what if i'm living with the same woman since 3 years, we even have a baby, but i never "married" to her, because our plane crashed and we found ourselves in this island so we fugged? i don't even actually like her, but what i'm gonna do fugg palm trees? so am i both a bachelor and in a long term relationship at the same time under these conditions?
Your reference to Andrew Wiles and Fermat's last theorem interested me because I have used it myself in my own teaching. I was expecting you to follow up on this. To me the point is that there there is nothing intrinsic to the idea that Aˣ = Bˣ + Cˣ cannot be satisfied where x > 2. However for a long time this was accepted as empirically true. Then (after a false start) Andrew Wiles makes the claim that he has a mathematical/ logical proof, subsequently his proof is accepted by other leading mathematicians. At this point something has changed: although I (along with most others) cannot understand the proof, I can understand that at for those, at the very least, who do understand the proof any further empirical attempts to investigate possible values for x are utterly futile in a way that was not so, before Wiles' work. Whatever Quine has to say about distinctions between analytic and synthetic, we need a concept to distinguish between the two states of understanding. Perhaps we could contend that propositions are either synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori and that analytic is only applicable within strictly defined local situations. Even there I see a problem because I would want to distinguish between statements that triangles have three straight sides (usually accepted as analytic a priori) and that the interior angles of a triangle add up to a straight line (arguably synthetic a priori).
There’s an interesting attack on the analytic synthetic distinction in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, and I find this attack more convincing than Quine’s. Basically Wittgenstein’s point is that Moore’s statement “I have two hands” has the form of an empirical statement and isn’t tautological yet is at the same time empirically unverifiable (because outside of special circumstances it’s inconceivable what it would mean to test it).
@@sbnwnc Not sure how to interpret your comment, but if you hold your hands out in front of you and see your two hands, is this a test of your eyesight or the existence of your hands? W's point is that any test you could do would implicitly presume something less certain than the existence of your hands and so wouldn't constitute a real test. When it comes to the existence of your hands, all you can really say is that nothing speak against it. On the other hand, a radical skeptic would not accept this as a legitimate verification of having two hands.
@@StatelessLiberty A radical skeptic always doubts everything. Since there is never a 100% certain ground for anything, I'm not sure what the point is of radical skepticism. Sounds fancy but it's empty.
Hold up, at around 44:34, you note that Quine complains that there is this circle of terms that refer to each other, and hence, through their circularity, we cannot confidently approach knowing if they are real concepts. Maybe I'm misreading, but that very finding sounds like an analytic argument to me! I'm genuinely unsure is a point for or against Quine's argument though: maybe the fact that he used analytic reasoning implies it is a possible form of reasining. But maybe the fact that by attempting analyticity he reaches a potential contradiction is an indictment on analyticity. I'm not sure which way this should cut.
Circular arguments are good as long as the circle is progressing. The concept of definitions has been progressing to new knowledge for thousands of years. I think Quine gets confused because he thinks apriori statements must be necessarily true or false, but we can always find counterexamples to conjectures, even the proven conjectures.
I have that reaction to a lot of Quine's work. Even where I tend to agree with his conclusions, the arguments are often surprisingly weak. It's a little puzzling that he was so influential.
Main reason of his popularity is his supposed dethronement of logical positivism. Time will show that he is a second grade philosopher with laughable statements like "theres no meaning". @@KaneB
If it's false then wouldn't there be a specific counterexample, i.e two numbers that add to something else in another world than what they do here? Being unprovable doesn't mean being untrue.
To some extent, it may be that Quine and Carnap are talking past each other. Quine's criticism is an attack on *a priori* knowledge, based on his holistic approach to epistemology. Analyticity gets caught up in the criticism because if there are *a priori* propositions then analytic ones are, and the logical positivists denied the existence of the synthetic *a priori*. Defenders of analyticity focus on what makes a proposition true; Quine is concerned with whether a proposition is exposed to revision for empirical reasons. For Quine, analytic sentences, and even definitions, do not have a privileged epistemological status that makes them immune to revision. So there is no dichotomy among propositions, just a spectrum ranging from more or less exposed to revision. For myself, I think that is correct. There are ways to define 'analytic' but it has no explanatory value in philosophy.
But we need to give some sentences privileged epistemic status. We could not communicate effectively without it. The usefulness of language would break down if any word might change its meaning at any time. For example, what evidence do you have that a triangle has three sides, as opposed to two or four? If that is the sort of question we are asking, then we are not ready to even _begin_ to talk about triangles.
@@Ansatz66I think you may have misunderstood my comment. We do not need sentences to have a privileged status in order for communication to happen, nor to ensure words do not change their meaning. On Quine's view, it is entire theories that confront empirical reality, not individual sentences. Within a theory, it is somewhat arbitrary as to which sentences we treat as axioms, which as definitions, and which as theorems. This is the sense in which I mean that a given sentence does not have any epistemological privileges. Labelling a sentence an axiom or a definition does not confer the status of 'necessary' or 'a priori' on it. The theory of which that sentence is a part is still exposed to revision.
@@BumbleTheBard: But if we do not give privileged epistemic status to "A triangle has three sides," then we would want evidence for this claim just as we would want evidence for claims like "Oswald shot Kennedy." Yet to facilitate communication we choose to accept sentences like "A triangle has three sides" because these are the bedrock on which communication is based. That is why they are necessary and _a priori._ Without such basic facts, we could not properly talk about triangles or anything else. But perhaps I have misunderstood your comment. Perhaps you do not grant privileged epistemic status to any sentence, and rather you are doubtful of the definitions of all the words you use, and perhaps you have decided that maybe triangles do not always have three sides, and perhaps you think you have empirical evidence that they sometimes have some other number of sides. And perhaps you have similarly come up with other meanings for words like "sentence" and "privileged" and nothing that you say means what I think it means. This is the breakdown in communication that we should avoid by granting privileged status to some sentences.
@@Ansatz66 Under Quine's holistic approach would we say that "a triangle has 3 sides" is part of a general theory of geometry. As long as that theory holds up and is the best we have, then all of its theorems may be considered true, but only because they inherit their truth from the theory as a whole. If someone has a rival geometric theory under which triangles sometimes have other numbers of sides, then we can examine it to see how it works and whether it is better. We don't have to hold rigidly to a sentence just because it is labelled a definition. Mathematics however is not the best example. In classical physics we used to define momentum as mass x velocity. Then in relativistic physics we redefined momentum to be mass x velocity x Lorentz factor. The reasons for doing this are ultimately empirical. Calling the classical version a definition does not make it immune to revision. It is the theory of mechanics as a whole that is supported or falsified by empirical data.
