On Quine's first of his "Two Dogmas"

numberjohnny5 January 04, 2017 at 10:32 2325 views 3 comments

As I understand it, Quine says that the circularity between analyticity, synonymy, and necessity for ways of arriving at analytic (a priori) truth is inadequate or unsatisfactory.

But in my view, language (and reasoning) is (ultimately) necessarily circular. That necessary truths derive from analyticity and synonymy doesn't at all negate or fail to provide adequate justification for necessary truths.

Furthermore, I'm not even sure what Quine is seeking regarding a satisfactory understanding or explanation of analyticity and synonymy to justify their use in determining necessary truths. In other words, what would a satisfactory explanation in terms of necessary truths regarding analyticity and synonymy for Quine even look like?

Comments (3)

jkop January 04, 2017 at 20:09 #44250 0 likes

Quoting numberjohnny5

But in my view, language (and reasoning) is (ultimately) necessarily circular.

That's weird. If language and reasoning would be circular, then words would be meaningless (e.g. 'food' would not refer to edible things in the world but only other words), and all reasoning would be invalid.

Regarding Quine and analyticity: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/

numberjohnny5 January 05, 2017 at 10:47 #44344 0 likes

Quoting jkop

That's weird. If language and reasoning would be circular, then words would be meaningless (e.g. 'food' would not refer to edible things in the world but only other words), and all reasoning would be invalid.

Well, I'm an internalist on meaning, so it's not "meaningless" in my view.

Re your example, "food" as a word would refer to particular objects we might eat, but defining the word "food" would involve synonymous definitions.

I meant "reasoning is circular" in the sense that if reasoning relies on the view that (linguistic) meaning is instantiated via words/sentences, then reasoning is circular due to synonymy. So I don't mean "reasoning is circular" in the sense of invalid arguments.

Terrapin Station January 06, 2017 at 14:38 #44762 0 likes

Re his comments on synonymy, Quine always seemed to me to be pulling the ridiculous rhetorical tactic where one pretends to not know what some common term refers to, and where when one is given a definition or explanation in common terms, one continues by pretending to not kinow what those terms refer to either, ad infinitum.

It always goes something like this:

Joe: "I have no idea what a dog is."

Bob: "Dogs--you know canines."

Joe: "I have no idea what canines are."

Bob: "You know the common house pet; not cats, but the ones that are wolf-like . . ."

Joe: "I have no idea what a pet is."

And it goes on and on, where no matter what words you use to explain it, Joe doesn't know those words.

People use that tactic a lot on message boards. Rather than seeming like an argument against the idea in question, it always seems to me like the person is effectively saying that they're either an imbecile or insane or a badly programmed robot or something, because they're apparently competent speakers of the natural language in question, but they can't grasp something required to make them a competent speaker of the language--making it clear that the appearance of them being a competent speaker of the language was mistaken, and suggesting that they instead need serious remedial education, or institutionalization, or better programming, or whatever it might be in the case at hand.