatic in any way.
Quine pretended otherwise
Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas.
Empiricism means something which aint fucking conditioned by any dogma whatsoever. One may say 'modern empiricism isn't empirical. It got hooked on drugs in High Skool and then joined a cult. Also it smells bad.' But anybody can bad mouth anybody.
One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.
That's Kantian shite. It aint empiricism which is the name you give to people who look at evidence and say 'on the basis of this clinching piece of evidence I think x is true beyond reasonable doubt.'
The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.
That is logical atomism or some such stupid shit. Meaningful statements feature high degrees to impredicativity or other types of recursion. In any case they feature 'epistemic' objects such that 'intensions' have no non-arbitrary extensions. Thus, empiricists don't believe this 'dogma'. If it were true, we would have a flawless universal translator on our smart phone.
To be fair to Quine, back in the Fifties, it wasn't obvious that 'i-languages' don't exist.
Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded.
Which is why empiricism refused to have anything to do with them.
One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.
Nope. Speculative metaphysics is just random shite peeps talk. True if they are actual natural scientists or poets or math mavens or serial killers, that random shite might be worth looking at to discover their motivation or to predict what they might do next.
Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.
Actual pragmatists move to Florida. Seriously, there is little point being a pragmatist if your balls are freezing off.
1. BACKGROUND FOR ANALYTICITY Kant's cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz's distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.
Or the distinction between stuff you can work out without looking at the evidence and stuff where must do so. Thus you can safely assume that a small baby is not the mastermind behind a complex financial fraud. You don't need to secure exculpatory evidence.
Leibniz spoke of the truths of reason as true in all possible worlds.
i.e. stuff we can't currently imagine could be the case. Then we discover that the baby is way smarter than us. Also, if anybody should go to jail for fraud, it should be the baby. How bad could baby jail be?
Picturesqueness aside, this is to say that the truths of reason are those which could not possibly be false.
Fuck we know about what is possible?
In the same vein we hear analytic statements defined as statements whose denials are self-contradictory.
It is self-contradictory for you to say I farted. This is because you are a dog. Dogs say woof woof. Thus you can't possibly have ever told me that the next time I farted you would divorce me and marry Camilla.
But this definition has small explanatory value;
no definition explains anything. Anyway, 'explanatory' is itself a Tarskian primitive. It is undefined.
for the notion of self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity itself.
and the need for clarification needs clarification as does the need for that need and so forth.
The two notions are the two sides of a single dubious coin.
There are no a priori synthetic truths. People thought maybe 'incongruent counterparts', which is Kantian, was kosher, but than the Wu experiment showed this wasn't so.
We must observe to begin with that meaning is not to be identified with naming or reference.
Why observe any such thing? Neither names nor references convey any meaning. That is why when I say 'James Armstrong' nobody understands that I am trying to order a pepperoni pizza. This is also the reason that my dissertation was rejected. Apparently not all your references can be to stuff up your supervisor's rectum.
...the Evening Star is the planet Venus, and the Morning Star is the same. The two singular terms name the same thing. But the meanings must be treated as distinct, since the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' is a statement of fact established by astronomical observation.
No. It is a matter of convention or convenience. In some cultures, morning star does not mean Venus and, in our own, Venus isn't a star. It is a planet
If 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' were alike in meaning,
Some people are referring to the same thing when they use these terms. Others are not. Thi
the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' would be analytic.
No. It would be hermeneutic. One linguistic term would be interpreted in the same way as another. The question then would arise whether the correct hermeneutic had been applied. Lucifer is sometimes translated as 'morning star' but we would be wrong to translate Isaiah 14.12 as 'How are thou fallen, Venus!'
Again there is Russell's example of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly.' Analysis of the meanings of words was by no means sufficient to reveal to George IV that the person named by these two singular terms was one and the same.
Scott had written other stuff and had some political importance. One might say, for the Prince Regent, Scott was a sound enough on the Union, Waverly's author might not.
The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms. The terms '9' and 'the number of planets' name one and the same abstract entity
No. One is a 'buck stopped' natural number, the other is a matter of observation or custom. Pluto has been downgraded because Mickey Mouse made him his bitch.
but presumably must be regarded as unlike in meaning; for astronomical observation was needed, and not mere reflection on meanings, to determine the sameness of the entity in question. Thus far we have been considering singular terms. 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' and Russell's of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly', illustrate that terms can name the same thing but differ in meaning.
This isn't true. 9 is not the name of the 'number of planets in a Solar system'. As for as I know there is no name given to this. But there could be. We could say 'the Copernicus number of such and such solar system is 12'.
The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms.
But it is a distinction hunting dogs understand. They respond to their name and quickly understand the meaning of the gestures given by the hunter.
Quine wrote well but he was rather conservative even by the standards of his time. He didn't get that the West hadn't really followed Aristotle. It had followed whatever would make it richer and more secure. Meaning- which in Sanskrit is called 'Artha'- is Economic- which is another, or the same, meaning of the word 'Artha'- or Utilitarian.
The Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning.
Intension is a term of art. But it isn't really meaning and, though useful enough in some contexts, it may itself not mean what it intends.
For Aristotle it was essential in men to be rational, accidental to be two-legged.
Probably because they were plenty of one-legged peripatetic philosophers hopping around all over the place.
Still, Aristotle was wrong. A raving lunatic isn't rational, but he is a man and fucking with him may cause you and your family to die very horrible deaths.
But there is an important difference between this attitude and the doctrine of meaning.
There is no doctrine of meaning. There are hermeneutic doctrines- i.e. doctrines of interpretation. But interpretation isn't meaning.
From the latter point of view it may indeed be conceded (if only for the sake of argument) that rationality is involved in the meaning of the word 'man' while two-leggedness is not;
Nonsense! From the point of view of any doctrine of 'meaning', there is one privileged 'interpretation', though it may not be accessible. But that has nothing to do with 'conventions' or Schelling focal solutions to coordination problems for pragmatics, not semantics, such that 'man' is a movable feast. My in-laws may agree that my wife is right to say I am not a real man. But, for some other purpose, e.g. a demand for alimony, they may insist that I am a man and not a lesbian elephant as I have frequently claimed.
but two-leggedness may at the same time be viewed as involved in the meaning of 'biped' while rationality is not.
Not really. A one legged bird is still a bird- or feathered biped- and a guy who, for some medical reason, never had legs, is still a 'featherless biped'.
Thus from the point of view of the doctrine of meaning it makes no sense to say of the actual individual, who is at once a man and a biped, that his rationality is essential and his two-leggedness accidental or vice versa.
What makes sense to you or your fellow shitheads is generally nonsense.
Why was 'two dogmas' considered worth reading? Why do academic availability cascades still exist? The answer is obvious. Philosophy had regained salience as a type of ethological 'displacement activity' in the context of 'concurrency' deadlocks or livelock with respect to tackling 'open questions' in STEM subjects. Then, thanks to Djikstra &c, it became obvious that there was no 'natural' solution to concurrency or other categorical problems.
Quine, we might say, was fighting a rearguard action against the credentialized cretinism of the post-GI Bill Academy. But he sat on a Chesterton's fence for too fucking long and thus was buggered by what he thought of as a barrier or 'cordon sanitaire' defending against the idiocy of stupid darkies like me. This is because he didn't embrace a throughly ontologically dysphoric notion of philosophy. It has no business making itself at home in a place where cunts like me can take its pants down and make fun of its puny genitals.
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