@@BumbleTheBard: What do you mean by "whether it is better"? If someone comes up with a geometric theory where they use the word "triangle" to refer to squares, that theory could work excellently for explaining geometry, no worse than an equivalent theory that used the word "square" refer to squares. The only issue with such a theory is the breakdown in communication that would be caused when trying to explain this theory to people. They would inevitably ask why we have redefined the word "triangle" in such a confusion way and why not just use the word "square" to talk about squares. In terms of the structure of the theory it is identical. In terms of being understood by people, it is much worse. What sort of "better" are you imagining it might be? "We don't have to hold rigidly to a sentence just because it is labelled a definition." If we do not hold rigidly to that, then people will not be able to understand what we are saying and we will not be able to understand other people. If we seriously consider the triangles might sometimes have four sides, then we will not be sure what people mean when they say "triangle," and no one who understands our peculiar philosophy should trust that they understand what we mean when we use the word "triangle." For all they know, "triangle" might mean elephant when we say it. The only hope for clear communication is to convince people that Quine's philosophy is just silliness. "In classical physics we used to define momentum as mass x velocity. Then in relativistic physics we redefined momentum to be mass x velocity x Lorentz factor." That is a synthetic issue, not an analytic issue. Those are not really definitions; those are equations relating momentum to mass and velocity based on empirical evidence.
It seems to me that the argument is that synonymy is a synthetic or empirical property of natural language. It is inferred rather than have it officially defined. There was an example given of a hypothetical situation in which it was discovered that foxes are asexual and vixen are a certain variety of fox. Such discovery would be impossible if vixen was in fact defined as a female fox.
I personally hate arguments that try to exploit the ambiguity of the natural language so much that I lose interest in reading the rest of the text. Congratulations, you are the smartest kid in the class! Want a smiley sticker?
@@sbnwncNo, it's not entirely clear to me why he is doing this, but he is trying to cast doubt on a priori knowledge. Kind of similar to what the sophists of ancient Greece were trying to do, although the sophists took this to an unreasonable extreme.
By analogy with the two classes of contradiction on the slide at 12:00 do you also distinguish two separate classes of tautology, one of the form "X is a bachelor and it is the case that X is a bachelor" and a broader one of the form "X is an unmarried bachelor"?
Yes, presumably tautologies in the first sense would be analytic statements of the first class, and tautologies in the broader sense would be analytic statements of the second class.
Of course you can make an error in dealing with something that's stipulated. If I'm typing with my left hand out of alignment, and some of my instances of "ff" appear as "gg", that's an error. If I actually state a stipulation that "ff" is to be an abbreviation for "female fox", and you hear me say "ephemeral fox" instead, that's an error. If I make a bunch of abbreviations, and you have to think a bit when you encounter one of them, it's still a stipulated definition. Why should that be any different when the stipulation was done collectively over decades, instead of individually within one lecture? -- Sydney can't believe that there is a vixen in his garden without believing that there is a female fox in his garden. Believing that there is a vixen in his garden isn't the same as believing that there is something called "a vixen" in his garden. One statement describes only his belief about what's in his garden, and the other describes his belief about the language.
Good point: if Sydney believes there is a female stoat in his garden and says that he thinks there is a vixen in his garden, it just means that no one else will understand him because he has made a mistake. Any other utterance (other than jill) could be substituted for vixen to the same effect. Actually if Sydney had said 'I think I saw a jill in the garden', he might also be misunderstood, if those he spoke to did not know that a jill is a word for a female stoat. There is a philosophical point here about private language here that I think does undermine Quine's argument about indeterminacy of meaning (it overinflates the significance of trivial error).
@@danwylie-sears1134 Goodness knows why, but it does show that misunderstandings can happen on both sides, however it is wrong to extrapolate that we always misunderstand or that there is no common language which seems to me to be the implication of Quine's thesis. Indeterminacy does not have to negate any facts of the matter. If I and you both use the word ^blue' there may be some indeterminacy at the margins, but it does not mean we misunderstand each other. If you use a colour word that is unknown to me, then I could easily be mistaken and confuse colour names, but I cannot see any serious philosophical complications in this.
@@martinbennett2228 No. Completely false, a fact of the matter is completely non existent , you assert this while your epistemology destroys any conception of the given.
i think the difference is something like the difference between sentences talking about blue, vs sentences talking about cars. it is not a distinction that matters for knowledge as we experience and hold it. i didn't go into the difference between analytic and synthetic, but i don't think it is strictly necessary, because in the context where knowledge and meaning is actual, there is not such divide at all, there is just the meaning of words and sentences as they are used, and the experience of understanding something. a sentence like "red is red" is on the one hand a truism that can be experiences as a sentence of that form, or a statement that "red means the experience of red" which just points to the experience of red in thought, whether it is about observing red or thinking about it, these two ways to view the analytic statement are just the same as when saying "kafka is a writer", the sentence just says that this kafka entitiy is a writer, meaning he fits the definition of a writer, the experience of kafka is the experience of reading, thinking about, or talking to a writer, whatever that means, when it comes to the relevant part of kafka, the world could have been otherwise, kafka could have been a plumber, but then we need to separate what we are actually talking about when we say something like that. first of all plubmer kafka is not the same kafka, it is no different than saying red could have been blue, only that for kafka, being a writer is not as all encompassing of the features of kafka as kafka can appear in thought. second, the words themselves could have been synonyms, the reason we know the case of red and the case of kafka is different in the first place is because we are leaning on our preconceived pre language game noitions, of writer, kafka and red. lastly, the only way to know the difference, and to unknown that red can't have different meanings in different positons in a sentence, are precisely these notions that exists in our experience of thinking prior to writing down a single argument about sentences, what it feels like to write or utter differently structured sentences and what it feels like to mean different things by them. so i hope you see what i mean, i don't think i can go much deeper into it right now, way too sleepy, i liked your video, i just think this issue is a lot deeper than just making arguments about structure and the content of our experience of thinking, i think we absolutely must be critical of what the experience of thinking and meaning actually is, and how concepts are rooted in it, and that logic and argumentation within language can only really gesture at what the problem is, and why there is really only one form of knowledge, and subcategories that are only applicable within language games and so on. anyway have a good day sir, nice video :). i think kant almost did it right but then got derailed by being too science envious instead of actually being critical he sort of reified an inability to do reason synthetically, without realizing that it is impossible to define terms and so you never actually have a priory knowledge of anything, just within a language game, and there only heuristically, not in any sense that can be called proof, it is not far off from what he argues but it is enough for me to reject it, especially the use of a priory, since i don't believe the term has any meaning at all, a bit like free will, it is a term, nobody can really define it properly without melting it away under scrutiny. i hope this made some sort of sense to you, that was my aim anyway, and the limitations imposed upon us by reality, whatever it is.
This is too easy to get around by developing a clear understanding of language, and the concept of aboutness. For example, all definitions are stipulative, because the thing they are about is arbitrary. We analyze not logical interactions between things-in-the-world, but rather between defined terms. This, perhaps in a disturbing cosmic horror sense, extends to numbers. What is so special about the number one? Turns out there's lots of units, and there's lots of number lines. Quite a few number circles. A bunch of number planes. A few interesting number hyper-doughnuts.
