No, I am not claiming that at all.
you deny that mathematics can be known apriori, as you are an empiricist…
sigh what’s the source of this confusion?
maybe you should draw me a picture.
You failed to either follow, read, or understand the links that I helpfully provided.
yes, you believe that we know triangles have 3 sides because of all the tests we did on them. and any individual if he is to come to know something about triangles must go out and find a large amount so that he has good statistical chances of drawing correct conclusions about how many sides they have.
No, that is an absolutely incorrect interpretation.
explain how knowledge of the properties of triangles are empirical yet do not require conducting experiments and making predictions and the like ?
No I mean how could you be sure your neurons were actually firing at that moment (not whether their firing in general causes such sensations)?
I’ll be a good sport, even though I think you didn’t read the supplemental material I linked.
You and I both will agree that a person can sit at a writing desk and discover mathematical truths, without even looking out the window! You allege this is a priori; I disagree.
I side with Quine; there is no such thing as a priori knowledge–rather, our knowledge is a seamless whole that originates, at the periphery, from observations.
OK, I read about Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
Although his (and others’) observations about synonyms were completely silly:
Quine begins by making a distinction between two different classes of analytic statements. The first one is called logically true and has the form:
- (1) No unmarried man is married
A sentence with that form is true independent of the interpretation of “man” and “married”, so long as the logical particles “no”, “un-”, “is” and “and” have their ordinary English meaning.
The statements in the second class have the form:
- (2) No bachelor is married.
A statement with this form can be turned into a statement with form (1) by changing synonyms with synonyms, in this case “bachelor” with “unmarried man”. It is the second class of statements that lack characterization according to Quine. The notion of the second form of analyticity leans on the notion of synonymy, which Quine believes is in as much need of clarification as analyticity. Most of Quine’s following arguments are focused on showing how explanations of synonymy end up being dependent on the notions of analyticity, necessity, or even synonymy itself.
How do we reduce sentences from the second class to a sentence of class (1)? Some might propose definitions. “No bachelor is married” can be turned into “No unmarried man is married” because “bachelor” is defined as “unmarried man”. But, Quine asks: how do we find out that “bachelor” is defined as “unmarried man”? Clearly, a dictionary would not solve the problem, as a dictionary is a report of already known synonyms, and thus is dependent on the notion of synonymy, which Quine holds as unexplained.
(Statements are not truth-apt. Only interpretations of statements are, so this semantic-level analysis is completely irrelevant. This is a big fail, but he seems great on most other things. This also explains why he was confused that “logic could be revised,” a position he thankfully later retracted. If you don’t realize statements are just signals not concepts, you become quite vulnerable to all that “logic is not certain because of quantum physics, etc.” confusion.)
Instead of reductionism, Quine proposes that it is the whole field of science and not single statements that are verified. All scientific statements are interconnected. Logical laws give the relation between different statements, while they also are statements of the system. This makes talk about the empirical content of a single statement misleading. It also becomes impossible to draw a line between synthetic statements, which depend on experience, and analytic statements, that hold come what may. Any statement can be held as necessarily true according to Quine, if the right changes are made somewhere else in the system
This I like. In other words, at a sufficiently deep level of analysis, the only thing we can meaningfully intend when we say “X is true” is “X follows from the premises.” (Note what this does to Goedel’s incompleteness thereom!)
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Are you asking a question like, “How do you know the back of your head exists right now?”
Do you believe different persons will create different translations of a French novel? If so, then you agree with Quine. As Peter Godfrey-Smith stated, this “paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy”; calling it “silly” seems very arrogant, probably betraying ignorance of the content.
Please provide evidence that he retracted that position; to my mind, he never did. And I, too, believe logic can be revised.
You’re talking about the mechanism by which sensation happens physically. I’m asking about why you are sure you’re actually experiencing sensation, absent the necessary equipment to detect your synapses firing.
And I suppose I’m imagining you’ll answer by saying something about how you, well you know, actually appear to feel some sensation or whatnot. This seems like the obvious and only answer.
I simply mean how can you be sure you do not want to be eaten by sharks now (or would you remain unsure until you had the right equipment to examine your brain activity)?
I know I do not want to be eaten by sharks right now because my behavior indicates that to be the case: I am not seeking a pool of hungry sharks right now, am I?
Do you believe different persons will create different translations of a French novel? If so, then you agree with Quine. As Peter Godfrey-Smith stated, this “paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy”; calling it “silly” seems very arrogant, probably betraying ignorance of the content.
I agree that translations will differ. Translations differ for the same obvious reason I’ve mentioned over and over: words are not thoughts/concepts/notions. They are communication devices. A translator interprets a source text into concepts (or “meaning” if you like), then finds corresponding words in the target language to express the same or sufficiently similar notions. This isn’t mysterious.
Now the above quote may misrepresent Quine, but the content of the above is indeed completely silly. If you’d like to discuss this, please address my claim that propositions are not truth-apt.
By the way, your apparent reverence for other philosophers worries me; silly is silly no matter how many smart people believe it. I hope you wouldn’t consider yourself arrogant if you disagreed with something others considered very important. Sure, it’s evidence that you’d better tread carefully and be sure you’re right, but it’s nothing more than that.
Please provide evidence that he retracted that position; to my mind, he never did. And I, too, believe logic can be revised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem–Quine_thesis:
“Quine even believed that logic and mathematics can also be revised in light of experience, and presented quantum logic as evidence for this. Years later he retracted this position; in his book Philosophy of Logic, he said that to revise logic would be essentially “changing the subject”. In classic logic, connectives are defined according to truth values. The connectives in a multi-valued logic, however, have a different meaning than those of classic logic. As for quantum logic, it is not even a logic based on truth values, so the logical connectives lose the original meaning of classic logic.”
“I know I do not want to be eaten by sharks right now because my behavior indicates that to be the case: I am not seeking a pool of hungry sharks right now, am I?”
How do you know you’re not seeking a pool of hungry sharks right now? (I’m not being cheeky, I genuinely am interested in how you know or “know” or whatever term you might use.)
From a more reliable Wikipedia article, In Philosophy of Logic (the chapter titled “Deviant Logics”), Quine rejects the idea case that classical logic should be revised in response to the paradoxes,being concerned with “a serious loss of simplicity”, and “the handicap of having to think within a deviant logic”. Quine, though, stood by his claim that logic is in principle not immune to revision.
His philosophy absolutely necessitates that logic be revisable.
Now that is an interesting question!
I can only tell you what I know based on the best theory I have from the observable data available. (I take “demonstrated preference” seriously.)
OK, so Quine does require that logic be revisable. If you can give me a very brief definition of what Quine means by logic and why he holds that position, I promise to treat it charitably. Does he mean anything like “logic is just a tool we developed to better navigate the sensory world”? By the definition of logic as I understand it, the notion of “revising” it at all would be incoherent. So he must mean something a little different.
On the shark thing, I know you must “get” what I mean about feeling a certain private sensation (fear, dread, or whatever) when you imagine being eaten by a shark. So I’m basically wondering in what exact fashion you’re _____-ing that private sensation. In the blank might go “rejecting,” “mistrusting,” “seeing as incoherent,” or something else.
Your “demonstrated preference”? How would you know that?
Philosophers; we’ve been babbling incessantly for over 5000years, but have we really said anything? I guess it depends on what you mean by “say.” Or what I mean by “mean.”
o.O