Greg Wong-Taylor

In order for us to associate a word with an object it might seem that we would need to have direct experience with both. Given the present technology, however, there are some objects with which we can have no direct experience, namely the unobservable entities postulated by scientific theories. The problem taken up here is how to refer to those entities. There are two prominent attempts to explain reference in scientific theories – the first is Ramsey and Carnap’s proposal that we exchange theoretical terms for variables and existential quantification. The second is Kripke and Evan’s causal theory of names and rigid designation. I will argue that the most plausible theory of reference to unobservables lies in between these two theories; terms that purport to refer to unobservable entities, when occurring within a theory, need to be thought of as bound variables. But when those same terms occur in sentences outside of the theory, as when spoken, for example, they occur as genuine referring expressions, which have their reference determined by a theory

This thesis sketches an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus centering on his treatment of necessity and normativity. The purpose is to unite Wittgenstein’s account of logic and language with his brief remarks on ethics by stressing the transcendental nature of each. Wittgenstein believes that both logic and ethics give necessary preconditions for the existence of language and the world, and because these conditions are necessary, neither logic nor ethics can be normative. I conclude by erasing the standard line drawn between his philosophy and his ethics, and redrawing it between the philosophical and artistic presentations of his thought, the latter being what remains after the nonsensical status of the work is recognized.

In his landmark article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” W.V.O. Quine pushed analytical philosophy into its post-positivist phase by rejecting two central tenets of logical empiricism. The first dogma was the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; the second was reductionism, or the belief that to each synthetic sentence there corresponds a set of experiences that will confirm or disconfirm it. But in both “Two Dogmas” and Word and Object, Quine stretches analytical philosophy to its limits. The problem is, ironically, his adherence to two separate dogmas. The first stems from Quine’s empiricism: he insists that there is nothing more to meaning than the empirical method of discovering it. The second has been taken as the defining characteristic of analytical philosophy;2 it is the belief that a philosophical account of thought can only be attained through an account of language – the famed “linguistic turn.” I will argue that a philosophical account of language can only be attained given an account of thought,3 and that the philosophies of Kant and Davidson can help us construct such an account.