@@nkoppa5332 Defined terms are arbitrary. Logic is necessarily not. The alternative is all information is unknowable. If you want to eat that? But I love how your criticism of my point, containing "all definitions are arbitrary" is "all definitions are arbitrary." No way. I didn't consider that. Clearly defeats the argument that depends on that.
@@warrendriscoll350 yeah so, knowledge is impossible on your view, and you would be required to stop talking or thinking. Infact, you would not be able to assert you had knowledge of the fact that you had no knowledge.
@@nkoppa5332 Oh wait. What stops you from asserting literally anything under such a circumstance? They would just all be baseless assertions. Actually, don't answer that. You're confusing me as to what your position is.
@@warrendriscoll350 my position is that once you are fundamentally unable to save anything from empiricism, you end up in a position unable to say anything, unable to assert knowledge Unable fundamentally to either agree or disagree to anything. The basis of rationality evaporates.
i think this turns out to be a bit meaningless tbh, the meanings of no words are rooted in a language game. there are use cases of all words that are rooted in intuitions, those intuitions are more or less an internal equivalent of finding a shiny rock on the beach, in terms of a persons experience. the only difference is the experience of the meaning of a word instead of the experience of seeing a shiny rock. knowledge comes in that one flavor, when we say something like "red is red" we are basically just saying my experience of red is what red is, that is a referral to a "state of the experiential world" just the same as saying "kafka is a writer" "my experience of the name kafka, is the experience of thinking of the writer kafka" the meaning of the word, always comes from such an operational definition that only ever makes any sense at all by being directly referential to experiencing thoughts associated with the word. a stipulation of meaning onto itself is just a statement of the existence and the label of the meaning, whether the word means anything or not is not really the point, the point is that when the word doesn't mean anything, the difference between analytic and synthetic is meaningless, and when it means something, the knowledge in either type of statement is the same type of knowledge. if that makes any sense to you, the distinction is only a distinction in the kind of sentence used, not in the meaning of the words or the composition, the different kinds of compositions have their own meaning akin to that of the words that is also understood in the same kind of way, all knowledge is, the rest is just sub-types of language game. i hope that makes sense to you, the broader point is that we can't trace out the meaning of any word inside of the formal bounds of a language, the usage of words can't give words meaning, and not sentences either, and so the formal knowledge we hold is a product of the reliability of the application of intuitions about operational definitions, like what plus is, how to use it, how to talk about it, how to add numbers in a way that you will tell yourself you did a good job, and others will agree with you, if you actually went to write down what plus actually means, you would produce a bunch of sentences, then you would struggle to produce new sentences to explain the symbolic usage of words and sentences in your attempt to define plus and so on and so forth until you are 90 years old and suddenly realize you spent your hole life scribbling down an infinite rabbit hole that structurally cannot have a bottom within a language game. this is true for mathematics as well, at some point we have to just say enough is enough and hope our operational understanding of how to apply an idea is reliable enough to apply without inconsistencies, you can't prove consistency or rigorously define the meaning of all your terms inside the system of meaning they represent, so you are simply forced to expand it and expand it but never being able to complete it. this is just a simple consequence of symbolic logic and language being open ended and never fully definable in a rigorous way, you have to build an adding machine, or apply an logarithm manually, of the back of some intuitive notion of it being a correct procedure in relation to the intuition you have about what you wanted in the first place, and hope you didn't skrew up in relation to your expectations, this is because existence and the real world is not structured in the context of symbolic logic, it is its own thing, runs its own analog processes and you are along for the ride, symbolic logic then arises as rule sets that give consistent results within their own operational definitions, like the rules of chess being unambiguous, but they are no more or less ambiguous than being able to tell whether you are inside your apartment or not, being able to make that kind of distinction reliably is all we need to be able to produce reproducible results, like proofs or to be able to follow rules of chess, and know when there is a checkmate, at least somewhat reliably, the mistake some people make is that they think such a procedure relies on formal proof, there is simply no such thing strictly speaking, we can never and will never define our terms properly inside a formal system, because that is beyond the limitations of logic and symbolic language as an activity. sorry if this was a bit rambly, i tried to boil it down, maybe the meaning got a bit lost, it is always hard to tell, when i have thought my own thoughts and have my own perspective and references to draw on that make me favor a certain explanation, that might mean something else when read by another person, or give the wrong impression of the content of the thoughts that i wished to convey, after all i can't check if it made any sense, and that is kind of the point. knowledge is fickle because of this, and there really is only one kind of knowledge in the most fundamental sense as it is experienced outside a language game, and inside my own experience, or yours.
Yes, that seems plausible to me. I suppose the trouble is that in working out what follows from these axioms and definitions, we're not just stipulating the entailments. Stipulative definition is involved in mathematics but doesn't get us very far.
I am pretty sure I would remember if I had seen a video about this before. Nothing else in philosophy frustrates me more than Quine's analysis of analytic propositions.
Quine's critique of various criterion is really pointless and makes it seem like he's doing anything else than just drawing conclusions from radical verificationism (and a bit of linguistic behaviorism). The problem is that you cannot make any sense of induction without invoking intensional or at least semi-intensional notions, like Goodman has shown, so Quine's stance cannot make sense of ordinary practice of empirical research.
@@kmerczerwony1739 well yes, showing that empiricism is self destructive and leads to coherentism, because meanings themselves are supposed to be grounded in sense data, yet sense data is invoked to be helpful due to induction So the problem of induction and causation itself applies therefore to meaning.
The ethnocentric meaning of a sentence depends on the context as within a sub cultural group a gangster leader will mean by a statement through member compliance. Ethnographic vagueness in this sense is when a bushman points at the rabbit utters a statement means giving cattle for a dowery. The issues arise as rationalism demand extant outputs like backing up a car and saying slowly upon which the driver crashes into the wall. Hence driverless cars meaning is quantised through signals of increment millimetres to seconds which have more precise meaning the backup slowly. However as for human ritual around reproductive rites or compliance there is a lived experience component that converges as the analytic content of mind converge with synthetic body political sense data as familiar with the place which is indicted by emotional stability or intelligence. The emotional aspect to meaning is cashed out in a Kantian sense of means to an end distinction where treating people as a means to an end will entail feelings to map onto a sentence as proceed with caution and othering/alienation or end in itself in-group hierarchy self evaluation. Even though treating people as an end in them selves seems inauthentic given number one it proves the other denizen your not an out right sociopath or narcissist with Machiavelli tendencies. Proposition are true on a spectrum within the pod like environment of the cult which can even take the form of enduring fields of enquires with formal languages. Members of the cult will have a greater sense of the meaning of place the bowl on the table then if within a setting like a public emergency shelter set up be the nation state for events like a storm surge of earth quake. The sentence in the former is linked to an elaborate ritual involving possible pair bonding and in the latter with a function of task completion to align object placement. The former has fussed analytic to synthetic correlations whilst the latter has disjointed analytic to synthetic relations for the exact same syntax structure. The semantics are divided into thematic drift as but one prototype that marks a superordinate structural positionally on meaning that filters to a subordinate layer that could deal with prototypes of family resemblances so that if the person in the emergency shelter is similar in appearance to cult prototypes the sentient meaning will take on a cult like sense of relevance whereas if the person in the shelter making the request had a non favourable ethnology to the recipient bias then the sentence might be seen as a potential threat and interpreted as intimidation. This suggests that research into sentence meaning will require extended participant observation within the in-group to gain qualitative and quantitative data to draw a conceptual map of possible structural patterns within the semantic web in relation to set and setting where the sentence occurred and with whom, where whom is the profile of the person ostensibly referenced by a name.
