How Not to Read/Teach “Two Dogmas”

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

Surfing the web, I find that two very wrong ideas about Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” are (almost) ubiquitous. Many philosophers, including some who do not make serious mistakes about any other twentieth century philosopher, tell their readers that “Two Dogmas” defends  two forms of holism: “meaning holism” and “confirmation holism”.  This post has two purposes: to explain why these are misinterpretations, and to speculate about the possible reasons that many philosophers (including, no doubt, many teachers of courses that discuss “Two Dogmas”) impose these misreadings on that famous text.

But first a disclaimer: I do not think that “only Hilary Putnam understands Quine, and everyone else gets him wrong.”  The best books on Quine (as opposed to many articles and PDFs I see on the web) do not make these mistakes. For example, Peter Hylton’s indispensable book, Quine, does not mention “confirmation”—which is as it should be, because, as I pointed out in a previous blog, Quine mentions “confirmation” in “Two Dogmas” only to say that, “apart from prefabricated examples of black and white balls in an urn”, we no more have a theory of confirmation than we do of analyticity!  Since the whole point of “Two Dogmas” is that “analytic” is a term we should stop using in philosophy, the reason Quine compares the two problems, the problem of explaining analyticity and the problem of explaining confirmation, has to be that we should no more employ the notion of confirmation than we should the notion of analyticity. Quine is not a  confirmation holist; he is a confirmation rejectionist. (See also my post on Quine and Popper). 

As for “meaning holism”, I have noticed something peculiar: I have noticed that whenever a passage from “Two Dogmas” is quoted to show that Quine is a “meaning holist”, the passage isn't ever about meaning. What is cited are passages that display Quine’s “Duhemianism”, that is, the view that our bodies of scientific theory confront “recalcitrant” experiences as wholes. This is a form of holism—call it “evidential holism”, but it doesn’t concern meaning. (Why the evidence relation isn’t a justification relation for Quine, I shall come to shortly.) This is peculiar, because no one, to my knowledge, thinks that Duhem was a meaning holist!  Indeed, since the demise of the early logical positivist claim that empirical statements can be verified (and not just confirmed or disconfirmed) by sense-data [a claim that Carnap abandoned in Testability and Meaning,  and arguably already in Logical Syntax of Language], it has become hard—perhaps impossible—to find a philosopher who does not agree with what Quine sometimes called “moderate holism” with respect to the relation between theory and evidence. But no one says that all these philosophers are “meaning holists”.  So why is Quine, and Quine alone, read in such a way that if he is a Duhemian, he must be a “meaning holist”? Just as he is a confirmation-rejectionist  and not a confirmation holist, Quine is a meaning-rejectionist and not a meaning holist.

 The source of the misreading.

I believe that the source of both misreadings is a refusal to believe that Quine’s views are as radically different from those of traditional epistemologists and traditional philosophers of language as they are. Philosophers who have written serious books defending or criticizing Quine (or partially defending and partially criticizing him), in particular Peter Hylton and Christopher Hookway stress this radicalism; so it seems too me that people who make these mistakes must have failed to avail themselves of the insights of these major Quine scholars. And at the heart of what am calling Quine’s philosophical “radicalism” is this: the evidential relation, for Quine, is not a justificatory relation. When Quine tells us that the “evidence” for scientific theories comes from experience, be means that the causal starting points in the human construction of science are  impacts on our senses (after Word and Object: impacts  on our sensory receptors). Some beliefs are “argued for probabilistically” [Quine in Pursuit of Truth—see my post on Quine and Popper], and sometimes even deductively, given a background theory (“the lore of our fathers”)—for example, given a lot of theory, a scientist can say that the BICEP2 [http://time.com/24894/gravity-waves-expanding-universe/] experiment’s significance level is 5.2 sigma—but there is no such thing as our scientific theory as a whole being probabilized by observations alone. If you want a “foundation” forget it.

If one makes the mistake of taking Quine’s talk of evidence and of accepting statements and of revision as talk about confirmation and disconfirmation, it easy to see how one will misread him as a “confirmation holist”. The mistake of reading him as a meaning holist is somewhat stranger, but here is my conjecture: “Two Dogmas” criticizes “the verification theory of meaning”, by arguing that there is no such thing as the method of verification (or confirmation/disconfirmation) of an individual sentence.  The philosophers I am referring to must be assuming that Quine cannot be so radical as to reject the notion of meaning altogether; so, they must think, he must mean that it is sufficiently large bodies of theory (perhaps total science) that have meaning and methods of verification together!  But this is a double error.

