N: “Okay okay okay… allow me to start over.”
She was almost giddy.
N: “High altitude perspective: The name of the game is how to deal with meaning, right?”
P: “Why is it that some questions can be answered without looking, right?”
N: “And of course, we shouldn’t focus too much on questions. The idea is that concepts are knowable, and in virtue of that, we don’t have to consult reality.”
P: “And the response to such a claim of course quickly becomes that they are only knowable due to learning. At some point we were also blank sheets, a point at which we could not just lean back and conclude anything. That’s the empiricist view.”
Nell got up and started to walk. Patricia may display exuberant tendencies when she got excited, but Nell could walk for hours.
N: “We are framing the matter in the wrong way: We project along an ideology-versus-materialism axis, which we think lies naturally at the heart of opposing philosophies. But at the heart of the heart lies a deeper question: When you look at something, do you see reality or do you see your knowledge about reality.”
P: “Except, seeing »reality« is the only thing all agree we can’t do.”
N: “… And how many things are there? One (the object) or two (the object and a set of strangely universal laws that the object obeys, and which are not knowledge but something one generation can die away from and a new generation can learn again)?”
P: “And are they »out there« or »in here« (pointing to her brain) or even »no where«?”
N: “It sounds like Kant again. The transcendental projection of learned laws into an experienced reality.”
P: “I thought Kant’s categories were fixed? Neo-Kantians talks about something that change with time.”
Nell looked guilty as charged.
N: “Embarrassing. I forgot. Yes, a priori knowledge. Okay. So initially the name of the analytic game was meaning unqualified, meaning as you and I could imagine it to be.”
P: “Frege wanted a logical language to be the stronghold of analytics instead combined with simple substitutions of words with identical meaning to arrive at an analytic truth.”
N: “Logical positivism desired empiricism (experiment should decide a verdict) but they also saw the wisdom in Frege’s logical language. However, instead of Frege’s substitutions of words with similar words, they had the idea of experimental verifiability: A statement about something can be substituted with an experiment to verify the statement.”
P: “They were unsatisfied with how the early empiricists used logical connections without admitting it. Like saying »I only believe in what can be sensed, and ‘because’ is certainly not a sensible thing in the world. But it was raining tonight, so today the streets must be wet. They must.«”
N: “This humiliating situation inaugurates the linguistic turn, the thinking that if and, or, because, and not have no real existence, but certainly real world consequences, they must be part of the language itself.
“I wrote a note yesterday.”
Is knowledge a hierarchy?
Positivism had a rough childhood. In essence it tries to apply the success of mathematics with its axioms forming the base layer and with derived layers building on the fundamental laws.
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It rested on the rigorousness of the foundation of logic.
Russell ended that with his paradox which made set theory incomplete.
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It implied a kind of provability where fundamental sentences are joined together to prove less fundamental sentences like layers of brickwork becomes a building. Analytical truths were to be a foundation of certainty for empirical sentences. Meaning played a central role in this plan.
Meaning could be pondered over and elucidated until it became clear why a sentence had to be either true or false (if it was analytic). Meaning was stable and analyzable.
But establishing stability turned out to be harder than expected.
Carnap saw that given sentences {A,B,C,D} which mathematically relates to each other, choosing {A,B} over {C,D} as foundational or indeed any variation of {A’, B’} did not make a difference. It was irrelevant whether you used A+B to prove C+D or vice versa. If both worked, just let simple convention choose the foundation.
perhaps what philosophical analysis is doing is
revealing the tacit conventionsof ordinary language,
N: “Quine took this notion quite a bit further. In many ways, he saw the behavioral aspect of the analytical philosophers and called it. "
How to behavioristically understand philosophers?
According to Quine, there are two assumptions built into our idealization of analysis:
- Analytic is intelligible
- Statements can be verified.
Note: These are dogmas. It is actually not relevant whether they are true or not (Q. believes they are not). What is worse: They make us think about the analytic as something we can arrive at systematically.
P: “… But that’s not what happens!”
N: “Not at all! And now we see Quine the behaviorist at work…”
We suffer from an idealized attitude to thinking which blinds us to our own behavior.
In reality a body of knowledge becomes its own animal. One limb or another may be cut off, but a new one grows out or an old one replaces it.
If science had worked like our mental ideal suggests, the inverted pyramid would have fallen when one of the lower layers failed to hold up. Rather the body remains and is patched.
It is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
P: “Good! Now I understand what he says about centrality.”
N: “That stuff about unrevisability?”
P: “Exactly that.”
The appearance of sentences being “analytic” is simply due to their being, like the laws of logic and mathematics, comparatively central, and so are
given up, if ever,only under extreme pressurefrom the peripheral forces of experience.
P: “But then Quine starts to admit that unrevisability alone is not sufficient. Have black dogs existed? Why yes, I saw one yesterday, so they have existed! But it is not a logical necessity. If nobody can recount it having been so, we cannot say that it is so!”
Far from unrevisability explaining analyticity, it would seem to be analyticity that explains this peculiar unrevisability: the only reason someone might balk at denying bachelors are unmarried is that, well, that’s just what the word “bachelor” means!
N: “When I read that, I felt we had come full circle in chasing the analytic!”
P: “Exactly! We’re back where we started! We are magnetically drawn to the analytical necessity as it comes to us.
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Kant: Bachelor means unmarried ⇒ true by pure mental analysis.
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Frege: It is true, because of its logical form. The rules of the language (when it can be transformed into a proper logical form) mandates the necessity.
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But (1) if we’re strictly formal, we cannot say why unmarrieds are unmarried. That would be metaphysics. And (2), pure logic is faulty anyway thanks to Russell, no matter how counter-intuitive it seems.
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Carnap: So forget formality. Rather it is convention. By convention unmarrieds are unmarried.
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Quine: But the conventions are arbitrary. We are just stating what we are really sure about. I mean really really sure. What makes something seem analytical is simply the fact that it doesn’t change very often.
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Everybody: But it must be so that bachelors are unmarried… because… because… because…
that is what it means to be a bachelor!”
Nell laughed heartily.
N: “We are trapped in our own logic, are we not.”
P: “Can it be true? Can the seemingly logical necessity simply be a pure illusion? Our neurons adapt to the world by inventing meaning, conceptual pieces that fit together, all neurologically founded. To us it seems like an eternal necessity, but eternity is momentary in the neurological evolution.”
Nell didn’t answer because she simply could not. But she could sigh, so she did.
N: “Can we go for another walk?”
P: “I would love to. Is it okay with you if we walk separately this time? I need to mull things over.”
Fighting to disguise the pain, Nell pretended to agree. When Patricia spoke, Nell’s gaze had glanced across Patricia’s hand. What would happen if she simply took it and held it citing some invented excuse.
Nell was 47, old enough to know the feeling of time running out. To know about fleeting chances that might become the last ones to suddenly appear right in front of you.
She said goodbye and her heart was engulfed in fire.
•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•