_All_ languages are artificial. Some languages may be considered more artificial then others in that they are constructed by people who are dedicating themselves to that purpose, while other languages are constructed slowly over time by whole cultures, but this is an irrelevant difference. Either way languages are made up by people and they have made-up rules. Quine's effort to find meaning behind the made-up rules of a language seems obviously pointless because they are just made-up rules. There is no reason behind all bachelors being unmarried. It is not analytic because of any particular quality of that proposition; it's just been made-up by people to be that way. There is no magical quality to the word "bachelor" to make it this way, no ontological mystery. To ask why would be like asking why a king cannot castle after moving in chess. The correct answer is that's just how it is. This does not mean we are justified in declaring that the rule does not exist. Even though the rule is just made-up and has no deeper cause behind it, still we have the rule now and it would be silly to pretend that we do not have it. The rule is that bachelors being unmarried is an analytic fact. You do not have to like it, you do not have to understand why, but you do have to live with it if you want to communicate effectively in English.
Wouldn't a better answer to the "why can't a king castle after moving in chess?" question be to provide a telos of some kind? I'm not a chess expert, so I can't be specific in my answer, but it seems probable to me that castling and its limitations were not merely created in a directionless vacuum, but rather by chess players and chess theorists desiring game rules conducive to a certain play experience. That considered, the best answer to the question wouldn't simply be, "that's just how it is" but rather, "somebody wanted it this way, and they wanted it this way for X reason." I don't think I have the special knowledge or intellectual dexterity to connect this to your arguments about language (because I suspect that the development of language operates with different rules than the ludology of chess), but I find it odd to suggest the artificiality of something as evidence that its stipulations are devoid of content, when it seems to me that artifice is more often the origin of content.
@@MMurine: True, the people who came up with the castling rules probably had some motivation for the rules they invented, but the point is that their motivation was entirely at their own whim. They could have made whatever rules they liked, and they chose these rules because they seemed fun. I do not think that is the sort of explanation that Quine is looking for. Quine wants a definitive reason why bachelors being unmarried needs to be analytic and why Bob being a bachelor needs to be synthetic, and he would not accept "because people thought it was fun for it to be that way."
@@nkoppa5332 : I would prefer to call it a social construct rather than a myth. Just because people make something up, that does not make it a myth. Myths are stories about things that never happened, but people can also make up artificial boundaries like the borders of a nation or the legislation of a government. The analytic-synthetic distinction is far more like the borders of a nation than like a story that never happened. I have seen no indication that Quine ever understood this.
@@Ansatz66 Social constructs are infact myths. Because the whole point, is that you actually have no prima facia access to the fact of the matter, including "what happened in reality" On this view, borders of a nation have as much legitimacy in terms of justification as the Gods of homer. I am literally just quotingQuine back to you. You have not made an actual legit distinction between a myth and social construct, and you fundamentally cannot. Gods of homer existed in the minds people who passed down stories.. The borders of a country exist in the minds of people who passed down the collective agreement that keeps it existing. Both are stories, there is no given, infact, the given, is a myth.
Such a terrible argument. Quine essentially says "If you adopt my stupid view of necessity, then analyticity cannot be defined non-circularly"... but of course this shouldn't lead us to reject analyticity. Rather, it should lead to us rejecting his stupid view of necessity! Rationalists have told us for more than 200 years that necessity cannot be reduced to analyticity. Quine doesn't give us an argument against analyticity, but rather an argument against reducing necessity to analyticity.
To be fair to Quine, this argument was made in the context of a critique of logical empiricism, and most of the logical empiricists shared Quine’s skepticism of necessity and saw these semantic distinctions as playing an important role in explaining necessity. I think it's a pretty weak argument even with that concession, though. I doubt there is any interesting concept (or even non-interesting concept) that could be given a definition that meets the standards to which Quine holds the concept of analyticity.
@@KaneB That's true - maybe if you are a hardcore empiricist, then you should buy Quine's critique. But then again I'd just say that this is to be interpreted as a reductio ad absurdum of hardcore empiricism, because literally nothing is more obvious than that "Bachelor" and "Unmarried man" are synonymous terms.
@@dominiks5068 So your defense of the analytic synthetic distinction from the rationalistic perspective, is to... not be an empiricist? You miss the point lol. rationalism is not what he was critiquing. BUt i would extend Quines critiques to all foundationalist systems so rationalists would not be safe either.
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Quine on indeterminacy of meaning: th-cam.com/video/W6Q19GwfGU0/w-d-xo.html
what if i'm living with the same woman since 3 years, we even have a baby, but i never "married" to her, because our plane crashed and we found ourselves in this island so we fugged? i don't even actually like her, but what i'm gonna do fugg palm trees? so am i both a bachelor and in a long term relationship at the same time under these conditions?
It is analytically and synthetically true that I have liked and commented on this video.
Thanks!
Wow! I've been waiting so long for this!
Please do Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized" also if you feel like it.
SAME AND YES
"Triangles have five sides"
True or false in virtue of meaning alone. That one's false from meaning alone.
@@leocossham But what sort of thing is a meaning?
@@nkoppa5332informative content, basically. I look forward to your response.
How strange it is that today I decided to read "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and understand Quine's criticism, and then this video comes out
God exists
@@Jy3pr6meaningless statement.
@@user-pi9pi3gy8h On the contrary, nothing can be more obvious
I actually read Quine's "Two dogmas" paper. I found it utterly unconvincing.
>> I found it utterly unconvincing
POV: You've decided to read what Quine wrote.
Why?
Your reference to Andrew Wiles and Fermat's last theorem interested me because I have used it myself in my own teaching. I was expecting you to follow up on this.
To me the point is that there there is nothing intrinsic to the idea that Aˣ = Bˣ + Cˣ cannot be satisfied where x > 2. However for a long time this was accepted as empirically true. Then (after a false start) Andrew Wiles makes the claim that he has a mathematical/ logical proof, subsequently his proof is accepted by other leading mathematicians. At this point something has changed: although I (along with most others) cannot understand the proof, I can understand that at for those, at the very least, who do understand the proof any further empirical attempts to investigate possible values for x are utterly futile in a way that was not so, before Wiles' work.
