23 February 2008

Nitpicking "On Quine's cul-de-sac"

Duck has already covered Hacker's "Passing By The Naturalistic Turn: on Quine's cul-de-sac" in broad strokes, and done a generally satisfactory job of it. I just intend to prod at some particular passages that annoyed me, or which caused me to want to write something.

In the USA it is widely held that with Quine’s rejection of ‘the’ analytic/synthetic distinction, the possibility of philosophical or conceptual analysis collapses, the possibility of resolving philosophical questions by a priori argument and elucidation is foreclosed, and all good philosophers turn out to be closet scientists.

If philosophy is supposed to be "continuous with science" then what can it mean for some philosophers (and not others) to be "closet" scientists? I do not think Quine's claim was that the distinction between the subject-matters of philosophy and science was vague, but that there just was not any: The difference between philosophy and chemistry is the same as the difference between chemistry and physics -- they are in different areas of a university. (I believe Quine once referred to the distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences as "Useful to librarians, but not to philosophers" but I can't place the quote. I suspect it was somewhere in Quiddities.)

Hacker notes that Quine himself "offered an account of analytic truths" in The Roots of Reference. It's two pages long, ps.79/80. The upshot is that an "analytic sentence" is a sentence which one learns to use just by learning to affirm it. I quote the close of the passage, to give the flavor, the book is searchable on Amazon:
In Word and Object I defined a stimulus-analytic sentence as one to which every speaker is disposed to assent. The analytic sentences in the present sense are a subclass of those, and a somewhat nearer approximation to the analytic sentences uncritically so called. Even so, we have here no such radical cleavage between analytic and synthetic sentences as was called for by Carnap and other epistemologists. In learning our language each of us learns to count certain sentences, outright, as true; there are sentences whose truth is learned in that way by many of us, and there are sentences whose truth is learned that way by none of us. The former sentences are more nearly analytic than the latter. The analytic sentences are the ones whose truth is learned in that way by all of us; and these extreme cases do not differ notably from their neighbors, nor can we always say which ones they are.
So there can be no dividing up of sentences into analytic and synthetic, since a) there are gradations of approximation to analyticity and b) it is not clear how to decide whether a sentence a speaker holds true is one whose meaning he learned while learning to assent to it, or if further inference (possibly involving non-analytic sentences) was needed to decide the sentence's truth (which he is presently disposed to assent to simply upon hearing the sentence). (Suppose you learned that Larry, Moe, and Curly were called "bachelors" by being taught to assent to the novel sentences "Larry is a bachelor", "Moe is a bachelor", and "Curly is a bachelor", which sentences are used to explain to you why the three share an apartment and throw wild parties each weekend. And suppose you knew they were men through their appearance. Then suppose that you realize that they are unmarried when you ask them where their wives are and they laugh at you. You might come to realize that "bachelors are unmarried men" at this point, depending on what else you'd picked up about the usage of the words. By Quine's standard, this sentence would not be analytic in your mouth -- you learned to assent to it some time after you were first able to form it.) So any attempt to separate sentences into the two categories of Hume's fork is going to fail -- there will be cases where it's just not clear which tine applies. And so any attempt to have philosophy consist in "clarifying" propositions partly by mean of Hume's fork is a dead program. It seems reasonable to deny that Quine is backsliding in Roots of Reference, contra the implication in Hacker's article on page two.

It also strikes me as worth noting that Quine handles the question of the analyticity of logical statements (on p. 80 of Roots of Reference) by just taking the highest common factor between quarreling logicians: The law of excluded middle "should be seen as synthetic" because denied by intuitionistic logicians, while "that an alternation is implied by its components" is declared analytic, because it is not a subject of disagreement. But there are paraconsistent logics which do reject the inference from A to AvB (which allows them to hold onto Disjunctive Syllogism as a rule of inference without risk of Explosion). So it would seem that Quine is wrong to count this as analytic -- there are logicians who find reason to object to it, and logics which disallow it. I take this to show that Quine's manner of distinguishing analytic from synthetic logical statement is ad hoc and pointless -- "analytic" here just means that there has not been a non-classical logician clever (or bored) enough to draw up a logic which denied some principle or other. Quine's just conjured up a useless standard for being "analytic" that lets him say (with many philosophers from the tradition) that logic is analytic. But this is mere wordplay. Quine is trying to find a way to talk in the traditional way despite having ruled out all of the plausible ways to actually get away with this.

