Quine's rejection of analytic / sythentic distinction.?

Question

I've read Two Dogmas of Empiricism, but it seems to me that any definition, if pushed far enough as Quine pushes this one will rely on either some undefined notion, or necessarily be circular. Is there something wrong with accepting the distinction as primitive? After all, it's easy enough to understand what we "mean" by the distinction.

Also what was Quine's motivation for rejecting this distinction? If I could understand his overall philosophical motivation, perhaps I could understand better why he would want to do away with this notion (and indeed, the notion of primitive "meaning" being associated with ideas which Quine seemed to dislike so much. After all, a theory of meaning may give new ground to plant the distinction in).

Also, what is the current status of the distinction?

Answer 1

Let's start by realizing that Quine was a physicist, first and foremost. Let's say he even loved it to the point that he worshipped physics. While this is an overstatement...it will help you understand what I'm stating next:

You've thrust yourself into a thickette of weeds, so to speak. First of all, you have asked several questions, which while appearing to be simple prima-fascia...are actually very complex in terms of history and theory.

I can help you with all of this, but only through the partitioning of it into multiple questions, which you will have to ask subsequent to this one if you want to continue beyond this.

Mainly, what is going on here is the sense within Quine that physics must be able to stand on its own, despite what humankind thinks. See, in the analytic-synthetic distinction, even simple mathmatics falls into the category of "synthetic."

For example: 4 + 4 = 8....is a synthetic statement because mankind must "synthesize" the first half (4 + 4) to derive the second half (8).

Extending this logically forward, all of mathmatics and physics becomes synthetic. See, this destroys the very foundation of science...that basic nature just IS, despite what we think, or think we know about it. Quine (via Tarski, et all) sought to do away with the A/S distinction because he saw it as a cumbersome counter-productive theory. He needed to demonstrate that, although we "discover" natural rules of the universe, those rules exist a-priori (so to speak)....not because we've synthesized mentally a mathmatical equation to describe them. And, he (dangerously) used the example of how scientific theory often times does NOT bear out to successfully describe the universe as a way to bolster his argument against A/S.

The irony is that the generator of the "A/S problem was a man who stridently sought to alay the skepticism towards what "WE CAN BE SURE OF" which was about to explode because of Hume...

IMANUEL KANT!!!!

I hope this is of help to you...

Answer 2

It bears mention that Quine goes after a LOT of things, and this is just one of them. I think the core of what he was after in a way was the idea that any venture we undertake is built on postulates, be it math, science, language, or logic. These aren't things we KNOW to be true, even by definition, but are actually just guesses.

The point, then, of much of his analysis might be summed up in the question, "What if our guesses aren't true?"

A parallel might be drawn with physics. It is possible to re-write all of physics without the idea of time. And while some people might wonder what the point of undertaking such a task might be, it is not inaccurate to say that if the common perception of time as a 'dimension' or a 'stream' is wrong, and everything is built on this wrong perception, then there is a much more accurate and powerful form of physics out there just waiting for us to discover it.

And perhaps there are more powerful versions of language, logic, and so on that we might find if we abandon what Quine argues to be an imaginary distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.

Another way to demonstrate what Quine might be after is by comparing primitive and modern ideas of the Sun. Though very primitive people all knew what they were talking about when they referred to the sun ("The Sun isn't up yet") and even could make accurate statements and predictions about it ("The Sun will be up tomorrow") their ideas about it also led them to make false conclusions ("The Sun is angry with us"). Modern ideas are less prone to that - we know that the Sun and Moon are different kinds of objects, what they are like, and how they are prone to act even better.

It's kind of funny that you mention that a 'definition' might be corrupted from too much analysis because I seem to recall Quine even suggesting that what DEFINITION is might be a hazy concept as well! And that is ultimately his problem with the distinction between the analytic and synthetic - if you can't come up with a satisfactory meaning for 'definition' or 'synonym', then the only way you have to distinguish concepts is in the real world of experience and experiment (and those are dependant upon the entirety of everything else you know and experience).

Quine's ideas taken to the extreme end up nullifying a lot of meaning. It's impossible to say whether one translation is more accurate than another without trying them out on people... it's even impossible to say whether one person is capable of communicating an idea in the same language... all you can determine is whether a speech act had the intended effect or not. Quine's arguments could even be used to say that thoughts are inherently meaningless. But since Quine was a behaviourist, he didn't find this to be too much of a problem.

I think the main argument against Quine is that just because HE can't think of a good way to describe 'definition', 'synonymy', and other concepts, it hardly means that those things fail to actually exist. Even if how most people distinguish those ideas now are not as accurate as they might someday be when a precise meaning is formulated, it doesn't mean we're wrong in doing so.

Take, for example, the distinction between a solid and a liquid. Past certain pressures and temperatures, the distinction disappears for most substances. Solidness and liquidity become a spectrum instead of distinct states of matter. But chemists have not discarded the idea of solids nor liquids because things are not ALWAYS in that state of continuum. They are still useful concepts, even if sometimes they are undefinable.

Chomsky also had a very interesting rebuttal. Chomsky, of course, was one of the early people to work out what may prove to be the instinctual bases for language. He argued that whether it makes sense or not, a distinction between the analytic and synthetic may just be one of those instinctive, instrinsic rules for how our language instincts work. There isn't a necessary difference, but for us it may be a demonstrable one.

Different modern philosophers will handle Quine in their own ways, of course. Some try to take his ideas and roll with them, extending his work to develop whole systems without instrinsic meaning. Others reject him for the above or other reasons. I think it is generally viewed as a perhaps insoluble problem (like certain mathematical theorems) and not worried about overmuch... even if it IS true, after all, it need not change everything else. We'll just have to see!

Answer 3

You might find your answer in one of these.

As for Quine's motivations for rejecting the distinction, probably you won't.

As for the 'current status', there probably isn't one, except for Quine's own, and whatever advances in his thinking have come from those who've studied him.


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