Online research in philosophy

Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. This is the first book devoted to both of them, but also the first to question some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought, and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate meaning and thought within a naturalistic framework, either by impugning them as unclear or by extracting them from physical facts, are ultimately unsuccessful. His discussion includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, and also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, such as the nature of truth and of meaning and interpretation, and the relation between thought and language.

The apparently disjointed structure of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has often been taken as a license for interpreting passages out of context. As a result, numerous articles and books have appeared which pay little attention to the actual text. Robert Arrington and Hans-Johann Glock show how important it is to consider the arguments which specify or authorize particular readings of certain passages. The essays in this volume approach the Investigations with the conviction that prior to pronouncements of the relevance or tenability of certain remarks, one must carefully consider Wittgenstein's text itself and locate the puzzling passages in their contexts in order to understand and appreciate them. A lively debate emerges as authors differ in their assessments of the philosophical value of their material; some try to show that careful interpretations reveal valuable insights into prima facie untenable passages, while others conclude that certain remarks fail to resolve the issues they address. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is a major contribution to the study of this work as well as the whole of Wittgenstein's thought. It will be essential and fascinating reading for those who study this great thinker.

This paper concerns Quine's stance on the issue of meaning normativity. I argue that three distinct and not obviously compatible positions on meaning normativity can be extracted from his philosophy of language - eliminative ]naturalism (Quine I), deflationary pragmatism (Quine II), and (restricted) strong normativism (Quine III) - which result from Quine's failure to separate adequately four different questions that surround the issue: the reality, source, sense, and scope of the normative dimension. In addition to the incompatibility of the views taken together, I argue on the basis of considerations due to Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Davidson that each view taken separately has self-standing problems. The first two fail to appreciate the ineliminability of the strong normativity of logic and so face a dilemma: they either smuggle it in illicitly, or insofar as they do not, fail to give an account of anything like a language. The third position's mixture of a universalism about logical concepts with a thorough-going relativism about non-logical concepts can be challenged once a distinction is drawn between the universalist and contextualist readings of strong normativity, a distinction inspired by Wittgenstein's distinction between grammatical and empirical judgements.

I take issue with Pieranna Garavaso’s contention - lodged in a rapprochement between Wittgenstein and Quine - that for Wittgenstein, there is no sharp categorial distinction between logical and empirical propositions, but only one of degree. I argue that Garavaso’s conclusion results from a misunderstanding of the river-bed analogy in On Certainty (96-99). When Wittgenstein maintains there is not a sharp boundary between propositions of logic and empirical propositions, he does not imply that there is not a sharp categorial difference between them, but that the boundary is permeable. The consequent changeability of status of logical and empirical propositions does not entail the collapse, or even a partial blurring, of their respective categories. I then address Wittgenstein’s puzzlement, in On Certainty, about the logical status of some apparently empirical propositions, and show that he resolves this not, as is often thought, by concluding that some empirical propositions are necessary, but by recognizing the ‘empiricality’ of these propositions as merely apparent. A line is thereby drawn between empirical propositions and framework propositions that only have the form of empirical propositions (OC 401). I conclude that, unlike Quine, Wittgenstein held a foundational view of our system of beliefs, making a categorial distinction between the foundation-walls and the house, and regarding part of these foundations as immovable.

1. In his book Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Hacker 1996), P.M.S.Hacker set up a very sharp opposition between Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy, on the one side, and Anglo-American philosophy drawing inspiration from Quine on the other. As a way of identifying analytic philosophy, the opposition is unconvincing: Hacker rightly insists on the variety of the analytic tradition, pointing out that different notions of philosophy’s role and even different notions of analysis prevailed with different philosophers at different moments. But then, he wants to exclude Quine and other philosophers he regards as Quinean from the analytic tradition, without it being quite clear why the cleavage between Quine and the later Wittgenstein, or between Quine and Austin, should be so much wider or more crucial than the difference between, say, Austin and Russell (who are both included in the tradition). Anyway, in drawing the opposition Hacker focusses on one aspect that I would also like to concentrate upon. According to him, post-Quinean philosophy appears to be dominated by “modes of thought that emulate the forms of scientific theories, the jargon and formalization of respectable science, without the constraints of systematic data collecting, quantitative methods and experimental testing” (p.266); whereas analytic philosophy properly so called always conceived of itself as being other than science1, and the later Wittgenstein insisted that the attempt to emulate or ape natural science typically produces bad philosophy. In Hacker’s own words.

Quine's indeterminacy differs from Wittgenstein's in several aspects. First, Wittgenstein and Kripke's indeterminacy applies to a single individual in isolation and this indeterminacy disappears when the single person is brought into a wider community. Thus, this indeterminacy is only logically possible or hypothetical. Second, in Quine's problem, two translation manuals are distinguishable; while Wittgenstein's hypotheses, such as 'plus' and 'quus' and many others, are indistinguishable for the subject's past and the subject would never aware of the distinctions. Third, in Wittgenstein's view, whether a member follows the rules or not can be determined by 'outward criterion'. Quine's indeterminacy denies the existence of such 'outward criterion' for his two translation manuals.

This remarkable collection explores the legacy of Wittgenstein's work in contemporary American philosophy. The contributors (including several celebrated philosophers) take a variety of approaches to Wittgenstein; they discuss such topics as rule-following, realism about mathematics, the method of the Tractatus, the relation between style and content in Wittgenstein, and his distinction between sense and nonsense. Wittgenstein also is discussed in relation to subsequent philosophers such as Quine and Kripke.

W. V. Quine was the most important naturalistic philosopher of the twentieth century and a major impetus for the recent resurgence of the view that empirical science is our best avenue to knowledge. His views, however, have not been well understood. Critics charge that Quine’s naturalized epistemology is circular and that it cannot be normative. Yet, such criticisms stem from a cluster of fundamental traditional assumptions regarding language, theory, and the knowing subject – the very presuppositions that Quine is at pains to reject. Through investigation of Quine’s views regarding language, knowledge, and reality, the author offers a new interpretation of Quine’s naturalism. The naturalism/antinaturalism debate can be advanced only by acknowledging and critiquing the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view. Gregory argues that the responses to the circularity and non-normativity objections do just that. His analysis further reveals that Quine’s departure from the tradition penetrates the conception of the knowing subject, and he thus offers a new and engaging defence of Quine’s naturalism.