Hacker again:
And in respect of a priority, what goes for mathematics and logic goes too for such propositions as ‘red is more like orange than like yellow’ or ‘red is darker than pink’.


I should have thought that red and yellow were more alike than red and orange: red and yellow are both primary colors, while orange is a secondary color. I don't even know what to make of this example. It's weird. Perhaps schoolchildren are taught their colors differently in Britain, as they are taught to pronounce "Zee" as "Zed", and part of this is that colors' "likeness" to one another is measured by their spacing on a color-wheel. (So contrastive colors are maximally unlike, and the three primary colors are all equally like and unlike one another.)

Certain reds are not darker than certain pinks. Looking at my bookcase, I see two books whose spines are a soft red and hot-pink, respectively. The hot-pink looks darker to me. Is hot-pink not pink? Or consider the red of red cellophane -- is this darker than the pink of a healthy pink carnation?

I shouldn't think it would be hard to produce color-swatches which matched the shades of red and pink I have in view. In which case what Hacker says is false, or at least not true in all cases of "red" and "pink" -- if he wants to talk about colors which are somehow impossible to illustrate with color-swatches, then I don't know what he is talking about.

Is it a problem if a philosopher's examples of a priori truths appear to be empirically false? What does it tell us about the a priori/a posteriori distinction if we are not all agreed on where to draw the line -- is the a priori still a "purely" conceptual matter if we are not agreed on its extent?

Hacker: "Knowledge that Jack is taller than Jill is categorially unlike knowledge that red is darker than pink." I don't know what a "category" is supposed to be here, or how they are supposed to be distinguished. I had to look to confirm my suspicion that Hacker's pink-generalization was wrong, and I should have to look to see if Jack was shorter than Jill. What is the point in drawing up "categories" and apportioning various bits of knowledge to different ones? In one sense I can perfectly well understand the point of having "categories" for different areas of knowledge: Chemistry, psychology, biology etc. are separated as a division of labor tactic -- new departments are formed as certain areas of study start to take up too much of the resources of the previous department, and their interrelations shift as convenient (thus the development of chemistry and physics as separate disciplines towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the blurring of chemistry and biology with the arising of organic chemistry; one could also note the development of psychology and computer science as disciplines, both of which split from what had previously been called "philosophy" -- as "natural science" earlier developed out of "natural philosophy"). What the epistemological import of these accountant's divisions could be supposed to be, I haven't the foggiest. Mathematics has the pedigree of having been privileged by the Greeks, but I don't see that there is a firm boundary between recent progress in mathematics and theoretical physics or computer science -- and where there are researchers whose work covers multiple fields, I don't see that it makes any sense to suppose that they are mixing and matching a little bit from each discipline, which might be untangled by a philosopher (and then "represented perspicuously" by a tabulation of which of their practices was of which sort, and then whether or not each of their utterances had a sense).

There are distinctions in how we are able to make sense of things like rocks, things like pigs, and things like philosophers. The rock has no aims; the pig has piggish aims; the philosopher aims at doing what is right. But I don't think that these sorts of categorical distinctions can be what Hacker wants; at the least, I don't see that these sorts of distinctions include a priori/a posteriori, conceptual and empirical, grammatical and natural-scientific, which seem to be more the type of thing Hacker wants to trumpet.

3 comments:

N. N. said...

The analytic sentences are the ones whose truth is learned in that way by all of us....

When I read this my immediate response was, "What an amazing accident that the truth of some sentences is learned 'outright' by all or most of us." Were these sentences chosen out of a hat, or is it just some coincidence of our makeup that we're 'disposed' to teach and learn as true.

The law of excluded middle "should be seen as synthetic" because denied by intuitionistic logicians, while "that an alternation is implied by its components" is declared analytic, because it is not a subject of disagreement.

What this doesn't allow for is the possibility of confusion! That someone is willing to defend some position (or that a logician can devise a calculus to which he assigns 'true,' 'false,' and some other value), does not establish that the position is coherent (or that the calculus has anything to do with language).

