Bredo Johnsen

Ernie Lepore: Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence: In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Quine characterizes and rejects three approaches to making sense of analyticity. One approach attempts to reduce putative analytic statements to logical truths by synonym substitution. A second approach is to identify analytic statements with “semantic rules,” or “meaning postulates.” A third approach relies on the verificationist theory of meaning. According to that theory, “every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience, or, less radically, “each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or information.” Analytic statements are, then, those that are confirmed come what experiences may. If either version of the verificationist approach were correct, then there would be objective facts about the extensions of terms from intuitive semantics, for example, “‘…’ is synonymous with ‘___’” and “‘…’ is analytic,” across all languages. In this essay, I focus my discussion primarily on the third, verificationist, approach – though what I shall have to say will bear on the second approach as well. In particular, I explain the models of language contained in verificationism and the weaker confirmationism, and why most positivists abandoned the former for the latter. I explain the connection between confirmationism and intuitive semantics and why considerations of holism alone are incapable of severing that connection.

In several recent writings and in the 1980 Freemantle Lectures at Oxford, Alvin Plantinga has defended the idea that belief in God is ‘properly basic,’ by which he means that it is perfectly rational to hold such a belief without basing it on any other beliefs. The defense falls naturally into two broad parts: a positive argument for the rationality of such beliefs, and a rebuttal of the charge that if such a positive argument ‘succeeds,’ then a parallel argument will ‘succeed’ equally well in showing that belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic. In this essay I shall argue both that Plantinga has partially misconceived the objection, and that he has not succeeded, indeed cannot succeed, in rebutting it, for the objection does in fact constitute a reductio ad absurdum of his position. For the sake of ease of exposition, I shall first provide a bare sketch of the positive argument, though I shall discuss it directly only as it bears on the attempted reductio.

In ‘Skeptism Oisarmed,’ L.S. Carrier asserts the following:… any reasonable person would accept premise only on the ground that both p and q are propositions for which we can get the requisite evidence.Premise, actually a premise schema attributed to Peter Unger, is the following:If A both knows p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.I suggest, contrary to Carrier's assertion, that many reasonable people, including many philosophers, would regard as a necessary truth knowable a priori, and would be quite happy to accept its universal quantification, with no implied restriction to propositions for which we can get any evidence at all.How is such a dispute about what reasonable people would do to be resolved? I suggest that, at the very least, Carrier owes us an explanation of the grounds on which he would reject particular instances of the schema, e.g.

Goodman concurs in Hume’s contention that no theory has any probability relative to any set of data, and offers two accounts, compatible with that contention, of how some inductive inferences are nevertheless justified. The first, framed in terms of rules of inductive inference, is well known, significantly flawed, and enmeshed in Goodman’s unfortunate entrenchment theory and view of the mind as hypothesizing at random. The second, framed in terms of characteristics of inferred theories rather than rules of inference, is less well known, but provides a compelling view of inductive justification. Once the two accounts are clearly delineated, one can see that both are driven by a single deep conviction: that inductive justification can only be understood in terms of our actual inductive practice

Central elements of W. V. Quine’s epistemology are widely and deeply misunderstood, including the following. He held from first to last that our evidence consists of the stimulations of our sense organs, and of our observations, and of our sensory experiences; meeting the interpretive challenge this poses is a sine qua non of understanding his epistemology. He counted both “This is blue” and “This looks blue” as observation sentences. He took introspective reports to have a high degree of certainty. He endorsed outright Hume’s “skeptical” argument concerning induction. His naturalized epistemology is simply naturalistic, or scientific, epistemology stripped of the project of rational reconstruction, and is thoroughly normative. Quine was unconditionally a scientific philosopher who took our theories to be answerable ultimately to our perceptual experiences (sensations)—and conditionally an empiricist, empiricism being a scientific theory that has no competitors worthy of the name. I attempt to make all of this clear, and conclude by offering a concise formulation of his epistemology.