Quine's Holism and Functionalist Holism

Mind Association

Quine's Holism and Functionalist HolismAuthor(s): Michael McDermottSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 110, No. 440 (Oct., 2001), pp. 977-1025Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3093563 .

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Quine's Holism and Functionalist Holism MICHAEL MCDERMOTT

One central strand in Quine's criticism of common-sense notions of linguistic meaning is an argument from the holism of empirical content. This paper explores (with many digressions) the several versions of the argument, and discovers them to be uniformly bad. There is a kernel of truth in the idea that 'holism', in some sense, 'undermines the analytic-synthetic distinction', in some sense; but it has little to do with Quine's radical empiricism, or his radical scepticism about meaning.

Quine's attack on intuitive semantics is no seamless web. The two main threads, separate and independent, are the argument from behaviourism and the argument from the holism of empirical content. They are of very different strengths. If you grant its premiss, the argument from behaviourism is good-simple, tight and to the point. But the holism espoused in ?5 of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' is no threat at all to intuitive notions of synonymy and analyticity.

If the key argument of 'Two Dogmas' was no good, what was the secret of its success? The explanation is that there is a kind of holism which does indeed imply a kind of demolition or demotion of the ASD (analytic-synthetic distinction). There was something real around where Quine was pointing; but nothing big enough, by light of day, to worry friends of meaning.

In section 1 the argument from behaviourism is reviewed, along with certain lesser arguments of Quine's. Our main topic, Quine's holism of empirical content, is introduced in section 2. Succeeding sections examine the different versions of that doctrine, and the different versions of the argument from holism against the ASD. Quine's slogan is that the 'unit of empirical significance' is the theory; his argument, at its simplest, is that therefore smaller linguistic items have no semantic properties. In section 8 we notice a non-Quinean kind of holism (although some have mistakenly attributed it to Quine), according to which words and sentences do have meaning after all, but their meaning is determined by some theory. I focus on one rather plausible view of this kind, and examine its consequences for the ASD.

Mind, Vol. 110 . 440 . October 2001 ? Oxford University Press 2001



978 Michael McDermott

1.

1.1 Common-sense semantics is mentalistic. It sees verbal behaviour as a product of two distinct causal factors, belief and linguistic compe- tence. 'Belief' here is to be understood non-linguistically. Many philosophers think that if such notions as belief and desire can be made sense of at all, it will be, as a first step, in terms of some notion of linguistic meaning (i.e. for public language). What I call mentalism holds, on the contrary, that thought is conceptually prior to language.

On the basis of this distinction it defines such notions as synonymy and analyticity. Two sentences are synonymous, in a broad intuitive sense, if they command assent and dissent concomitantly, and this is due strictly to word usage rather than to non-linguistic belief. A sentence is analytic if it commands universal assent, and this is due strictly to word usage rather than non-linguistic belief.

This is intralinguistic synonymy. Quine thinks that the intuitive notion of interlinguistic synonymy is also defective. His argument, in rough outline, is that the closest approximation to the intuitive notion that can be formulated in behavioural terms is not close enough: for there will always be translations of a given sentence that are equally correct by the behavioural standard but not equally correct by the intuitive standard. It seems to have been established beyond need of further discussion, however, that Quine's numerous attempts to clarify this indeterminacy of translation thesis, and to argue for it, have been unsuccessful. I shall therefore concentrate on intralinguistic synonymy.

Also it is broad synonymy. For example, any two analytic sentences are synonymous in this sense. Similarly, for any sentence s and any analytic sentence t, s is synonymous with sAt. In intuitive terms, this is perhaps equivalence by meaning rather than equivalence in meaning. Such a broad concept of synonymy might be unsuitable for some philosophical purposes. But it is uncontroversial that a more fine-grained notion of synonymy can be defined in terms of the broad intuitive sense. See, for example, ?14 of Word and Object (Quine 1960): given a broad synonymy notion for wholes, we could define synonymy for parts as interchangeability salva meaning; then a narrow notion of synonymy for the wholes could be defined by appeal to synonymy of the homologous parts. 'So let us concentrate on the broader and more basic notion of sentence synonymy.'(p. 62)

My formulations of the mentalistic concepts are Quine's, near enough. (For synonymy, Quine's actual words are '... rather than to how things happen in the world' (Quine 1960, p. 62). I presume this is

just a slip: he does not mean that the mentalist thinks that our assent-



Quine's Holism and Functionalist Holism 979

ings reflect how the world actually is (perhaps unbeknown to us), but how we believe it to be. For analyticity we get the opposite combination: 'true purely by meaning and independently of collateral information' (p. 65). I presume Quine meant to say 'assented to purely by meaning and independently of collateral information' There are two acceptable ways of aligning the relevant concepts: (i) truth as a product of lan-

guage and fact, (ii) assent as a product of language and belief. The second group of concepts have to do with language users; the first do not.

Quine says 'One usually hears the matter described in terms rather of truth values than of assent and dissent; but I warp it over to the latter terms in order to maximise chances of making sense of the relation on the basis of verbal behavior'. (p. 62) Good idea: but warp it over consist-

ently.) Many mentalists would protest that our formulations of analyticity

and synonymy are defective because we need to bring in a notion of rule as well: meaning is a matter of what people should say, given their beliefs, not what they do say. But this refinement would not help the mentalist meet Quine's attack.'

Quine rejects the distinction between verbal habit and non-linguistic belief (or 'collateral information', to use Quine's characteristic phrase). What we have, objectively, is just the observable verbal behaviour, and

dispositions to behave. The distinction between the two causal factors is illusory. This is what I call Quine's behaviourism.

Quine's behaviourism has been obscured from many readers by his

attempts to make it seem less controversial. Quine is prepared to consider attempts to analyse intuitive semantic concepts in behavioural terms. For example, suppose that someone dissents from the sentence 'Brutus killed Caesar'. From a common-sense point of view, there are two possible explanations: (i) historical ignorance, (ii) linguistic incompetence. Hoping to preserve some contact with common sense, Quine suggests that he too can distinguish two kinds of case, depending on how the speaker would assent to and dissent from other sentences.That is compatible with behaviourism. What the mentalist asserts, and the behaviourist denies, is that the distinction is a distinction between possible inner causes of verbal behaviour, not between possible patterns of verbal behaviour.

'A mentalist might reject these definitions on other grounds, too. For example, there is a currently fashionable view according to which such notions as analyticity and synonymy apply (if they make sense at all) in the first instance to beliefs (independent of public language): two sentences are synonymous, for example, if they express not the same belief, but 'synonymous' beliefs!

This curious view is commonly associated with the language of thought hypothesis, though perhaps not actually entailed by it.




Quine's doctrine might be better characterized as 'verbal behaviourism', since it has no place for any other behaviour than assenting to sentences (when stimulated). (This has striking consequences for Quine's account of translation, for example. Suppose we have a tentative translation manual equating native sentence S with 'It is going to rain'. We will be pleased to observe that assent to S correlates with umbrella-car- rying. But for Quine such non-verbal behaviour is objectively irrelevant.)

Behaviourism is sometimes said to be the thesis that semantic knowledge and worldly knowledge are mutually 'inextricable', that our linguistic dispositions are never 'pure'. Quine's view is that there is no distinction between semantic and worldly knowledge, not that they always go together. The weaker thesis might be enough to imply that there are no analytic sentences; but it would cast no doubt on the meaningfulness of 'analytic', or of 'synonymous', or on the claim that some pairs of terms are synonymous.