Whatever Quine has to say about distinctions between analytic and synthetic, we need a concept to distinguish between the two states of understanding. Perhaps we could contend that propositions are either synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori and that analytic is only applicable within strictly defined local situations. Even there I see a problem because I would want to distinguish between statements that triangles have three straight sides (usually accepted as analytic a priori) and that the interior angles of a triangle add up to a straight line (arguably synthetic a priori).
Just got to Kant in my Modern Phil class. Great timing!
Yesss been waiting for this for some time. Thanks Kane you rock 🔴
There’s an interesting attack on the analytic synthetic distinction in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, and I find this attack more convincing than Quine’s. Basically Wittgenstein’s point is that Moore’s statement “I have two hands” has the form of an empirical statement and isn’t tautological yet is at the same time empirically unverifiable (because outside of special circumstances it’s inconceivable what it would mean to test it).
How about observation?
@@sbnwnc Not sure how to interpret your comment, but if you hold your hands out in front of you and see your two hands, is this a test of your eyesight or the existence of your hands? W's point is that any test you could do would implicitly presume something less certain than the existence of your hands and so wouldn't constitute a real test. When it comes to the existence of your hands, all you can really say is that nothing speak against it. On the other hand, a radical skeptic would not accept this as a legitimate verification of having two hands.
@@StatelessLiberty Do you really doubt you that you have two hands?
@@StatelessLiberty A radical skeptic always doubts everything. Since there is never a 100% certain ground for anything, I'm not sure what the point is of radical skepticism. Sounds fancy but it's empty.
@@StatelessLiberty I don't mean to be insulting if this is your position.
Hold up, at around 44:34, you note that Quine complains that there is this circle of terms that refer to each other, and hence, through their circularity, we cannot confidently approach knowing if they are real concepts.
Maybe I'm misreading, but that very finding sounds like an analytic argument to me!
I'm genuinely unsure is a point for or against Quine's argument though: maybe the fact that he used analytic reasoning implies it is a possible form of reasining. But maybe the fact that by attempting analyticity he reaches a potential contradiction is an indictment on analyticity. I'm not sure which way this should cut.
Thanks for another video.
Circular arguments are good as long as the circle is progressing. The concept of definitions has been progressing to new knowledge for thousands of years. I think Quine gets confused because he thinks apriori statements must be necessarily true or false, but we can always find counterexamples to conjectures, even the proven conjectures.
Circles dont progress
@@nkoppa5332 they do when it's a positive feedback loop.
I remember finding the exact spot in Word and Object where he makes the argument, and I was like "wait, that's it?"
I have that reaction to a lot of Quine's work. Even where I tend to agree with his conclusions, the arguments are often surprisingly weak. It's a little puzzling that he was so influential.
Main reason of his popularity is his supposed dethronement of logical positivism. Time will show that he is a second grade philosopher with laughable statements like "theres no meaning". @@KaneB
@@K1ngsd1 Quine did infact destroy it lol.
This is so awesome lol i literally have an exam on this on thursday
Hope it's helpful!
Bro uploaded this when I've almost finished SEP entry on the subject matter 😭
Is it really the case that Fermat's last theorem is true over "all worlds" when it's not even clear if it's provable in Peano arithmetic?
If it's false then wouldn't there be a specific counterexample, i.e two numbers that add to something else in another world than what they do here? Being unprovable doesn't mean being untrue.
To some extent, it may be that Quine and Carnap are talking past each other. Quine's criticism is an attack on *a priori* knowledge, based on his holistic approach to epistemology. Analyticity gets caught up in the criticism because if there are *a priori* propositions then analytic ones are, and the logical positivists denied the existence of the synthetic *a priori*. Defenders of analyticity focus on what makes a proposition true; Quine is concerned with whether a proposition is exposed to revision for empirical reasons. For Quine, analytic sentences, and even definitions, do not have a privileged epistemological status that makes them immune to revision. So there is no dichotomy among propositions, just a spectrum ranging from more or less exposed to revision. For myself, I think that is correct. There are ways to define 'analytic' but it has no explanatory value in philosophy.
But we need to give some sentences privileged epistemic status. We could not communicate effectively without it. The usefulness of language would break down if any word might change its meaning at any time. For example, what evidence do you have that a triangle has three sides, as opposed to two or four? If that is the sort of question we are asking, then we are not ready to even _begin_ to talk about triangles.
@@Ansatz66I think you may have misunderstood my comment. We do not need sentences to have a privileged status in order for communication to happen, nor to ensure words do not change their meaning. On Quine's view, it is entire theories that confront empirical reality, not individual sentences. Within a theory, it is somewhat arbitrary as to which sentences we treat as axioms, which as definitions, and which as theorems. This is the sense in which I mean that a given sentence does not have any epistemological privileges. Labelling a sentence an axiom or a definition does not confer the status of 'necessary' or 'a priori' on it. The theory of which that sentence is a part is still exposed to revision.
@@BumbleTheBard: But if we do not give privileged epistemic status to "A triangle has three sides," then we would want evidence for this claim just as we would want evidence for claims like "Oswald shot Kennedy." Yet to facilitate communication we choose to accept sentences like "A triangle has three sides" because these are the bedrock on which communication is based. That is why they are necessary and _a priori._ Without such basic facts, we could not properly talk about triangles or anything else.
But perhaps I have misunderstood your comment. Perhaps you do not grant privileged epistemic status to any sentence, and rather you are doubtful of the definitions of all the words you use, and perhaps you have decided that maybe triangles do not always have three sides, and perhaps you think you have empirical evidence that they sometimes have some other number of sides. And perhaps you have similarly come up with other meanings for words like "sentence" and "privileged" and nothing that you say means what I think it means. This is the breakdown in communication that we should avoid by granting privileged status to some sentences.
@@Ansatz66 Under Quine's holistic approach would we say that "a triangle has 3 sides" is part of a general theory of geometry. As long as that theory holds up and is the best we have, then all of its theorems may be considered true, but only because they inherit their truth from the theory as a whole. If someone has a rival geometric theory under which triangles sometimes have other numbers of sides, then we can examine it to see how it works and whether it is better. We don't have to hold rigidly to a sentence just because it is labelled a definition. Mathematics however is not the best example. In classical physics we used to define momentum as mass x velocity. Then in relativistic physics we redefined momentum to be mass x velocity x Lorentz factor. The reasons for doing this are ultimately empirical. Calling the classical version a definition does not make it immune to revision. It is the theory of mechanics as a whole that is supported or falsified by empirical data.
@@BumbleTheBard: What do you mean by "whether it is better"? If someone comes up with a geometric theory where they use the word "triangle" to refer to squares, that theory could work excellently for explaining geometry, no worse than an equivalent theory that used the word "square" refer to squares. The only issue with such a theory is the breakdown in communication that would be caused when trying to explain this theory to people. They would inevitably ask why we have redefined the word "triangle" in such a confusion way and why not just use the word "square" to talk about squares. In terms of the structure of the theory it is identical. In terms of being understood by people, it is much worse. What sort of "better" are you imagining it might be?
