Hilary Putnam has posted a really interesting analysis of what he thinks is wrong with some "ubiquitous" interpretations of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". According to Putnam, the standard story is that Quine's paper defends (1) meaning holism, and (2) confirmation holism. According to Putnam, this is to totally misunderstand what Quine is doing–and the cause of the error is trying to fit Quine into traditional conceptions of meaning and epistemology (i.e. there must be "a meaning" for any given linguistic term). According to Putnam, this is precisely what Quine means to deny. He means to deny that there is any determinate meaning to expressions in natural language. As Putnam writes:
And similarly with the notion of “meaning”: one of the main claims of “Two Dogmas” (and of Word and Object and subsequent publications) is that there are no acceptable [to Quine] identity-conditions for “meanings”. Yes, there are “translation manuals” (Word and Object), and the purpose ofWord and Object is to show how communication (speaking with members of one’s community as well as translation of alien languages) is possible without positing such entities as “meanings”, indeed, without going beyond Fred Skinner’s behaviorist account of “verbal behavior”. But there are no “meanings”, neither of single utterances nor of whole theories. In short, Quine was already practicing “naturalized epistemology” (and language theory) long before he wrote “Epistemology Naturalized”.
This is exactly what I was going on about in my post, "Misled by language?". Analytic philosophy has been driven by conceptual analysis…which presupposes that concepts have determinate meaning to analyze. But they don't, and Quine knew it, just as Wittgenstein did. We use words and concepts in a myriad of ways, none of which are uniquely "correct." And, Quine says–and I agree–it is the job of empirical science to explain to us what our messy concepts are, how they are indeterminate, etc. The job of the philosopher is, therefore, not to muck around with conceptual analysis, settling what "free will" is, or "moral responsibility", etc.–for these conceptual questions can, in principle, never be settled (we simply have a wide array of different conceptions of "free will", "moral responsibility", etc.). The task of the philosopher and scientist is not to seek artifical levels of clarity that cannot be achieved (qua the kinds of interminable debates that dominate analytic philosophy, with separate camps defending their own favored concept). The task of the philosopher and scientist are to cooperate together, within the limits of natural language, to make clear those things that can be made clear (are there electrons? Do brains obey the laws of the physics?) and to set those things that cannot be made clear aside.
This, in my view, requires a vast rethinking of the methods of philosophy. It requires doing philosophy in ways that work with science to make verifiable predictions–predictions that can then serve to settle philosophical and empirical debates, as opposed to conceptual analysis, which tends to result in little more than ongoing debates that never resolve themselves (and really, how could they resolve themselves if they make no empirical predictions?). It requires, in other words, a return to natural philosophy. Now, of course, some might wonder, if philosophy must make predictions, isn't it just science? To which I answer: no. Philosophy can, and should, go hand-in-hand with science, as philosophy can direct science, and science can direct philosophy (see e.g. here and here). Or so say I (again). 🙂
Finally, however, just to clarify, some kinds of conceptual analysis may well be useful in natural philosophy. We might think of philosophy on the lines of "cartography", teasing out different conceptions of "free will", "moral responsibility", etc., and leaving it to empirical science to determine which are the most empirically useful, and fruitful, conceptions to work with…just as Josh Shepherd and James Justus contend!
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