Now it certainly seems to follow from behaviourism that the mentalistic definitions of 'synonymous' and 'analytic' fail: they are based on a false presupposition. I can see no way of avoiding this conclusion.

As far as I can see, anyone who hopes to defend mentalistic semantics must attack Quine's case for behaviourism. I would not argue with Quine's demand that any acceptable linguistic or psychological con-

cepts must be in some way linked to behaviour. The further demand that they be linked exclusively to verbal behaviour, and that they be analysable as simple dispositions to verbal behaviour, however, is unrea- sonable. If the intuitive concept of belief is an integral part of a theory which explains non-linguistic behaviour,2 that should be enough. On such an analysis, belief would be available for use in the analysis of lin-

guistic meaning. There are, of course, grounds on which to question the explanatory

pretensions of mentalistic psychology, and Quine gives many of them. The issues here cannot be avoided, I think, by the defender of mentalistic semantics. But they will not be discussed in this paper. I will be discussing certain attempts to define the intuitive semantic concepts in non-mentalistic terms, and Quine's arguments, from holism, against them.

1.2 Mentalistic semantics had been out of favour among philosophers

2 This is meant to include the explanation of verbal behaviour under a description not presup- posing the concept of linguistic meaning: he made such-and-such noises because he believed that

making such-and-such noises would get him something he desired.




long before Quine. Its popular replacement was truth-conditional semantics. On this approach meaning is a relation between words and the world, rather than between words and thought. It sees truth as in general a product of two factors, language and the world; whereas mentalism sees linguistic behaviour as in general a product of two factors, language and thought. Truth-conditional semantics provides obvious parallels to the mentalistic definitions of synonymy and analyticity. Two sentences are synonymous (in the broad sense) if they have the same truth value in virtue of meanings alone and independently of fact. A sentence is analytic if it is true in virtue of meanings alone and independently of fact.

Quine's main objection to the classical truth-conditional definition of 'analytic' is very simple and, I think, very effective. What does 'independently of fact' mean? Is the truth of 'Everything is self-identical' dependent on the fact the everything is self-identical? Why not? The definition seems to be irremediably unclear.

I think Quine's argument is effective-against the classical truth- conditional definition of 'analytic'. It does not work against the mentalistic definition. The problem was to say why the fact that everything is self-identical is not a genuine fact, when the fact that Brutus killed Cae- sar is. You might be inclined to wonder, analogously, why the belief that everything is self-identical is not a genuine belief, when the belief that Brutus killed Caesar is. But there is a natural, non-circular criterion for the mentalist to appeal to: the role of the alleged belief in the explanation of non-linguistic behaviour. Folk psychology can tell us what would cause someone to believe that Brutus killed Caesar, and what effects the belief would have in various circumstances. But what causes the belief that everything is self-identical? What effects does it have? How would someone behave who did not believe that? If a man believed that his wife, say, was not self-identical, how would he behave towards her? (The man who thought his wife was a hat is not relevant: he never thought 'My wife =: my wife'.) It is not just that no one does think that anything is non-self-identical: no one does believe that there have never been black dogs, but psychology can tell us what kind of experience would produce that belief, and what kind of behaviour it would produce in various circumstances. A non-self-identical wife, however, is literally inconceivable; and the responsible contraceptive is the nature of psychological explanation. The point is that there is no non-linguistic behaviour, no matter how crazy, which would be explained as a product of the belief that something is non-self-identical; and hence no non-linguistic behaviour, no matter how sane, which




would be explained as a product of the belief that everything is self- identical.

Quine's argument against the truth-conditional definition is rather untypical of his central concerns. One sign of this is that the focus of the unclarity allegation is on 'fact' rather than 'meaning'. This is actually the way one would expect an argument against the ASD to go. If we are after a distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, it does not seem crucial to clarify the feature which they are supposed to have in common, namely that their truth value depends on the meanings of their component words. 'Brutus killed Caesar' would be false if 'killed' happened rather to have the sense of 'begat'; 'Everything is self-identical' would be false if 'everything' happened rather to have the sense of 'nothing'. The intended distinguishing point is that 'Brutus killed Cae- sar' would be false if the non-linguistic world had been different.

Quine's argument is in 'Carnap and Logical Truth' (Quine 1966a, p. 106). Although the definition at which it is aimed is prominent in 'Two Dogmas', Quine's treatment of it there is not very easy to follow. In ?1 Quine seems to be rejecting the definition on the grounds that there are no such entities as meanings (p. 22; see also paragraph 1 of ?4). But when he sums up the argument so far in the final paragraph of ?4, he still does not deny (indeed he says it is 'obvious') that 'language' is a factor, along with 'extralinguistic fact', in the truth of sentences: then is it still OK to define 'analytic' as 'true in virtue of language alone'? From here on the key point becomes holism-that the distinction between the two factors in the truth of sentences applies only collectively, not to individual sentences. The question of whether meanings are entities was a red herring, as Quine made clear later (e.g. 'Reply to Alston' Quine 1986a, p. 73).

Another puzzle is that Quine seems to think that the definition 'true in virtue of meanings alone' is somehow discredited by the failure of the other definitions discussed between ?1 and ?4 (e.g. 'reducible to a logical truth by putting synonyms for synonyms'). But I cannot tell why he might think this. The textual evidence that he does think it is (i) the last paragraph of ?4, and (ii) the second-last paragraph of ?5. In each place he says that on a certain natural assumption-namely, the falsity of holism-we could define 'analytic' in this way, and then: (i) 'But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn'; (ii) 'But I hope we are now impressed with how stubbornly the distinction between analytic and synthetic has resisted any straightforward drawing.' The 'but' certainly seems to suggest that the demonstrated difficulty of defining




'analytic' in the ways discussed counts against this definition too. (Gib- son sees Quine's point as an argument. He worries at great length (Gib- son 1988 p. 33-42) whether Quine can both argue from holism against the ASD (as he clearly does elsewhere) and use here a reductio argument for holism from the non-existence of the ASD. I think Quine's purpose is to explain how people could have come to believe in an ASD, and to criticize their reasoning, not to argue for holism. In any case, the argument here, if there were one, would be much worse than Gibson recog- nizes: Quine would be arguing 'If holism were false we could define 'analytic' as 'true by meanings alone'; but we have found it impossible to define 'analytic' in various other ways; therefore holism is true'.)

1.3 Other definitions of analyticity (and synonymy) are criticized by Quine also on the grounds of their unclearness. In each case he means that it is not apparent how it will lead us to the ultimate goal of a clarification in terms of behaviour; or, more strictly, in terms of verbal behaviour.

On the less strict meaning, I think this is a good objection. It seems certain that, in the long run at least, facts about linguistic meaning must turn out to be facts about language users. From Quine's point of view the truth-conditional approach to meaning improves on mentalism by leaving out the mind, but it goes wrong in leaving out verbal behaviour as well.

That the criterion of clarity is a link to verbal behaviour is made clear by Quine in Word and Object (Quine 1960, p. 207), responding to Grice and Strawson's criticism of'Two Dogmas'

Explicit references to behaviour in 'Two Dogmas' are few. At page 24 Quine says that synonymy needs to be clarified 'presumably in terms relating to linguistic behavior'. Similarly at page 36, except that the effect there is spoilt by the allowed alternatives: 'mental or behavioral or cultural'. Perhaps the summary at the end of ?4 points in the same direction. Quine says that the first dogma is 'unempirical' and 'metaphysical', which means, for a verificationist, that it has not been explained in terms of observables; and for linguistic or mental concepts the relevant observables are surely behavioural.