"We don't have to hold rigidly to a sentence just because it is labelled a definition."
If we do not hold rigidly to that, then people will not be able to understand what we are saying and we will not be able to understand other people. If we seriously consider the triangles might sometimes have four sides, then we will not be sure what people mean when they say "triangle," and no one who understands our peculiar philosophy should trust that they understand what we mean when we use the word "triangle." For all they know, "triangle" might mean elephant when we say it. The only hope for clear communication is to convince people that Quine's philosophy is just silliness.
"In classical physics we used to define momentum as mass x velocity. Then in relativistic physics we redefined momentum to be mass x velocity x Lorentz factor."
That is a synthetic issue, not an analytic issue. Those are not really definitions; those are equations relating momentum to mass and velocity based on empirical evidence.
It seems to me that the argument is that synonymy is a synthetic or empirical property of natural language. It is inferred rather than have it officially defined.
There was an example given of a hypothetical situation in which it was discovered that foxes are asexual and vixen are a certain variety of fox. Such discovery would be impossible if vixen was in fact defined as a female fox.
I personally hate arguments that try to exploit the ambiguity of the natural language so much that I lose interest in reading the rest of the text. Congratulations, you are the smartest kid in the class! Want a smiley sticker?
Maybe I don't understand the argument, but does Quine think that one day we will find a married bachelor out there in the world?
@@sbnwncNo, it's not entirely clear to me why he is doing this, but he is trying to cast doubt on a priori knowledge. Kind of similar to what the sophists of ancient Greece were trying to do, although the sophists took this to an unreasonable extreme.
@@tunahankaratay1523 It seems like Quine does the same
@@sbnwnc Yes because there is nothing that is not subject to revision when we rid ourselves of apriori concepts.
@@nkoppa5332 That is a little weird. There can't be a married bachelor, can there be?
By analogy with the two classes of contradiction on the slide at 12:00 do you also distinguish two separate classes of tautology, one of the form "X is a bachelor and it is the case that X is a bachelor" and a broader one of the form "X is an unmarried bachelor"?
Yes, presumably tautologies in the first sense would be analytic statements of the first class, and tautologies in the broader sense would be analytic statements of the second class.
Of course you can make an error in dealing with something that's stipulated. If I'm typing with my left hand out of alignment, and some of my instances of "ff" appear as "gg", that's an error. If I actually state a stipulation that "ff" is to be an abbreviation for "female fox", and you hear me say "ephemeral fox" instead, that's an error. If I make a bunch of abbreviations, and you have to think a bit when you encounter one of them, it's still a stipulated definition. Why should that be any different when the stipulation was done collectively over decades, instead of individually within one lecture?
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Sydney can't believe that there is a vixen in his garden without believing that there is a female fox in his garden. Believing that there is a vixen in his garden isn't the same as believing that there is something called "a vixen" in his garden. One statement describes only his belief about what's in his garden, and the other describes his belief about the language.
Good point: if Sydney believes there is a female stoat in his garden and says that he thinks there is a vixen in his garden, it just means that no one else will understand him because he has made a mistake. Any other utterance (other than jill) could be substituted for vixen to the same effect. Actually if Sydney had said 'I think I saw a jill in the garden', he might also be misunderstood, if those he spoke to did not know that a jill is a word for a female stoat.
There is a philosophical point here about private language here that I think does undermine Quine's argument about indeterminacy of meaning (it overinflates the significance of trivial error).
@@martinbennett2228 I didn't know that a female stoat was called a jill.
@@danwylie-sears1134 Goodness knows why, but it does show that misunderstandings can happen on both sides, however it is wrong to extrapolate that we always misunderstand or that there is no common language which seems to me to be the implication of Quine's thesis. Indeterminacy does not have to negate any facts of the matter.
If I and you both use the word ^blue' there may be some indeterminacy at the margins, but it does not mean we misunderstand each other. If you use a colour word that is unknown to me, then I could easily be mistaken and confuse colour names, but I cannot see any serious philosophical complications in this.
@@martinbennett2228 No. Completely false,
a fact of the matter is completely non existent , you assert this while your epistemology destroys any conception of the given.
@@nkoppa5332 Is that a fact?
i think the difference is something like the difference between sentences talking about blue, vs sentences talking about cars. it is not a distinction that matters for knowledge as we experience and hold it. i didn't go into the difference between analytic and synthetic, but i don't think it is strictly necessary, because in the context where knowledge and meaning is actual, there is not such divide at all, there is just the meaning of words and sentences as they are used, and the experience of understanding something. a sentence like "red is red" is on the one hand a truism that can be experiences as a sentence of that form, or a statement that "red means the experience of red" which just points to the experience of red in thought, whether it is about observing red or thinking about it, these two ways to view the analytic statement are just the same as when saying "kafka is a writer", the sentence just says that this kafka entitiy is a writer, meaning he fits the definition of a writer, the experience of kafka is the experience of reading, thinking about, or talking to a writer, whatever that means, when it comes to the relevant part of kafka, the world could have been otherwise, kafka could have been a plumber, but then we need to separate what we are actually talking about when we say something like that. first of all plubmer kafka is not the same kafka, it is no different than saying red could have been blue, only that for kafka, being a writer is not as all encompassing of the features of kafka as kafka can appear in thought. second, the words themselves could have been synonyms, the reason we know the case of red and the case of kafka is different in the first place is because we are leaning on our preconceived pre language game noitions, of writer, kafka and red. lastly, the only way to know the difference, and to unknown that red can't have different meanings in different positons in a sentence, are precisely these notions that exists in our experience of thinking prior to writing down a single argument about sentences, what it feels like to write or utter differently structured sentences and what it feels like to mean different things by them. so i hope you see what i mean, i don't think i can go much deeper into it right now, way too sleepy, i liked your video, i just think this issue is a lot deeper than just making arguments about structure and the content of our experience of thinking, i think we absolutely must be critical of what the experience of thinking and meaning actually is, and how concepts are rooted in it, and that logic and argumentation within language can only really gesture at what the problem is, and why there is really only one form of knowledge, and subcategories that are only applicable within language games and so on. anyway have a good day sir, nice video :). i think kant almost did it right but then got derailed by being too science envious instead of actually being critical he sort of reified an inability to do reason synthetically, without realizing that it is impossible to define terms and so you never actually have a priory knowledge of anything, just within a language game, and there only heuristically, not in any sense that can be called proof, it is not far off from what he argues but it is enough for me to reject it, especially the use of a priory, since i don't believe the term has any meaning at all, a bit like free will, it is a term, nobody can really define it properly without melting it away under scrutiny. i hope this made some sort of sense to you, that was my aim anyway, and the limitations imposed upon us by reality, whatever it is.
Can you elaborate on what poetic quality is?
This is too easy to get around by developing a clear understanding of language, and the concept of aboutness. For example, all definitions are stipulative, because the thing they are about is arbitrary. We analyze not logical interactions between things-in-the-world, but rather between defined terms.
