Marie McGinn; VII*—The Third Dogma of Empiricism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 82, Issue 1, 1 June 1982, Pages 89–102, https://doi.org/10.109.

Much discussion has been accorded in recent years to what Willard Quine has dubbed “two dogmas of empiricism”.

Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has (...) also endorsed the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. The early Quine, as well as the later Quine, believe that the indeterminacy of translation casts serious doubt on the existence of facts of the matter about correct translation between languages. In this paper, I will argue that Quine cannot be the target of Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism, and that Davidson’s argument is in conflict, among others, with his endorsement of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. I will show how this conflict results in a radical departure from Quine with respect to the matter of factualism about fine-grained meanings. (shrink)

Marie McGinn; VII*—The Third Dogma of Empiricism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 82, Issue 1, 1 June 1982, Pages 89–102, https://doi.org/10.109.

(2001). Against a third dogma of logical empiricism: Otto Neurath and 'unpredictability in principle' International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 199-209. doi: 10.1080/02698590120059068.

This essay reconsiders Davidson's critical attribution of the scheme‐content distinction to Quine's naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson's complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine's epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine's central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. Davidson's (...) critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine's view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders Davidson's critical attribution of the scheme‐content distinction to Quine's naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson's complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine's epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine's central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. Davidson's (...) critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine's view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how some of Wittgenstein's considerations in the Philosophical Investigations speak to the neo-empiricist tendency to give sensation a purely causal, non-epistemic role. As the foil for Wittgenstein's criticisms, I outline the way Wilfred Sellars rehabilitates sensory impressions from his own diagnosis of the Myth of the Given by construing them as purely causal episodes. Sellars' work shows how it is possible to have a keen appreciation of the incoherence of the empiricist model yet to believe (...) that we ought to maintain that model by modifying our account of the role that sensations play in perception. Sellars and Wittgenstein have the same understanding of what a non-epistemic conception of sensations must involve. Wittgenstein articulates the way this conception manifests itself in ordinary thinking while Sellars gives it a sophisticated theoretical elaboration designed to retain what is key for sensory episodes while avoiding traditional problems of givenness. The instructive difference between Sellars and Wittgenstein is that while Sellars believes we can develop a coherent non-epistemic conception, Wittgenstein’s work suggests that we cannot. (shrink)

Four dogmas have shaped modern neoclassical economics. The first proposes that markets may fail to allocate resources efficiently, that is, to those willing to pay the most for them. The second asserts that choices, particularly within markets, reveal preferences. The third is the assumption that people always make the choices they expect will benefit them or enhance their welfare. The fourth dogma holds that perfectly competitive markets will allocate resources to their most beneficial uses. This is the doctrine (...) of the invisible hand. I argue that these dogmas of applied welfare economics should be abandoned. One consequence of doing so will be an increased interest in the institutional context of production. A second will be a turn toward empiricism. (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them (...) is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", a short paper which appeared 50 years ago in the Philosophical Review, was a milestone within the development of analytic philosophy. It was more important than many big volumes before and after. This might strike someone not familiar with the analytic tradition as a bit unusual; such impact one might expect from whole books like the Critique of Pure Reason or the Tractatus, but not from a 16 page paper. In these remarks, which opened (...) a conference on Quine's seminal paper, I would like to indicate why "Two Dogmas " was and still is so important, not only as a standard topic of modern philosophical teaching and as a provocative treatment of the evergreen problem of analyticity, but also as one of the most challenging answers to the question what role philosophy can play in an age of science. (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. 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. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them (...) is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

There is a general consensus that Quine’s assault on analyticity and verificationism in ‘Two Dogma of Empiricism’ has been successful and that Carnap’s philosophical position has been vanquished. This paper so characterises Carnap’s position that it escapes Quine’s criticisms. It shows that the disagreement is not a first order dispute about analyticity or verificationism, but rather a deeper dispute about philosophical method.

W.V. Quine’s article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is one of the most influential works in 20thcentury philosophy. The article is cast most explicitly as an argument against logical empiricists such as Carnap, arguing against the analytic/synthetic distinction that they appeal to along with their verificationism. But the article has been read much more broadly as an attack on the notion..

This is a critical examination of Quine's "Two Dogmas" that leaves nothing much of Quine's paper still standing. It concludes with a short study of a bit of bad work in philosophy that results from following the doctrines of "Two Dogmas".

...its identity in the pragmatics of elucidation, and not in some sort of special knowledge...yer's essay (`Implicit Thoughts: Quine, Frege and Kant on Analytic Propositions...by Quine, and attributed to Kant, Frege and Carnap, has nothing in common..

Quine seems to maintain that there is no sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, and also that 'analytic' and 'synthetic' have no meaning. the dependence of these concepts on 'meaning' is used to show the incompatibility of these two interpretations of quine's conception of the analytic and the synthetic, and to show that both have a paradoxical character of their own. that may threat reductionist semantics as a whole. still the need for a totally different (rationalistic, essentialistic) semantics may (...) be obviated by a reasonable explication of a vague distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. (shrink)

Davidson's anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the (...) anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

This article critically examines the contemporary resurgence of empiricism (or “neo-empiricism”) in philosophy, psychology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence. This resurgence is an important and positive development. It is the first time that this centuries-old empiricist approach to cognition is precisely formulated in the context of cognitive science and neuroscience. Moreover, neo-empiricists have made several findings that challenge amodal theories of concepts and higher cognition. It is argued, however, that the theoretical foundations of and the empirical evidence for neo- (...) class='Hi'>empiricism are not as strong as is usually claimed by its proponents. The empirical evidence for and against neo-empiricism is discussed in detail. (shrink)

Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the (...) anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

It is argued that neither the "theory-informity" of observations nor the Quine-Duhem thesis pose any in principle threat to the objectivity of theory evaluation. The employment of exploratory theories does not generate incommensurability, but on the contrary is responsible for the mensurability and commensurability of explanatory theories, since exploratory theories enable scientists to make observations which are critical in the evaluation of explanatory theories. The employment of exploratory theories and other auxiliary hypotheses does not enable a theory to always accommodate (...) recalcitrant observations to preserve evidential equivalence with a rival theory. Explanatory theories become rapidly degenerating if exploratory theories or other auxiliary hypotheses which inform the original confirmation base are modified to accommodate recalcitrant observations. (shrink)

SummaryThis article is a defense of a semantic concept of incommensurability. Davidson's criticism of the dualism of scheme and content and Ramberg's davidsonian pragmatic concept of incommensurability are discussed. It is argued that Davidson's argument against conceptual relativism fails to undermine the notion of two languages being mutually partially not translatable. It is then claimed that a non‐trivial concept of semantic incommensurability based on the notion of intranslatability does makes sense, does not presuppose the scheme‐content dualism and is consistent with (...) an objectivist view of progress in science. It is then concluded that, although the widely held view that the incommensurability thesis entails some form of epistemological relativism must be rejected, it does follow from Davidson's criticism of the “third dogma” of empiricism that a sharp distinction of the kuhnian kind between “normal” disagreement and conceptual change can not be drawn. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonism is the default theory of aesthetic value. Some of its critics share with it a pair of unquestioned assumptions, namely, that any theory of aesthetic value should make special appeal to its being the case that the canonical form of aesthetic evaluation is a state of pleasure and to its being the case that the canonical purpose of aesthetic acts is to access pleasure. This paper argues that there is reason to doubt both assumptions. Doubting both assumptions suggests (...) a wider range of alternatives to aesthetic hedonism and primitivist inversions of aesthetic hedonism. (shrink)

We find three related holisms in Davidson's work: the holism that Quine brought to bear against the analytic–synthetic distinction, which arises due to the interdependence of meaning and belief; a holism of belief itself that Quine dubbed the “web of belief,” and a parallel holism of meaning. These holisms are plausible in spite of recent arguments against them. They are also important. As Davidson showed, they supply a much needed justification for Quine's Principle of Charity; and because this is so, (...) holism played a crucial, though little noticed, role in his charity‐based argument against relativism in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” However, he did not adequately render the relativist's idea of an alternative, and this led him to conflate two quite distinct theses as a single, third dogma of empiricism: the relativist's thesis that languages may be true but not translatable, and the skepticism‐generating thesis that we have only mediated epistemic access to reality. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Le but de W.V. Quine, dans «Deux dogmes de l’empirisme», n’est pas de prouver contre tous que la distinction analytique/synthétique est intenable ni de fournir une conception originale de la connaissance. Il veut plutôt ébranler l’attrait de l’empiriste pour la distinction et montrer ce en quoi réside un empirisme exempt de dogme. En me concentrant sur §§1-3 et §6, je soutiens que son traitement de l’analyticité est structuré par des hypothèses philosophiques fondamentales et que la conception de la (...) connaissance qu’il défend l’habite depuis fort longtemps. «Deux Dogmes» est moins facilement invalidé quand il est interprété en référence aux premières conférences de Quine sur Carnap. (shrink)

In “Two Dogmas”, Quine indicates that Carnap’s Aufbau fails “in principle” to reduce our knowledge of the external world to sense data. This is because in projecting the sensory material to reconstruct the physical world, Carnap gives up the use of operating rules and switches to a procedure informed by general principles. This procedure falls short of providing an eliminative translation for the connective “is at”, which is necessary for the reduction. In dissecting Quine’s objection, I argue that Quine has (...) at best proven the claim that the use of general principles essentially fails the task of radical reductionism. However, in order to establish the conclusion that the Aufbau fails in principle, Quine needs to further vindicate two other claims. They are: first, a switch from operating rules to general principles is necessary; second, the set of general principles Carnap adopts is the best alternative. By disambiguating the notion of “explicit definition” and examining the concept of definability in the Aufbau, I explore the possibility of justifying these two claims that Quine overlooks in his objection. The result suggests that Quine’s objection stands in tension with his radical reductionist reading of the Aufbau. (shrink)

True to the spirit of Topoi’s Untimely Reviews section, the present essay is a work of the counterfactual imagination. Suppose that Quine’s “Two Dogmas” had been written and published in the late 1990s rather than the early 1950s. What, in those circumstances, would philosophical commentary look like, especially against the marked developments in Quine’s philosophy in that same period? In short, how would Quine’s “Two Dogmas” stand up as a late 1990s paper rather than an early 1950s paper? Answering that (...) question is my task here. (shrink)

The first person singular is the nucleus on which all the other referential devices depend… The final point of reference, by which a statement is attached to reality, is the speaker's reference to himself, as one thing and one person among others… The world is always open to conceptual re-arrangement. But the re-arrangement is only the addition of new tiers of discrimination to a foundation that remains constant: the recognition of persisting things singled out by active observers who have a (...) statable standpoint as objects among other objects. It is in judgments of perception that the notion of identity, and principles of individuation, are given their earliest sense. That beings, who are capable of action and observation, are born into, and move among, a world of persisting objects is a logical necessity and not a contingent matter of fact.. (shrink)