In 'Two Dogmas' the unclarity point was rather that an acceptable clarification must get out of the intentional circle. Grice and Strawson objected that some perfectly good concepts can only be explained in terms of each other. At one time Quine's inclination was to concede the point: 'In recent classical philosophy the usual gesture towards explain- ing "analytic" amounts to something like this: a statement is analytic if




it is true solely by meanings of words and independently of matters of fact. It can be objected, in a somewhat formalistic and unsympathetic spirit, that the boundary which this definition draws is vague or that the definiens is as much in need of clarification as the definiendum. This is an easy level of polemic in philosophy, and no serious philosophical effort is proof against it' ('Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory', Quine 1966c p. 136). By Word and Object he saw things more clearly: it is essential to get out of the intentional circle; and, moreover, to establish an explanatory connection to behaviour.

1.4 The ultimate fate of any intuitive semantic notion depends, for Quine, on whether it can be explained in purely behavioural terms. For analyticity, Quine thinks that the leading candidate for a behavioural account is social stimulus analyticity. (A sentence is socially stimulus analytic if it would be assented to by any speaker of the language, under any conditions of current stimulation.) But it gets the extension wrong: 'There have been black dogs' is socially stimulus analytic, but it is not analytic. Similarly social stimulus synonymy (social stimulus analyticity of the biconditional) is a poor approximation to sentence synonymy: 'Brutus killed Caesar' and 'Brutus killed Caesar and there have been black dogs' are socially stimulus synonymous, but not synonymous in even a broad intuitive sense. Analyticity and synonymy are no good because the closest behavioural approximation is in each case not close enough.

1.5 Quine's thesis is that there is no way to make sense of the ASD. An alternative interpretation has also become popular, mainly because of the influence of Harman (1967). On this alternative view, Quine's thesis is that all sentences are synthetic. (According to Harman, Quine's definition of 'analytic' is 'true in virtue of meanings alone': he holds that the truth value of every sentence is partly dependent on non-linguistic reality.)

Harman seems to be well aware that what Quine actually says sup- ports the orthodox interpretation. For the only defence he offers for his own interpretation is that it is not really an alternative interpretation: the theses respectively attributed to Quine ((i) 'analytic' and 'synthetic' are meaningless; (ii) all sentences are synthetic) do not really conflict! In support of this no-conflict claim, Harman argues as follows: 'If someone appears to hold that there are analytic truths, but also agrees with Quine's argument that meaning lacks the required explanatory power, ... then an empiricist like Quine will say that this person has




made his view meaningless ...'(p. 127). What is 'the required explanatory power'? Lack of it is apparently

supposed to make a view 'meaningless' for an 'empiricist' Harman is presumably referring to the verificationist principle that a sentence with no implications for experience is (if not analytic) meaningless. So he apparently reads Quine as arguing 'My opponent claims that some sentences are analytic; but he concedes, or should concede, that his claim has no implications for experience; therefore his claim is meaningless'.

This is a rather uncharitable interpretation of Quine-to see him as using against his opponent the (non-holistic) verification principle he explicitly rejects. But let us suppose that the interpretation is not too far from the truth. The question is, how does this support the no-conflict claim? Harman has Quine arguing that the claim 'Some sentences are analytic' is meaningless. That has not the slightest tendency to show that Quine also argues, or could consistently argue, that the claim 'All sentences are synthetic' is true.

1.6 In this section we have looked at a number of Quine's arguments against the ASD. They are all arguments that deserve to be taken seri- ously. But none of them has anything to do with holism.

2.

The empiricist theory of content says, in general terms, that the factual (or 'cognitive') content (or 'significance', or 'meaning') of a linguistic item of the relevant kind is determined by the experiences to which it is related in the relevant way. Quine embraces the empiricist theory on condition that the relevant kind of linguistic item is taken to be a whole theory (not a word or a sentence). This is Quine's holism.

As to the relevant relation to experience, there are two main options. (i) It may be held that in general sentences/theories are true in virtue of facts solely about experience. On this view two sentences/theories have the same content if any course of experience which would make the first true would make the second true, and vice versa; a sentence/theory has no content if its truth value is independent of experience; and so on. This is phenomenalism. (ii) It may be held that in general the content of a sentence/theory is determined by how different possible experiences relate to it evidentially. On this view two sentences/theories have the same content if any course of experience which would confirm/disconfirm the first would confirm/disconfirm the second, and vice versa; a




sentence/theory has no content if no possible course of experience would confirm/disconfirm it; and so on. This is verificationism.

My terminology here is largely stipulative. 'Phenomenalism' for instance, is often used for what Quine calls 'radical reductionism'-the thesis that every sentence is translatable into a sentence about experience. But we need some term for the weaker thesis (i).

We might wonder, also, whether 'verificationism' is historically justi- fied for (ii). Ayer's position in Language, Truth and Logic (Ayer 1936), for example, was considerably more subtle. Ayer thought that some kinds of confirmation did not count. For example, 'I have blood on my coat' might confirm the hypothesis 'I have committed a murder', but he did not want it to follow that it was 'part of the meaning' of that hypothesis. (p. 19) Similarly, observing that you were behaving as I do when in pain might confirm the hypothesis that you were in pain, on a 'metaphysical' (non-behaviourist) understanding, but that was not enough to show that the hypothesis would actually have any factual content, so understood. (p. 170) More generally, 'A previously reliable authority says that p' seems to confirm p, for any p, but we would not want it to follow that p has factual content, for any p. How to define the desired, more restrictive, concept of confirmation? If it had not been for certain considerations to do with holism, Ayer would have defined it simply as the converse of entailment. (pp. 51-2) The attempt to take account of the holistic considerations led to his famously disastrous formulation of the verification criterion: h has factual content iff there is a background proposition b such that, for some experiential proposition e, bAh entails e, and b alone does not entail e. Such subtleties were superseded, however, by Quine's more radical holism.

Verificationism, in our sense, is of course not the same as behaviourism. It could be combined, indeed, with a frankly mentalist view of

meaning, as follows: We have beliefs (and desires), which are about nothing but the future course of our own experience; our sentences express these beliefs, and hence can differ in content only if they would be confirmed or disconfirmed by different experiences.

I mention this point because Quine's verificationism eventually comes to take on a decidedly behaviourist tinge. As a reasonable behavioural approximation to the idea that a certain experience would confirm/disconfirm a sentence, he adopts the idea that a certain stimulus would prompt assent/dissent to/from the sentence; verificationism becomes the thesis that meaning is determined by stimulus meaning. By the time of 'Epistemology Naturalized', Quine finds himself offering in defence of 'the verification theory of meaning' considerations which




seem more relevant to the behaviourist part of the package: the lan-

guage learner has 'no data but the concomitances of... utterance and observable stimulus situation' (Quine 1969, p. 81).

Quine himself was a verificationist, not a phenomenalist. (See partic- ularly 'On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma', Quine 1981d, p. 39.) But in the central text for Quine's holism, ?5 of 'Two Dogmas', the argument does not rely on that choice. He moves back and forth between verificationism and phenomenalism. The verificationist path gives the section its title, and is favoured somewhat overall. But the particular example Quine gives of a holistic theory of empirical content, the Aufbau theory (from which Quine says his holism 'issues essentially'), is phenomenalist, not verificationist. And in the crucial last three paragraphs of ?5 experience figures more often as the 'factual component [in] the truth of statements' than as the confirmer/disconfirmer. We can see why Quine might have wanted to keep both alternatives in play. Verifica- tionism is generally felt to be much more plausible than phenomenalism, irrespective of whether the unit of significance is the sentence or the theory. On the other hand phenomenalism has a more obvious relevance to the definition of 'analytic' which Quine seems to have most squarely in his sights-'true in virtue of meanings and independently of fact'. The phenomenalism-verificationism question could best be left open, Quine apparently felt, for the purposes of 'Two Dogmas': holism was the crucial thing.