I have already explained why bodies of theory are not confirmed by observation alone, for Quine: because the notion of confirmation is one he wants us to throw in the trash barrel along with the notion of analyticity. (Quine does tell us that given background beliefs, we can justify many statements deductively, and given probability theory and the like, sometimes probabilistically.) And similarly with the notion of “meaning”: one of the main claims of “Two Dogmas” (and of Word and Object and subsequent publications) is that there are no acceptable [to Quine] identity-conditions for “meanings”.  Yes, there are “translation manuals” (Word and Object), and the purpose of Word and Object is to show how communication (speaking with members of one’s community as well as translation of alien languages) is possible without positing such entities as “meanings”, indeed, without going beyond Fred Skinner’s behaviorist account of “verbal behavior”.  But there are no “meanings”, neither of single utterances nor of whole theories. In short, Quine was already practicing “naturalized epistemology” (and language theory) long before he wrote “Epistemology Naturalized”.

In conclusion

I agree with Hookway [Language, Experience, and Reality] that Quine’s three fundamental commitments are “empiricism, scientism, and physicalism”. Although I do not share those commitments, each of them is important, and Quine, like David Hume, was a great philosopher because he was willing to point out the radical consequences of his own commitments, rather than hide them or deny them. One does no favor to either Quine or philosophy by making him less radical than he is.

Ned Block writes about my "Escher Colors" post

" I completely agree that the point about neither eye being more veridical than the other shows what you say.  The way I would put the conclusion is that the phenomenology of color experience is a matter of the way one sees the objective colors and two different ways of seeing objective colors can be equally veridical.  Further, there is every reason to believe that if one of your eyes were transplanted into another person (if you will pardon the macabre example) then the intrasubjective color vision difference would become an intersubjective color vision difference.  I mention this to combat the idea (e.g. Stalnaker) that we can make sense of intrasubjective differences but not intersubjective differences."

Escher Colors

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

Once, not long ago, I took my wife to have a picture taken of the maculae of her eyes, the tiny areas of the retina of greatest visual acuity surrounding the fovea. (The finding was satisfactory.)  As each eye was scanned, the macula filled the technician’s screen, and the technician,who specializes in taking such pictures, told me the magnification was so great that if one showed the whole back of the eye at the same magnification the picture would cover the whole large wall behind the apparatus—perhaps forty feet long! Afterwards, as the technician and I were chatting, I mentioned that most people experience a slight difference in the shades of color they seem to see when they look at something with one eye closed and then, looking from the same spot, look with the other eye closed, and that this is explained by slight normal variation in the pigmentation of the macula themselves.  The technician exclaimed, “I noticed that, and I thought there was some sort of imbalance in my vision.” So the ubiquity of a phenomenon which is easily checked (as my students have verified through the years), is not known to at least one technician who spends his life looking at precisely the maculae of the human eye, even though he experiences it himself! And, apart from Ned Block, who cited me as the source of his information [in “Wittgenstein and Qualia”], and myself,  it seems to be missing in the literature on perception. But it should be better known, because it is only by ignoring it that one can even consider accepting the version of ultra-naïve realism about perception that currently goes by the name of “representationalism” [or some of the more extreme versions of disjunctivism?].

As I explained in the course of a comment on a paper by Ned Block [“Comment on Ned Block” in Baghramian’s Reading Putnam], this phenomenon is one I noticed by chance when was a college student, and, as I just said, many people have verified it since, including (in his own case) the photographer of maculae I mentioned above. As I said in “Comment on Ned Block”:

“I have experienced it [that colors ‘look different’ to the right eye and to the left eye] in my own case. And it also doesn’t really depend on the names we have for the various colors and shades of colors. First of all, the difference isn’t so great that with one eye closed I would say “It’s a grey wall” and with the other eye closed I would say “It’s a white wall”. In the case of my experience when looking at a beach in bright sunlight, what I might have said is that the beach seemed to be slightly different shades of yellow, depending on which eye was open.  But I wouldn’t say that it seemed to be yellow when viewed through my left eye alone, and gray when viewed through my right eye alone. The difference was not that extreme. And it wouldn’t have affected my “matching” performance on a color chart. No matter which eye is shut, if the beach matches yellow₃₂ with the left eye shut, it will match yellow₃₂ with the right eye shut. And by the way, our notion of “exactly the same color,” has itself been affected by and refined by technology especially by mass production and the resultant need for standardization.