This, perhaps in a disturbing cosmic horror sense, extends to numbers. What is so special about the number one? Turns out there's lots of units, and there's lots of number lines. Quite a few number circles. A bunch of number planes. A few interesting number hyper-doughnuts.
You didnt get around it at all. defined terms and logic are just as arbitrary themselves.
@@nkoppa5332 Defined terms are arbitrary. Logic is necessarily not. The alternative is all information is unknowable. If you want to eat that?
But I love how your criticism of my point, containing "all definitions are arbitrary" is "all definitions are arbitrary." No way. I didn't consider that. Clearly defeats the argument that depends on that.
@@warrendriscoll350 yeah so, knowledge is impossible on your view, and you would be required to stop talking or thinking.
Infact, you would not be able to assert you had knowledge of the fact that you had no knowledge.
@@nkoppa5332 Oh wait. What stops you from asserting literally anything under such a circumstance? They would just all be baseless assertions.
Actually, don't answer that. You're confusing me as to what your position is.
@@warrendriscoll350 my position is that once you are fundamentally unable to save anything from empiricism, you end up in a position unable to say anything, unable to assert knowledge
Unable fundamentally to either agree or disagree to anything. The basis of rationality evaporates.
i think this turns out to be a bit meaningless tbh, the meanings of no words are rooted in a language game. there are use cases of all words that are rooted in intuitions, those intuitions are more or less an internal equivalent of finding a shiny rock on the beach, in terms of a persons experience. the only difference is the experience of the meaning of a word instead of the experience of seeing a shiny rock. knowledge comes in that one flavor, when we say something like "red is red" we are basically just saying my experience of red is what red is, that is a referral to a "state of the experiential world" just the same as saying "kafka is a writer" "my experience of the name kafka, is the experience of thinking of the writer kafka" the meaning of the word, always comes from such an operational definition that only ever makes any sense at all by being directly referential to experiencing thoughts associated with the word. a stipulation of meaning onto itself is just a statement of the existence and the label of the meaning, whether the word means anything or not is not really the point, the point is that when the word doesn't mean anything, the difference between analytic and synthetic is meaningless, and when it means something, the knowledge in either type of statement is the same type of knowledge. if that makes any sense to you, the distinction is only a distinction in the kind of sentence used, not in the meaning of the words or the composition, the different kinds of compositions have their own meaning akin to that of the words that is also understood in the same kind of way, all knowledge is, the rest is just sub-types of language game. i hope that makes sense to you, the broader point is that we can't trace out the meaning of any word inside of the formal bounds of a language, the usage of words can't give words meaning, and not sentences either, and so the formal knowledge we hold is a product of the reliability of the application of intuitions about operational definitions, like what plus is, how to use it, how to talk about it, how to add numbers in a way that you will tell yourself you did a good job, and others will agree with you, if you actually went to write down what plus actually means, you would produce a bunch of sentences, then you would struggle to produce new sentences to explain the symbolic usage of words and sentences in your attempt to define plus and so on and so forth until you are 90 years old and suddenly realize you spent your hole life scribbling down an infinite rabbit hole that structurally cannot have a bottom within a language game. this is true for mathematics as well, at some point we have to just say enough is enough and hope our operational understanding of how to apply an idea is reliable enough to apply without inconsistencies, you can't prove consistency or rigorously define the meaning of all your terms inside the system of meaning they represent, so you are simply forced to expand it and expand it but never being able to complete it. this is just a simple consequence of symbolic logic and language being open ended and never fully definable in a rigorous way, you have to build an adding machine, or apply an logarithm manually, of the back of some intuitive notion of it being a correct procedure in relation to the intuition you have about what you wanted in the first place, and hope you didn't skrew up in relation to your expectations, this is because existence and the real world is not structured in the context of symbolic logic, it is its own thing, runs its own analog processes and you are along for the ride, symbolic logic then arises as rule sets that give consistent results within their own operational definitions, like the rules of chess being unambiguous, but they are no more or less ambiguous than being able to tell whether you are inside your apartment or not, being able to make that kind of distinction reliably is all we need to be able to produce reproducible results, like proofs or to be able to follow rules of chess, and know when there is a checkmate, at least somewhat reliably, the mistake some people make is that they think such a procedure relies on formal proof, there is simply no such thing strictly speaking, we can never and will never define our terms properly inside a formal system, because that is beyond the limitations of logic and symbolic language as an activity. sorry if this was a bit rambly, i tried to boil it down, maybe the meaning got a bit lost, it is always hard to tell, when i have thought my own thoughts and have my own perspective and references to draw on that make me favor a certain explanation, that might mean something else when read by another person, or give the wrong impression of the content of the thoughts that i wished to convey, after all i can't check if it made any sense, and that is kind of the point. knowledge is fickle because of this, and there really is only one kind of knowledge in the most fundamental sense as it is experienced outside a language game, and inside my own experience, or yours.
Ok so admission of a language game is to admit to quines conclusion, coherentism, and overall relativism lol.
Aren’t mathematical axioms and definitions stipulative though? Hence, preserving the analyticity of mathematics
Yes, that seems plausible to me. I suppose the trouble is that in working out what follows from these axioms and definitions, we're not just stipulating the entailments. Stipulative definition is involved in mathematics but doesn't get us very far.
No, equivalence is itself just another derivative of "true in terms of meaning", you have no platonic realm of meanings.
Imagine thinking there are no analytic sentences and therefore no real meanings of the sentences. Philosophers are a funny bunch.
lit vid bruh
Weird, I thought you already made this one
I might have done. I don't remember all the videos I've made.
no, not really.
I am pretty sure I would remember if I had seen a video about this before. Nothing else in philosophy frustrates me more than Quine's analysis of analytic propositions.
i can use bachelor to refer to the academic degree and still have that person be married
Crossword clue: female fox, 6 letters.
Can it be a semantic primitive?
What is that?
i feel like you’ve done this video before.
Quine's critique of various criterion is really pointless and makes it seem like he's doing anything else than just drawing conclusions from radical verificationism (and a bit of linguistic behaviorism). The problem is that you cannot make any sense of induction without invoking intensional or at least semi-intensional notions, like Goodman has shown, so Quine's stance cannot make sense of ordinary practice of empirical research.
Because empirical research is unjustified on the empricisit grounding.
@@nkoppa5332 Yes. That's the paradox, I guess.
@@kmerczerwony1739 well yes, showing that empiricism is self destructive and leads to coherentism, because meanings themselves are supposed to be grounded in sense data, yet sense data is invoked to be helpful due to induction
So the problem of induction and causation itself applies therefore to meaning.
When's the next AMA?