I should have thought that red and yellow were more alike than red and orange: red and yellow are both primary colors, while orange is a secondary color.

'Alike' is ambiguous. With respect to being primary, red is more like yellow than orange. In another sense, red is more like orange than yellow because red is 'closer' to orange than to yellow (i.e., orange is intermediate 'between' red and yellow).

Certain reds are not darker than certain pinks. Looking at my bookcase, I see two books whose spines are a soft red and hot-pink, respectively. The hot-pink looks darker to me.

I wonder about the word 'darker.' What are the different aspects of color? I am not up to speed on the philosophy of color (I havn't even read Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color), but I suspect that Hacker's examples could be given more definition.

I have a few more comments to make, but I'll have to make them later.

J said...

It's not only what truth-functional logic, or even analytical philosophy IS, but what it DOES--how it functions. And truth-functional logic, based on tautologies (tho' that's not to imply platonic ghosts) can do some things: whether in terms of programming, or mathematical foundations, or maybe encryption. But it can't do many other things: like cure cancer, hepatitis, AIDS, solve economic/environmental problems, etc.

Rationalists (whether Hacker, or early Wittgenstein, Frege-Russell) continually mistake philosophy as some contemplative exercise (tho' Russell moved away from view). At least Quine's project (not without some unpleasant implications--as "stimulus-analytic sentence" shows) has some place as part of human knowledge, and scientific thinking: not as merely some quasi-theological search.

Daniel Lindquist said...

"I wonder about the word 'darker.' What are the different aspects of color? I am not up to speed on the philosophy of color (I havn't even read Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color), but I suspect that Hacker's examples could be given more definition."
I suspect that what Hacker was thinking of with the second example was that if you mix red paint and white paint, you get a shade of pink paint. But I doubt this will work for making all tones that get called "pink". If I was not lazy, I would throw some swatches in Paint and check their RGB codes; I suspect that hot-pink has blue in it. I recall that being true of a lot of "darker" shades of red -- they aren't G=B=0.

(I recall hearing in Intro to Psych that very young children often have trouble distinguishing between purple and pink; it's one of the last differences they pick up, on average. Not all color differences are created equal. It's also interesting to see how many color-words primitive languages have; any language with at least two color-words has a word for "red", as I recall. And several languages used the same term for "blue" and "green" -- Japanese aoi still has this ambiguity, though modern Japanese has added separate word for green, midori, to help disambiguate; there is not a corresponding term for "just means blue". Colors are fun.)

I am sure Hacker could give his examples more definition -- "Lightening red creates pink" would not have been rebutted by the spines on my comic-books. Even then, I don't think he actually gives much in the way of argument for color-stuff being a priori/"purely" conceptual. It's just supposed to be obvious that things like his examples are not like the sort of things handled by natural sciences. If he just wanted to argue that color-talk is different from rock-talk or lifeform-talk or mind-talk, this would be fine; but he seems to want color-talk to show that there is some realm of discourse opposed to "empirical" discourses, the purely conceptual, and that color-talk is a part of this. The fact that (at least in this article) he's arguing against Quine somewhat rigs the deck; it's not hard to show that Quine is, in the name of Science and Empiricism, ruling a whole slew of discourses as "bad efforts", and rehabilitating any of them gives the appearance of showing that Quine has neglected an important kind of discourse. But I'd prefer to say that Quine gets Science and Empiricism wrong, too; his ruling-out of some of the things people like Hacker want to pay attention to means he can't give a suitable treatment of things he wants to talk about, either. And the converse holds as well -- if you want to talk about "the conceptual", then there's nothing you can coherently oppose to it. (This is all very sketchy and programmatic.)

Mainly, I was surprised at how poor Hacker's examples seemed to be. Like I said, it was a nitpick.

I haven't read Remarks on Color, either. I heard it was largely Wittgenstein discussing Goethe's remarks on color, and that turned me off; I've already slogged through a bunch of Hegel's rubbish discussing that stuff. (Horst Althaus, in his biography of Hegel, says that Goethe's approach to color is easier to understand when one learns that Goethe never got Newton's prism experiment to work -- he apparently couldn't get the little rainbow to reform into white light, or somesuch.)