Now what is the connection supposed to be, in ?5, between holistic empiricism and analyticity? One possible interpretation sees Quine as rebutting what he takes to be an influential argument for the ASD (or for the adequacy of some particular definition of 'analytic'): because of holism, the argument's premiss is false. On another interpretation, Quine is offering an argument-a new argument, from holism- against the ASD (or against some particular definition of'analytic').

I think there is some truth in the first interpretation. (It is explicit in 'Mr Strawson' (Quine 1966c). Quine says that 'misgivings over the notion of analyticity are warranted also at a deeper level, where a sin- cere attempt has been made to guess the unspoken Weltanschauung from which the motivation and plausibility of a division of statements into analytic and synthetic arise. My guess is that that Weltanschauung is a more or less attenuated holdover of phenomenalistic reductionism' (p. 136). If Quine's diagnosis and rebuttal were correct, it would be of fairly limited significance: true views are often accepted for bad reasons. But in fact the diagnosis seems obviously wrong. Not many of those who accepted an ASD also accepted phenomenalism, or verification-




ism, or any version of the empiricist theory of content. And even among those who did, there is no reason to think that the two views were causally or rationally connected.)

But the second interpretation is the one we want. No one doubts that there is an argument from holism against the ASD in 'Two Dogmas', and it is obviously not before ?5. (In 'Mr Strawson' also, Quine implies that there is also an argument from holism against the ASD: the holistic empiricist 'may be expected to find no way of [defining 'analytic']'. (Quine 1966c p. 137)) So, leaving aside Quine's other aims, let us pursue the argument.

The argument seems to be that the target definition of'analytic' has a false presupposition: namely, that the unit of significance is the sentence. Given empiricism, we must take the unit of significance (i.e. 'empirical significance') to be the theory, not the sentence; and on holistic empiricism the target definition fails.

And what is the target definition? There are two target definitions. The first is 'true in virtue of meanings alone'; in arguing against this definition Quine uses the truth-conditional formulation of empiricism, the phenomenalist version-he takes his opponent to be a phenomenalist, and goes along with that for the duration of the argument. The second is 'vacuously confirmed, ipso facto, come what may'; in arguing against this definition Quine uses the verificationist formulation of empiricism. Let me consider the two versions of the argument separately.

3.

3.1 For the truth-conditional argument the main text is the second-last paragraph of ?5. Quine denies that 'the truth of a statement is somehow analysable into a linguistic component and a factual component', though he accepts that 'in general the truth of statements does obviously depend both upon language and upon extralinguistic fact'; and of course 'The factual component must, if we are empiricists, boil down to a range of confirmatory experiences'. He thinks it is 'nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement', though he accepts that 'Taken collectively, science has its double dependence on language and experience'. (The second formulation seems to get the intended contrast better: experience makes sentences true collectively rather than individually; it is not a matter of general versus particular.) And the target definition of'analytic' is 'the extreme case where the lin-




guistic component is all that matters'; this is evidently a trivial variation on 'true in virtue of meanings alone'

We may agree, I think, that holistic phenomenalism is preferable to non-holistic phenomenalism. Quine's argument does depend, though, on his opponent's acceptance of phenomenalism: it requires more than just the assumption that there are two separate components, linguistic and non-linguistic, in truth. If the factual component in the truth of sentences/theories were taken to be the external world, rather than experience, holism would not seem plausible. It would seem plausible to say that 'Brutus killed Caesar' was true, as an isolated sentence, in virtue of a single historical event. Quine's argument is that if you want to be a phenomenalist you should be a holistic phenomenalist, but the target definition only works if you are a non-holistic phenomenalist.

My objection is that the target definition does not fail on the holistic assumption. How do things work, on Quine's picture? We have the facts, the full facts of experience. We have a true theory; that is to say, a certain infinite set of sentences are true. If the facts of experience had been different (but the language the same), a different theory would have been true. If the facts had been different again, a third set of sentences would have been true. Consider all the possible ways experience might have gone-all possibilities regarding the full facts of experience. Keeping fixed the other component, 'language', consider the corresponding true theory, the corresponding set of true sentences, in each case. Now consider the sentences which are members of every true theory: they are true independently of experience. If the language were different, these sentences could be false; but they are true in virtue of the language only. There is no reason to doubt, on Quine's assumptions, that the target definition picks out a definite class of sentences, or that it captures the intentions of those who use the word 'analytic'.

If we assume that in general each sentence has its own truthmaker in experience-the bit of experience in virtue of which it is true-we can define 'analytic' as the special case of truth in virtue of meanings alone. And if we assume that true sentences are typically all made true by the same thing, the full actual course of experience, we can still define 'analytic' as truth in virtue of meanings alone. As we saw, there are other objections to defining 'analytic' in this way. And the whole idea of a distinction between language and experience as two factors in the truth of sentences/theories is rejected in Quine's later work. But as long as you accept that distinction, as Quine does in this part of 'Two Dogmas', holism makes no difference.




3.2 Let me illustrate the point with reference to the Aufbau. The part we are interested in is the 'construction' of the external world (Part IV, A and B). Carnap, beginning with a primitive relation of similarity-and- temporal-precedence between elementary experiences, has assembled enough defined terms to enable him to talk about the assignment of colours to points in the two-dimensional visual field, at various times. As a small-scale model of the external world, he takes the assignment of colours to points in four-dimensional space-time. He has the colours; the space-time points he construes as simply quadruples of real numbers. The next step is the crucial one.

He introduces two new predicates-'c [a colour] is atp[a space-time point]' and 'the observer's viewpoint is at p' And he gives a set of rules according to which the truth values of sentences in the new vocabulary are determined on the basis of the truth values of sentences in the old vocabulary. There are many such rules, but their overall effect, described in 'realistic' language, is that (i) truth values are to be assigned so that the actual visual experience matches as nearly as possible what the observer 'should' get when viewing the resultant world from the specified point of view; (ii) the resultant world is to be as stable (with respect to colour change over time, colour variation between 'seen' and 'unseen' points, motion of coloured points, etc.) as possible.

As Quine points out, Carnap was wrong to think that these rules amount to definitions. They do not provide translations of individual sentences. The model is phenomenalist, in our terminology, but not reductionist. To apply the rules one would take all possible theories of the external world (a theory = an assignment of truth value to each sentence in the new vocabulary) and give each a score on the basis of certain overall features-some purely internal, others concerning the theory's match with the actual visual experience. Then the highest- scoring theory is the true theory. The truth of the theory's individual sentences follows; but the true theory is arrived at first, not by assem- bling the sentences individually certified as true. This is the holism which Quine admires.

Despite its holism, however, the Aufbau model raises no difficulty for the definition of 'analytic' as 'true by meanings alone'. The model rests on an explicit distinction between the facts of experience and the linguistic rules. If there are sentences which turn out to be assigned the truth value 'true' by the highest-scoring theory however experience may go, these are analytic.