Never
@@KaneB that better be false in all possible worlds 😤
The ethnocentric meaning of a sentence depends on the context as within a sub cultural group a gangster leader will mean by a statement through member compliance. Ethnographic vagueness in this sense is when a bushman points at the rabbit utters a statement means giving cattle for a dowery. The issues arise as rationalism demand extant outputs like backing up a car and saying slowly upon which the driver crashes into the wall. Hence driverless cars meaning is quantised through signals of increment millimetres to seconds which have more precise meaning the backup slowly. However as for human ritual around reproductive rites or compliance there is a lived experience component that converges as the analytic content of mind converge with synthetic body political sense data as familiar with the place which is indicted by emotional stability or intelligence. The emotional aspect to meaning is cashed out in a Kantian sense of means to an end distinction where treating people as a means to an end will entail feelings to map onto a sentence as proceed with caution and othering/alienation or end in itself in-group hierarchy self evaluation. Even though treating people as an end in them selves seems inauthentic given number one it proves the other denizen your not an out right sociopath or narcissist with Machiavelli tendencies. Proposition are true on a spectrum within the pod like environment of the cult which can even take the form of enduring fields of enquires with formal languages. Members of the cult will have a greater sense of the meaning of place the bowl on the table then if within a setting like a public emergency shelter set up be the nation state for events like a storm surge of earth quake. The sentence in the former is linked to an elaborate ritual involving possible pair bonding and in the latter with a function of task completion to align object placement. The former has fussed analytic to synthetic correlations whilst the latter has disjointed analytic to synthetic relations for the exact same syntax structure. The semantics are divided into thematic drift as but one prototype that marks a superordinate structural positionally on meaning that filters to a subordinate layer that could deal with prototypes of family resemblances so that if the person in the emergency shelter is similar in appearance to cult prototypes the sentient meaning will take on a cult like sense of relevance whereas if the person in the shelter making the request had a non favourable ethnology to the recipient bias then the sentence might be seen as a potential threat and interpreted as intimidation. This suggests that research into sentence meaning will require extended participant observation within the in-group to gain qualitative and quantitative data to draw a conceptual map of possible structural patterns within the semantic web in relation to set and setting where the sentence occurred and with whom, where whom is the profile of the person ostensibly referenced by a name.
What the fuck are you talking about man?
any collapse of analytic synethic leads to coherentism, coherentism leads to relativism.
Quine be like the initialization function sus bro
Fuck yeah thank you
It continues to seem like there could be a bachelor in a green card marriage
_All_ languages are artificial. Some languages may be considered more artificial then others in that they are constructed by people who are dedicating themselves to that purpose, while other languages are constructed slowly over time by whole cultures, but this is an irrelevant difference. Either way languages are made up by people and they have made-up rules. Quine's effort to find meaning behind the made-up rules of a language seems obviously pointless because they are just made-up rules. There is no reason behind all bachelors being unmarried. It is not analytic because of any particular quality of that proposition; it's just been made-up by people to be that way. There is no magical quality to the word "bachelor" to make it this way, no ontological mystery.
To ask why would be like asking why a king cannot castle after moving in chess. The correct answer is that's just how it is. This does not mean we are justified in declaring that the rule does not exist. Even though the rule is just made-up and has no deeper cause behind it, still we have the rule now and it would be silly to pretend that we do not have it. The rule is that bachelors being unmarried is an analytic fact. You do not have to like it, you do not have to understand why, but you do have to live with it if you want to communicate effectively in English.
Wouldn't a better answer to the "why can't a king castle after moving in chess?" question be to provide a telos of some kind? I'm not a chess expert, so I can't be specific in my answer, but it seems probable to me that castling and its limitations were not merely created in a directionless vacuum, but rather by chess players and chess theorists desiring game rules conducive to a certain play experience. That considered, the best answer to the question wouldn't simply be, "that's just how it is" but rather, "somebody wanted it this way, and they wanted it this way for X reason." I don't think I have the special knowledge or intellectual dexterity to connect this to your arguments about language (because I suspect that the development of language operates with different rules than the ludology of chess), but I find it odd to suggest the artificiality of something as evidence that its stipulations are devoid of content, when it seems to me that artifice is more often the origin of content.
@@MMurine: True, the people who came up with the castling rules probably had some motivation for the rules they invented, but the point is that their motivation was entirely at their own whim. They could have made whatever rules they liked, and they chose these rules because they seemed fun. I do not think that is the sort of explanation that Quine is looking for. Quine wants a definitive reason why bachelors being unmarried needs to be analytic and why Bob being a bachelor needs to be synthetic, and he would not accept "because people thought it was fun for it to be that way."
Ok, so its a language game, and the analytic synthetic distinction is a myth.
So you basically concede Quines conclusions as well as wittgenstein.
@@nkoppa5332 : I would prefer to call it a social construct rather than a myth. Just because people make something up, that does not make it a myth. Myths are stories about things that never happened, but people can also make up artificial boundaries like the borders of a nation or the legislation of a government. The analytic-synthetic distinction is far more like the borders of a nation than like a story that never happened. I have seen no indication that Quine ever understood this.
@@Ansatz66 Social constructs are infact myths.
Because the whole point, is that you actually have no prima facia access to the fact of the matter, including "what happened in reality"
On this view, borders of a nation have as much legitimacy in terms of justification as the Gods of homer. I am literally just quotingQuine back to you.
You have not made an actual legit distinction between a myth and social construct, and you fundamentally cannot.
Gods of homer existed in the minds people who passed down stories.. The borders of a country exist in the minds of people who passed down the collective agreement that keeps it existing.
Both are stories, there is no given, infact, the given, is a myth.
Comment for engagement
I appreciate it!
Is that a description or a command?
@@drewhallett yes
Such a terrible argument. Quine essentially says "If you adopt my stupid view of necessity, then analyticity cannot be defined non-circularly"... but of course this shouldn't lead us to reject analyticity. Rather, it should lead to us rejecting his stupid view of necessity! Rationalists have told us for more than 200 years that necessity cannot be reduced to analyticity. Quine doesn't give us an argument against analyticity, but rather an argument against reducing necessity to analyticity.
To be fair to Quine, this argument was made in the context of a critique of logical empiricism, and most of the logical empiricists shared Quine’s skepticism of necessity and saw these semantic distinctions as playing an important role in explaining necessity. I think it's a pretty weak argument even with that concession, though. I doubt there is any interesting concept (or even non-interesting concept) that could be given a definition that meets the standards to which Quine holds the concept of analyticity.
@@KaneB That's true - maybe if you are a hardcore empiricist, then you should buy Quine's critique. But then again I'd just say that this is to be interpreted as a reductio ad absurdum of hardcore empiricism, because literally nothing is more obvious than that "Bachelor" and "Unmarried man" are synonymous terms.
@@dominiks5068 So your defense of the analytic synthetic distinction from the rationalistic perspective, is to... not be an empiricist?
You miss the point lol. rationalism is not what he was critiquing.
BUt i would extend Quines critiques to all foundationalist systems so rationalists would not be safe either.
@@dominiks5068 If you are any form of empiricist at all, you should take quines critique.