Quammen, David: "Spillover" (2012)
Quine Willard: WORD AND OBJECT (MIT Press, 1960)
Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic and advanced
an indeterminacy principle to distinguish the logical from the extra-logical
vocabulary: the only vocabulary that counts as logical is the one that is
free of translational indeterminacy.
Quine Willard: FROM A LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW (Harper & Row, 1961)
Contains the famous "Two Dogmas Of Empiricism", a manifesto of holism.
Influenced by Pierre Duhem's argument that hypotheses cannot be tested in
isolation from the whole theoretical network in which they figure, Quine
thinks that an hypothesis is verified true or false only relative to
background assumptions. There is no certain way to determine what has to
be changed in a theory, any hypothesis can be retained as true or discarded
as false by performing appropriate adjustments in the overall network of
assumptions. No sentence has special epistemic properties that safeguard it
from revision. Science is but self-conscious common sense.
The structure of concepts is determined by the positions that their
constituents occupy in the "web of belief" of the individual. The child's
concepts are based on the notion of similarity, and they slowly evolve
to acquire a more theoretical structure.
Quine Willard: ONTOLOGICAL RELATIVITY (Columbia Univ Press, 1969)
The truth of a statement cannot be assessed as a function of the meaning
of its words. Words do not have an absolute meaning. They have a meaning
only with respect to the other words they are connected to in the sentences
that we assume to be true. Their meaning can even change in time.
Quine's underdetermination theory originates in the sciences.
For every empirical datum there can be an infinite number of theories that
explain it.
Science simply picks the combination of hypotheses that seems more plausible.
When an hypothesis fails, the scientist can always modify the other hypotheses
to make it hold.
Language is a special case. An empirical datum is a discourse and a theory
is its meaning. There are infinite interpretations of a discourse depending on
the context. A single word has no meaning, its referent is "inscrutable".
The meaning of language is not even in the mind of the speaker. It is a
natural phenomenon related to the world of that speaker.
A translation depends on the manual of translation that has been chosen.
Like verificationists, Quine thinks that
the meaning of a statement is the method that can verify it empirically.
Like holists, Quine thinks that the unity of meaning is given by science in
its entirety, i.e. verification of a statement within a theory depends on the
set of all other statements of the theory.
Each statement in a theory partially determines the meaning of every other
statement in the same theory.
This is a variant of Brentano's "irreducibility" thesis, that mental states
cannot be reduced to physical states. But
Quine believes that intentional phenomena should be purged from science.
Quinn Naomi & Holland Dorothy: CULTURAL MODELS IN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT (Cambridge Univ Press, 1987)
Physical objects, because they exhibit spatial properties, allow us to
build mental models. The only way to build a mental model for a non-physical
object is to transfer the model of a physical object through a metaphor.
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