But are there any such sentences? Given the extreme artificiality of the model, I do not think it would discredit the definition of'analytic' if




it turned out that no sentences were analytic. But there is in any case no reason to think that the model has this consequence. Although Carnap says that his rules are, collectively, to be 'satisfied as far as possible', some of them seem to be absolutely necessary. For example several of the rules would be completely inapplicable for a theory which put the observer's viewpoint in two different places at the same time: such theories are apparently meant to be definitely excluded from the comparison. If so, 'not-(the observer's viewpoint is at (x,y,z,t) and the observer's viewpoint is at (x+i,y,z,t))' is analytic. Or consider the ordinary truth- functional tautologies. Although Carnap does not explicitly say so, he obviously intends that the linguistic rules should include the usual rules for the truth-functional connectives, so that all tautologies would appear in any theory selected as true.

Carnap's picture is holistic: the book of rules picks out the true physical theory, for the given facts of experience, as that which scores highest overall. But there is still a distinction between analytic truths, whose truth value is determined by the rule book alone, and synthetic ones, whose truth value depends also on experience. Although all synthetic sentences share the same truth-maker-the full facts of experience- not all sentences are synthetic.

4.

4.1 Now to the verificationist version of the argument. Quine accepts holistic verificationism: he combines verificationism with the thesis that the unit of confirmation is not the sentence but the theory. He says it is 'not significant' to speak of an isolated sentence being confirmed or disconfirmed; but we can speak of a theory being confirmed or disconfirmed.

Quine's focus is on the unit of confirmation. He does not attempt to analyse or criticize the notion of confirmation in any other respect. The argument apparently uses an intuitive notion of confirmation, applied to theories.

The thesis that the unit of confirmation is not the sentence but the theory, by itself, is 'confirmation holism'. It was promoted by Duhem, and accepted by the positivists (e.g. Carnap 1937, p. 318; Ayer 1936, p. 125f.). But Quine was the first to argue that confirmation holism makes impossible a verification principle applicable to individual sentences: he was the first 'holistic verificationist'.

Now the only place where a connection is explicitly made between verificationism and analyticity is the third-last paragraph. And all




Quine says here is that the dogma of non-holistic verificationism sup- ports the dogma of the ASD-not the other way round: 'as long as it is taken to be significant to speak of the confirmation and infirmation of a statement, it seems significant to speak also of a limiting kind of statement which is vacuously confirmed, ipso facto, come what may; and such a statement is analytic.' Is this the argument against the ASD that we are seeking-'If the unit of confirmation were the sentence, the definition 'analytic = vacuously confirmed' would be satisfactory; but the unit isn't the sentence; so the definition isn't satisfactory' ? No. I think Quine should be read as asserting a biconditional. For the converse of the above conditional not only provides a basis for such an argument, it is also pretty obviously true: for if it is not significant to speak of the confirmation of an isolated sentence, it is presumably not significant to speak of an isolated sentence as being confirmed by every possible experience; and a definition according to which it is not significant to call a sentence analytic is clearly no good.

Quine's other premiss, that the unit of confirmation is not the sentence, seems uncontroversial. (The argument requires only confirmation holism, not verificationism. Verificationism is only needed to make the argument interesting, by making the target definition look plausible.) So Quine seems to have a good argument against 'analytic =

vacuously confirmed'. However, (i) this definition of 'analytic' is so

utterly unmotivated, so obviously defective, even on the assumption of non-holistic verificationism, that the additional argument provided by holism is of little importance. And (ii) a rather obvious variant of the definition will, on Quine's assumptions, work adequately even under holism.

4.2 First (i): I know of no empiricist before Quine who even considered

defining 'analytic' on the basis of the Verification Principle. A typical formulation of the Principle was Ayer's: 'a statement is held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifia- ble'(Ayer 1936 p. 12). Similarly Hempel: 'a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion ... only if it is either (1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in principle, of experiential test' (Hempel 1950 p. 108). The ASD was taken as something already settled, and available for use in formulating the Verification Principle: not vice versa.

Certainly analytic sentences were supposed to have vacuous verification conditions. But this was also (and, in the positivist programme, more importantly) a feature of metaphysical nonsense. It was not supposed to follow that there was no difference. But the distinction had to




appeal to something other than verification conditions. (A verificationist believer in linguistic rules, for example, might have said that a sentence is meaningless, or not fully meaningful, if the rules of language do not always determine the truth value (or acceptability) of the sentence, given the facts of experience; whereas a sentence is analytic if the rules of language determine that it is true (or acceptable) whatever the facts of experience.)

Sloganistic formulations of verificationism often said simply 'meaning = verification conditions'. But all this meant was that, for fully meaningful sentences, verification conditions determined meaning: two meaningful sentences could not differ in meaning (they would be synonymous in the broad sense) if they had the same verification conditions.

(Much confusion was caused by a certain terminological difficulty the verificationists experienced. Since analytic sentences and nonsense were both incapable of experiential confirmation, they were certainly regarded as having something important in common: they both lacked ... what? Meaning? Then what is it that analytic sentences have and nonsense lacks? Wittgenstein said tautologies 'lacked sense', but were not 'nonsense'. Hempel distinguishes 'logical meaning' from 'empirical meaning'. Ayer tends to say that analytic sentences lack 'factual meaning' but have 'literal meaning'. No standard usage emerged. Perhaps this encouraged unsympathetic interpreters to think that confirmation conditions were supposed to exhaust 'meaning' in the broadest sense. (Quine, in 1986, attributed to his opponents a distinction between 'meaning' and 'content' ('Reply to Hellman', Quine 1986b, p. 207))).

4.3 Secondly (ii): Quine holds that the unit of empirical significance is the theory. But that does not mean that synonymy, for example, cannot be defined for sentences: it just means that synonymy for sentences cannot be defined by direct appeal to the verificationist principle. It may still be definable indirectly.

The point is the same as that which Quine makes when he emphasizes that taking the unit of empirical significance as the sentence rather than the term does not prevent us defining synonymy for terms indirectly: if we say that sentences are synonymous (in the broad sense- equivalent by meaning) iff they have the same confirmation conditions, we can say that terms are synonymous iff replacement of one by the other in a sentence (i.e. in any sentence of the relevant language) yields a synonymous sentence (Two Dogmas pp. 37-8). (In ?3 of'Two Dog- mas' Quine showed that interchangeability salva veritate is not an ade-




quate criterion of synonymy of terms-unless the language contains suitable non-extensional contexts, in particular the adverb 'necessarily' What is now being discussed is interchangeability which preserves meaning-within contexts large enough to have meaning, i.e. a meaning determined by verification conditions.) Quine's holistic position is that theories are synonymous (in the broad sense) iff they have the same confirmation conditions. Why can't we say, then, that sentences are synonymous iff replacement of one by the other in a theory (i.e. in any theory stated in the relevant language) yields a synonymous theory?

Analogy aside, there is reason to think that if the account of synonymy for theories is intuitively adequate, the replaceability criterion for sentence synonymy must be too. For, assuming the desired broad notions of synonymy, we can argue as follows. If two sentences are synonymous, replacement of one by the other in a theory must yield a synonymous theory. If two sentences are not synonymous, then there is a non-self-contradictory theory in which one is affirmed and the other denied; but replacement of one by the other in this theory would yield a self-contradictory, and hence non-synonymous, theory.

Given sentence synonymy, analyticity could be defined in the way Quine explains: as synonymy with some paradigmatically analytic sentence, e.g. 'Pigs are pigs'.