My own experience thus prepared me to accept one of the points that Block makes: the view (common to ‘representationalists’ and at least some ‘disjunctivists’ in the philosophy of perception) that the phenomenal quality of a subject’s visual experience upon looking at (hearing, feeling, smelling, etc) a certain portion of her environment is exhausted by the objective appearance-properties (e.g., looking such-and-such a shade from such-and-such a point in space under such-and-such lighting conditions) of that portion of the environment is untenable. This view is, of course, a strong form of ‘naïve realism’, and while I think naïve realists are right to say that what we see (hear, feel, smell, etc.) when we perceive objects and events in our environment are properties of those objects and not properties of our qualia (something Block also thinks is right, as his paper makes clear), it is a mistake to say that describing what we perceive in objective terms also completely describes the phenomenology of the perceptual experience. That phenomenology is determined by a combination of objective and subjective factors, and representationalists err by failing to recognize the contribution of the subjective side. On all this Block and I are in agreement.”

What I want to do in this little post is go further into the implications of this fact.

One of those implications was very well brought  our by Block [in “Wittgenstein and Qualia”, the paper I commented on].  Given that the phenomenon is ubiquitous (I had no way of knowing in advance that the technician I mentioned it to had noted it in his own case, but this agrees perfectly with the testimony of my students over the last ten years, since I have been mentioning it in lectures), it would be crazy to say that the explanation is that my right eye is “normal” and my left eye is “abnormal”, or vice versa. Nor is there any reason to suppose that my color-qualia are exactly the same when I look at the gray wall from a certain place using my right eye (i.e., with my left eye closed) as your color qualia when you look at the wall from the same viewpoint using either your right eye or your left eye. There is no reasonable notion of a “normal” macular pigmentation such that all persons with a normal macular pigmentation enjoy the same phenomenal color experience when they look at things with a given objective color.

Of course, the representationalist (or an extreme disjunctivist?) can claim that there are no such things as color qualia, and a fortiori no such meaningful question as whether my color qualia (with or without one eye closed) are the “same” as someone else's; but the question whether the phenomenal character of my own color experience when I use my right eye and when I immediately after use my right eye to view a given thing is a question to which I can certainly give an answer, and the fact that the answer is that it isn’t exactly the same precludes my saying that my experience can be identified with the color properties of the given thing, or with veridical information about those properties, or is simply a “taking in” of those objective properties (as some disjunctivists would put it), etc., etc. If the aim of this post were simply to make this point, it would be unnecessary, since Block has already made it. But I want to go more deeply into my experience when I perform this experiment.

On the beach

As I said above, I noticed this phenomenon (Hilla Jacobson and I call it, the “H phenomenon”), when I was a college student, and I noticed it by chance. I was lying on beach, and I shut my right eye so sand wouldn’t get it, and I was struck by the fact that the sand “looked different”.) I didn’t know the term then, but I can now say that the color of the sand looked less saturated—I thought of it as “paler”, or “grayer”, or something like that.  (So I was comparing the appearance when I used my left eye alone to the appearance when I used both eyes.)   When I reverted to this experience in the last twenty years, long long after my college years, instead of going to a beach I tried looking at various object—say a gray wall—using one eye and then the other, or using one eye and then both eyes, and eventually I got around to asking students to do the same and report what they experienced, and the reports were similar to my own. But, at some point (I don’t if it was already in my college years, although it might have been), I was struck by the thought that the question “Is the sand really the color it looks to be when I use my right eye, or really the color it looks to be when I use both eyes?” makes no sense. It makes no sense, although I would not have thought of that reason in my college years (even though I was a philosophy major), because what could “really be the color” mean if there is no one “color” the sand looks to be to all normal viewers?

I said “makes no sense”, but that is too “Wittgensteinian”. The point is not about language at all; certainly it is not contradictory (or a “violation of ordinary language”, or something like that) to suppose that there is such a thing as the one unique phenomenal way a thing “really looks” when seen “as it truly is”, and that some eyes (or pairs of eyes) see it that way and others don’t, even if we have no present way of discerning which eyes are thus metaphysically privileged. But it is crazy to say that. There is no basis in either the physics of color or the physiology of color vision to support the idea that some eyes have that sort of metaphysical privilege. And if that is a false metaphysics then we are stuck with Block’s “phenomenist” conclusion, that the objective (physical) properties of things, including their location in space relative to the viewer and the illumination of the scene,  do not fully determine the phenomenal character of the experience of the viewer, be she as “normal” as you wish.