A verificationist who held that only sentences, and nothing smaller, had verification conditions should not infer that nothing smaller had meaning: on the contrary, Quine says, it would follow that terms did have semantic properties and relations such as synonymy. But, believ- ing that only theories, and nothing smaller, have verification conditions, Quine himself infers that nothing smaller can have meaning.3

4.4 My analogical argument against Quine rested on the premiss that terms are synonymous iff replacement of one by the other in a sentence yields a synonymous sentence ('Two Dogmas' pp. 37-8). This statement, and similar statements in Word and Object (Quine 1960) ?14 and elsewhere, are apparently retracted in ?22 of Pursuit of Truth (Quine 1990). Quine there advances an argument against any attempt to define synonymy of terms as interchangeability which preserves meaning (within suitably large contexts). But the argument is transparently bad.

Quine says that the interchangeability criterion cannot work unless the language contains suitable non-extensional contexts, in particular the special kind of de dicto belief-ascription which Quine calls 'de sensu.

3 It is sometimes debated whether Quine is a meaning holist or a meaning nihilist. The answer is that he is a nihilist about word and sentence meaning, deducing this from his meaning holism.




(Suppose that, unbeknown to Tom, 'Hesperus' means 'the Evening Star'; then 'Tom knows that Hesperus is the Evening Star' is true de sensu but false de voce.) A criterion of term synonymy which required interchangeability in de voce position would be too strict. But we can't confine our attention to de re positions, Quine argues: we must require interchangeability in de sensu positions. But how to distinguish de sensu from de voce without assuming synonymy?

Why can't the interchangeability test be confined to de re positions? Quine does not argue that we can't objectively distinguish de re from de dicto. His argument is: 'If interchanges of terms were allowed for only in de re use, we would end up defining sameness of meaning of terms as mere sameness of reference-a clear notion, but not what we are looking for'.

Quine is apparently forgetting that the criterion of term synonymy at issue requires that the interchanges preserve meaning, not just truth. (For example, he would accept, in Pursuit of Truth, that the observation sentence 'This is a unicorn' is a big enough linguistic item to have a meaning of its own, that the position occupied by 'unicorn' is de re, that 'goblin' is coextensive with 'unicorn', and yet that 'This is a goblin' is not synonymous.)

(Quine's argument was, I suspect, the product of panic induced by a realization that he had blundered in 'Use and its Place in Meaning'(Quine 1981)-see below.)

4.5 Grice and Strawson (1956) also argue that statement synonymy can be defined on the assumption of holistic verificationism. 'Quine does not deny', they say, 'that individual statements are regarded as confirmed or disconfirmed ... in the light of experience. He denies only that these relations between single statements and experience hold independently of our attitudes to other statements.' So we can say that two statements are synonymous iff 'any experiences which, on certain assumptions about the truth-values of other statements, confirm or disconfirm one of the pair, also, on the same assumptions, confirm or disconfirm the other to the same degree' (p. 156).

However, their argument seems to rest on a misinterpretation of Quine. I think Quine does deny that it makes sense to talk of the confirmation or disconfirmation of individual statements, even 'on certain assumptions about the truth-values of other statements'. Certainly he would deny that 'e confirms s' can be true, irrespective of whether its truth value is supposed to depend on the truth values of certain other statements.




(When Quine considers Grice and Strawson's proposal, in Word and Object, his interest is in seeing whether it suggests a definition of synonymy in behavioural terms which does better than social stimulus synonymy. He argues (correctly, I think) that it does not (p. 64). My own proposal is also not meant to address that challenge.4)

5.

5.1 1 have been discussing ?5 of'Two Dogmas' What about ?6? The section as a whole is ostensibly devoted to giving some positive characteri- sation of a view which, while rejecting the two dogmas, is still empiricist, and to drawing the consequences for ontological questions of rejecting the ASD. But the second paragraph seems to contain an argument, perhaps a new argument, against the ASD. 'If this view is correct', Quine says-i.e. the view summarised in paragraph i-'it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic ... and analytic statements ...'; and the following sentences appear to say why.

Let us begin by looking at the first paragraph. It sketches a distinc- tively Quinean version of verificationism. There are four main ele- ments:

(i) Deductive structure Our knowledge of the world ('so-called') is encompassed in a deductive system. We accept not only sentences, but also formal rules of inference according to which acceptance of a set of sentences may require us to accept certain other sentences-and according to which, therefore, rejection of a sentence may require rejection of (at least one member of) a certain set of sentences. (It is possible to accept the implying sentences and reject the implied sentences, but this constitutes rejection of the rule.)

Quine does not say 'rules of inference'. He says 'entails', truth values 'have to' be redistributed, we 'must' re-evaluate a sentence, and so on. But Quine's terminology tends to create a suspicion that he is implicitly acknowledging an ASD: doesn't 'p entails q' mean that 'Ifp then q' is

analytic? Doesn't 'have to' mean 'if you don't change meanings'? I hope to avoid this suggestion by putting the point in terms of 'rules of infer-

4 Gibson, incidentally, misinterprets the Grice and Strawson proposal. As they-and Quine- understand it, si and s2 are to be synonymous if, for any assumption about the truth values of other statements, s1 and s2 have the same confirmation conditions on that assumption. For Gibson (1988, p. 94), the proposal is for a relativised notion of synonymy: s, and s2 are to be synonymous on an assumption about the truth values of other statements if they have the same confirmation conditions on that assumption.




ence'. After all, even an uninterpreted deductive system has rules of inference. I sayformal rules to emphasize that the user does not have to know the 'meaning' of a sentence to apply the rule.

Quine tries to avoid the suggestion by saying that 'the logical laws [are] simply further statements of the system'. This can't be literally correct, as Lewis Carroll showed. I think Quine could be understood here in either of two ways. (i) Perhaps he is just ignoring for the sake of simplicity the system's actual rules (i.e. its primitive rules). These will normally be very few, perhaps just modus ponens. The vast bulk of allegedly analytic inferences will require as additional premisses certain allegedly analytic sentences, and these are what he is referring to as 'simply further statements of the system'. (For example, if MP is the sole rule, we can't infer p from 'p and q'; we need the further premiss 'Ifp and q then p'.) (ii) Perhaps he means that there is no need to distinguish rules and sentences because a rule of inference, just as much as a sentence, can be intuitively 'synthetic'. I think this is correct: as an alternative to accepting the sentence 'All ravens are black', you could include in your system a primitive rule of inference 'x is a raven F-x is black'.

Neither Quine's language nor mine is explicitly behavioural. As well as rules relating sentences to sentences, there are rules accord-

ing to which experience may require the rejection of a certain set of sentences; or, to put it the other way round, in virtue of which a set of sentences may have implications for experience. (The second formulation is intended to be equivalent to the first. I do not mean that Quine thinks that statements or beliefs about future experience can be inferred from other sentences of the system. Quine does indeed say in paragraph 4 that science is a 'tool ... for predicting experience'; and a 'prediction' is, in ordinary language, a statement or belief about the future. But in the light of Quine's overall view the use of this term is best seen as an aberration. No statements are 'about' experience. ('Two Dogmas' p. 43) And he would presumably not want to say that we have non-linguistic beliefs about future (or past) experience. Such a mentalist position may be compatible with the positive claims of paragraph 1, but does not seem to be required by them.)

There is no reason to assume that these rules must be 'analytic'either. For example my system might have a rule linking 'This is John' with particular visual experiences: getting recalcitrant experiences would require abandonment of 'This is John', or abandonment of the rule. But if I did abandon the rule I might have no inclination to describe the revision as a change in 'the meaning of "John"': it might just be a revision in my 'beliefs about what John looks like'.




In ?6 Quine seems to use the phrase 'empirical content' to mean what a sentence or set of sentences implies about experience, directly or indirectly, in virtue of such rules.

(ii) Holism A single isolated sentence typically implies nothing about experience. A sufficiently large set of sentences may have implications for experience (perhaps indirectly, via the implication of certain other sentences); that is to say, the occurrence of the recalcitrant experience will require rejection of at least one member of the set; but not of any particular member -there will be a choice. (There will also be the option of rejecting the relevant rules.) If we identify the factual content of a sentence or theory with its implications for experience, this amounts to a holism of content-sentences typically don't have factual content in isolation.

This is not the same as the holistic verificationism of ?5, which apparently rested on an intuitive conception of confirmation. Con- firmation is, intuitively, a matter of meaning. If we assume an ASD, we can reconstruct an intuitive concept of confirmation as follows: e dis- confirms k (a set of sentences) iff the conjunction of k with all the analytic sentences of the language implies (via such of the rules as are analytic, if not all are) the non-occurrence of e.

I don't think Quine really intends to say that only a whole theory can have empirical content. It is hard to see how a deductively structured system could possibly have rules on which nothing short of a whole theory had experiential implications and yet a theory did.

Then what of all the passages in which Quine insists that science is, in principle at least, linked to experience 'as a whole', since 'the logical truths at least ... are germane to all topics and thus provide connections' (Quine 1960, pp. 12-13)? Quine's point, I think, is that when experience requires that some member of a (limited) set of sentences be revised, the decision which member to revise will rationally depend on considerations affecting the whole system-what else will have to be revised, how it will affect overall simplicity, and so forth. There are two aggregates, of different sizes, which are relevant to holism: (i) the smallest aggregate which has implications for experience; (ii) the smallest aggregate which 'will embody all the connections that are likely to affect our adjudication of a given sentence'. It is the second which, at least in principle, equals the whole theory.

(The degree of holism in Quine's picture is thus pretty modest in comparison with the Aufbau. There, nothing short of a complete assignment of colours to spatial points at a given time can be relied on




to have implications for experience, in any sense. The Aufbau example also highlights the difference between holism and deductive structure. Despite its extreme holism, there is no significant deductive structure in an Aufbau theory.)

Quine's position allows, I think, that even a single sentence could have empirical content-a sufficiently long conjunction. In later work Quine also says that an observation sentence has an empirical content of its own, but 'Two Dogmas' shows no signs of awareness of a need to weaken the doctrine of holism on this account.

(iii) Universal revisability For any accepted sentence or rule, there are experiential circumstances in which its abandonment would be rational.

This claim is often seen as an immediate consequence of Quine's holism. I don't know why. Holism implies that there is always a choice what to revise, but that does not imply that anything can be revised.

Quine seems to think there is a connection. But the only hint as to his reason is the final alternative in this sentence from paragraph 2: 'Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws'. This is hard to fathom. If I want to maintain 'There are no centaurs', for example, in the face of recalcitrant experience, how could amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws help?

In 'Reply to Vuillemin' Quine explicitly describes the 'doctrine that every sentence is vulnerable' as 'holistic'. The only hint of a reason for the description comes when he continues, 'Even a truth of logic or mathematics could be abandoned in order to hold fast some casual statement of ephemeral fact'; he gives intuitionist logic and quantum logic as actual examples. But how could a switch to intuitionist/quantum logic enable us to hold fast some casual statement of ephemeral fact? And surely this was not actually the motive of its proponents, in either case!

(iv) Peripheral vs central Sentences differ in how likely they are to be abandoned in the event of recalcitrant experience. More precisely, a sentence is peripheral to the extent that, for some possible (not necessarily likely) experience, it would probably be abandoned if that experience occurred.

Claims (i)-(iii) are about rules or norms, of formal deduction or of rationality, and what they permit or prohibit. (iv) is about the relative




likelihood, in practice, of various moves allowed by the rules.

5.2 Our system of knowledge, as described in (i)-(iv), is said by Quine to be analogous to a fabric, to a field of force, and to a network.

The first two analogies are obviously weak. What would the threads of the fabric be? Statements? But every thread in a fabric is, typically, directly accessible at the periphery. A typical thread touches every thread running at right angles, plus its two neighbours; does this represent any interesting relation among statements? What is the periphery of a force field? What in the field do the statements of the theory corre- spond to?

The most popular analogy has been the net. The nodes are presumably supposed to be our theory's statements. Presumably they are connected by paths representing relations of formal deducibility (according to the system's primitive rule/s). So a typical path will be from two points to a third. That's one path, not two separate paths. Can we understand that? Maybe we need something like nerve cells, each with several input lines and one output line, rather than paths. Now the statements at the periphery are those which imply something about experience. What is distance from the periphery? A connection consist- ing of many steps? No, 'There are centaurs or there are no centaurs' is supposed to be at the centre, though it will be deducible pretty directly from 'There are no centaurs', at the periphery. We'd better mean distance by 'distance': we can push nodes around, stretching connections where necessary, to get all the nodes where we want them. (For more details on the relation of the net to experience, Quine refers us, in Word and Object, to Hempel. But Hempel's net floats parallel to the ground (experience): we can ascend from experience to theory, and descend at a different point, via strings ('rules of interpretation') linking certain points in the net to the ground.) What is recalcitrant experience? What is a revision of the theory? What feature of a net corresponds to the possibility of alternative adjustments to experience? It is hard to believe that the wide appeal of the analogy comes from its being a genuine aid to understanding. Could it perhaps be functioning as a substitute for understanding?

5.3 Claims (i)-(iv) all seem to be fairly plausible, given a fundamentally verificationist orientation. A defender of the ASD would want to note that the changes referred to in (iii) might constitute changes in meanings, but he would not deny that language can change, does change, and should change in response to empirical discoveries.




Now how, according to paragraph 2, does this view give grounds for rejecting the ASD? We may concede that nothing in (i)-(iv) entails that there is an ASD; but does it entail that there is not? What Quine says is: 'it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may ... Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune from revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed ... and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy ...?'

There seem to be two separate arguments. (i) Any sentence, even an allegedly synthetic sentence, can be held true come what may, and hence holds true come what may, and hence is analytic according to the target definition ('analytic = true in virtue of meanings alone').

The premiss is true: because of holism-or, separately, because of universal revisability-any synthetic sentence can be held true come what may. But the argument is obviously invalid. If 'holds true come what may' is to have any relevance at all to the premiss, it must be understood in terms of what people hold true, hence, presumably, as 'must be held true'. But 'can' does not imply 'must'. (This is true whether Quine's 'can' and 'must' mean according to the system's rules of inference, or according to standards of rationality-or even, although this couldn't be what Quine means, according to rules of meaning.) (ii) Any sentence, even an allegedly analytic sentence, can be revised, and hence is synthetic according to the target definition.

Again the premiss is true-not because of holism, but because of universal revisability. But this argument is also obviously invalid. There is no inconsistency in maintaining (as Carnap, and just about everyone else, did) that a sentence true in virtue of meanings alone can be revised.5 If Quine had meant 'can be revised without changing meanings' the argument would be valid. But of course that can't be what Quine meant, since he thinks it senseless to talk about 'changing mean-

5 The point was made by Grice and Strawson. Gibson (1988 p. 95) has offered an ingenious reply on Quine's behalf. He points out that Grice and Strawson admit that if you accept both the ASD and universal revisability you must accept a distinction between sentence revisions which change meanings and ones which don't. 'Then, says Gibson, 'why all this hocus pocus?' His point, he explains, is that accepting a distinction between sentence revisions which change meanings and ones which don't is tantamount to accepting the ASD. So if you accept both the ASD and universal revisability, you have thereby, in effect, accepted the ASD. Cop that, Grice and Strawson!




ings'; and in any case the premiss is completely without support if so understood.