But I want to go beyond this “phenomenist”  point. Yes, the question “is the wall (or the sand, in the beach case) really the shade of gray (or yellow, in the case of the sand) that it appears to be when I use my right eye or the shade it appears to be when I use both eyes, has no answer, “makes no sense”—there is no metaphysical fact to the matter to decide this “question”; but, in another way, it seems to make sense.  It takes reflection, however brief, to convince oneself that there is no such thing as the wall (or the sand) being colorwise as it looks to my left eye as opposed to its being as it looks to my right eye. It seems, at least for a moment, as it somethings may “really be” that color.  But there is no such thing as that color!   The color, or better the exact shade of gray or yellow or whatever,  that the wall seems to be when I use my right or left eye isn’t the sort of thing that a color on a paint chart is; the wall could really be, say, purple-gray₃₂, but there is no such thing as it’s really being “gray*”, where gray* is the “shade” that the wall “seemed to be” when I used my left eye to view the wall on that occasion.  Subjective colors are impossible colors.  Like an Escher building, they seem to be real and simultaneously to be impossible. As as long I can remember how the “gray*” wall looked, I can say truly that “it looked gray*”, but “gray*” occurs intentionally, not referentially, in “looks gray*”; there is such a thing as “looking gray*” to a person at a time, but no such thing as really being gray*. Subjective colors aren’t colors; they are Escher colors.

Unscrambling my own syntax 

In a previous post, I wrote that my interpretation is that Quine thought that Popper is right that observations by themselves cannot support a hypothesis, but "he holds that, in conjunction with theories that we accept, but contrary to empiricism as traditionally understood, not simply because they are supported by observations.”

I would like to correct this scrambled syntax. What I meant was that Quine believed that theories are never probabilized by observations alone, but (sometimes) by previously accepted theories, or by previously accepted theories conjoined with certain observations plus mathematical statistics. According to him, the total body of our theoretical beliefs is not, contra Carnap and Reichenbach, probabilized by the sum total of our observational beliefs. 

"Two Dogmas" on "Confirmation"

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

In my previous post I mentioned that as a young philosopher I noticed that Quine never used the word "confirmation".  A reader of this blog pointed out that it occurred a half dozen times in Quine's celebrated paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". So it behoves me to point out that Quine uses it there only to deny that there is such a thing as the confirmation of a statement. His reasons for distrusting the notion are explicitly stated (on pp. 41-2 of the version in From a Logical Point of View): "I hope we are now impressed with how stubbornly the distinction between analytic and synthetic has resisted any straightforward drawing. I am impressed also, apart from prefabricated examples of black and white balls in an urn, with how baffling the problem has always been of arriving at any explicit theory of the empirical confirmation of a synthetic statement."  In sum, the notion of confirmation of a statement, to which Carnap and Reichenbach devoted so much attention, should be discarded along with the analytic/synthetic distinction. 

Surprising praise of Popper by Quine

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

In Pursuit of Truth (1992) Quine expressed a surprising measure of agreement with Popper - agreement which, as far as I know, has gone uncommented on all these years! 

On page 12 Quine writes “Traditional epistemology sought grounds in sensory experience capable of implying our theories about the world or at least endowing those theories  with some increment of probability. Sir Karl Popper has long stressed, to the contrary, that observation serves only to refute theory and not to support it.”

Taken at face value this looks like total agreement with Popper, and the whole section (which starts on page 9) up to this point is in perfect agreement with Popper. Moreover, the sentence that follows: “We have now been seeing in a schematic way why this is so.” (emphasis added by me), says that this is in agreement with Popper. (I noticed when I was still quite a young philosopher that Quine never employs the term “confirmation”, which is why I shudder when people call him a “confirmation holist”, just as I shudder when people call him a “meaning holist”.)

BUT

On Page 13 Quine says something that Popper would clearly disagree with:

“It is clearly true, moreover, that one continually reasons not only in refutation of hypotheses but in support of them. This, however, is a matter of arguing logically or probabilistically from other beliefs already held. It is where the technique of probability and mathematical statistics is brought to bear. Some of those supporting beliefs may be observational, but they contribute only in company with others that are theoretical. Pure observation lends only negative evidence, by refuting an observation categorical that a proposed theory implies.”

As I interpret this, Quine’s considered view is that Popper is right that observations by themselves cannot support a hypothesis, but he holds that, in conjunction with theories that we accept, but contrary to empiricism as traditionally understood, not simply because they are supported by observations (!).

For the leaders of Logical Empiricism,  Carnap and Reichenbach, it was important that there should be a formalizable notion of probability such that accepted scientific hypotheses have (ideally) a high degree of probability (Reichenbach) or a high of degree of instance-confirmation [I have forgotten what Carnap's technical term is, but I mean a high probability that the next observation will conform to the hypothesis, if the hypothesis is a universal generalization] relative to the total observational evidence.  Quine is explicitly rejecting that in those pages from Pursuit of Truth. If I am right about this, this is as sharp a break with logical positivism as the rejection of the analyticity of mathematics. And by citing Popper favorably, he emphasizes the disagreement with Carnap, since Popper and Carnap and their followers waged war on just this issue.