There is also the rhetorical question at the end. Quine means that there is no difference in principle between the revisions of theory which allegedly involve a change in meanings and the ones which don't. If he could establish this, it would be very relevant: it would undermine the ASD. But saying 'What difference is there?' does nothing to show that there is no difference.

6.

6.1 Yet there remains a stubborn feeling that something interesting and important is being said against the ASD in ?6. What is it?

The hidden argument concerns, I think, the importance of the ASD. Quine's target is certain definitions of 'analytic'. He is not really concerned to criticize our intuitive, non-philosophical talk of synonymy or truth by meaning, or to deny that it can be explained, or clarified, or tidied up. The notion of distance from the periphery is offered, indeed, as an account of this intuitive use. It is actually in Quine's interest to be able to give such an account, because it provides an answer to the objection 'If there is no ASD, why do we think there is one?' The answer is, 'Because you are misperceiving the real difference among sentences in distance from the periphery'. If someone proposed to define 'analytic' as, say, 'maximally distant from the periphery', Quine's main response would not be that the definition was unclear, or that it had a false presupposition, or that it did not capture the intuitive use of the term, but that it made it turn out that everything philosophers had said about analyticity was false or trivial. (Perhaps Quine would object that distance from the periphery is 'only a distinction of degree'-meaning that there is no extreme position, no sentences have zero likelihood of being revised in response to recalcitrant experience. Would this be consistent with holding that some sentences are socially stimulus analytic?) The definitions of 'analytic' which Quine is concerned to attack are those which make analyticity seem philosophically important.

The hidden argument is, I think, a general argument for the conclusion that there cannot be an epistemologically important ASD.

Epistemology is about the rationality of theory construction and adjustment. Quine's premiss is that a theory is 'a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience'. He infers that the rational way to revise a theory in response to recalcitrant experience is pragmatically-do whatever yields a theory which makes many




experiential predictions, makes true experiential predictions, which is simple, clear, etc., etc. Now suppose that there are 'rules of meaning', so that there is a distinction between theory revisions which change meanings and theory revisions which do not. How is this supposed distinction relevant? Consider for example the question whether we should accept such sentences as 'Numbers exist', 'o 0 1' and so on. 'We should', says Quine's empiricist opponent (Carnap, say), 'because (i) they are analytic-acceptance of such sentences is required by certain rules of meaning; furthermore (ii) these are good rules-acceptance of the sentences in question enables us to have a system which is empirically adequate, simple, and so on'. To which Quine responds, 'The last part of this is by itself a full answer to the original question: we should accept the sentences in question because that is a rational way to achieve the purpose of our system. The detour via rules of meaning contributes nothing. The right way to make the revisions which you regard as changing meanings is, we agree, pragmatically. But also the right way to make revisions which you do not regard as changing meanings is- pragmatically. The supposed distinction between revisions which change meanings and revisions which do not is of no importance'.6

The premiss, about what theories are 'for', would not appeal to non- empiricists. A realist, for example, might want to ask whether acceptance of sentences about numbers achieves the rational theoretical purpose of correctly representing a reality independent of our experience. But even an empiricist might object that the argument completely ignores the function of language in communication. In Quine's picture each of us is constantly adjusting an inherited verbal structure to fit his own continuing experience. Quine's 'rationality' relates to this essentially private pursuit.7 Imagine, then, a theorist who decides to simply interchange two predicates throughout his theory, say 'buttermilk' and 'arsenic' (Hempel). This will not affect the theory's predictions of experience, or its overall simplicity. On Quine's assumptions, there is nothing against it. But in reality there is something against it (even from an empiricist viewpoint), because the language of science is also a tool for

6 Churchland gives a version of this argument (1979, pp. 49-51), and it seems clear that he thinks the essence of it is in 'Two Dogmas'. Churchland's version is actually spoilt by an unnecessary overstatement. He imagines two theorists who accept all the same sentences but differ in which ones they call analytic, and argues that they do not differ in which sentences they should abandon in response to the same recalcitrant experience. But he adds, unnecessarily, that one theorist calls all his non-observation sentences analytic. This implies that the 'analytic' sentences collectively imply observation sentences. Clearly this theorist is using 'analytic' in a way no defender of the notion would condone.

7 Dummett describes Quine's view-in 'Two Dogmas', not in Word and Object-as 'solipsis- tic'




communication. As well as rules of inference and general principles of rationality, there seems to be a place for 'rules of meaning', rules requiring us to accept certain inferences and/or sentences, and to not abandon them without special public notice. The pragmatic value of such rules would be that a hearer could get useful information about the empirical content of a speaker's theory from a single remark ('Butter- milk is bad for Baby'), because a shared background could be relied on. Prima facie, the existence of rules of meaning seems to be explicable as a rational response to the need for an effective tool of communication. It could, perhaps, be replied that the obvious irrationality of the linguistic behaviour described above can be explained by general principles of rationality, once we admit that language is a tool for communication, even in the absence of any separate rules of meaning; or that these alleged rules cannot be explained in behavioural terms; or etc. But it hardly seems reasonable to just ignore the use of language in communication.

Quine might reply that his argument was only intended to show the unimportance of analyticity for epistemology, not for the theory of language in general. If the argument is correct, 'The notion of analyticity then just subsides into the humbler domain where its supporting intuitions hold sway: the domain of language learning and empirical semantics'. ('Reply to Hellman', Quine 1986b p. 208)

On that understanding the argument seems to me to be as good as its empiricist premiss. But the question is, now, is it an argument from holism? Apparently not. A non-holistic system would have rules linking each of its sentences, directly or indirectly, with certain experiences, so that occurrence of those experiences would require abandonment of the sentence. These rules would be rationally revisable in pursuit of a system which was simpler, clearer, and empirically adequate. If, in the interests of easy communication, it proved useful to classify some of these rules as 'rules of meaning', that would still be irrelevant to the merits of revising a rule in pursuit of the aims designated by Quine as epistemologically relevant-just as in the holistic case.

So we still do not have a good Quinean argument from holism against the ASD (even in the present weak sense of 'against').

6.2 As I mentioned, Quine wishes to explain away our intuitive belief in an ASD. The 'Two Dogmas' explanation, in terms of a misperceiving of 'distance from the periphery', seems to be a rather poor one. Intuition says that 'There have been black dogs' is not analytic, despite its low likelihood of being revised.8




Quine and others have offered other explanations of our intuitions of synonymy and analyticity (explanations which do not imply that the notions are philosophically important). One favourite is that we intuitively judge a sentence to be analytic if the utility in communication of one of its words depends on general acceptance of the sentence. Why do we feel that 'Bachelors are unmarried', for example, is analytic? 'One looks to "unmarried man" as semantically anchoring "bachelor" because there is no socially constant stimulus meaning to govern the use of the word; sever its tie with "unmarried man" and you leave it no very evident social determination, hence no utility in communication' (Quine 1960, p. 56). Quine presumably thinks that this explanation can be cashed out in behavioural terms, but he does not suggest how. In any case, the explanation seems to be simply false. Even if 'married' and 'unmarried' were banished from the language, the meaning and utility of 'bachelor' need not be affected. Perhaps we could do better if we said that a sentence is intuitively analytic if the utility in communication depends on its not being denied. But not much better: whatever the purposes of communication are supposed to be, in terms of which 'utility' is measured, I will presumably have difficulty achieving them with 'black' 'dog' etc. if I deny 'There have been black dogs'.

Another explanation Quine offers is that we intuitively judge a sentence analytic if everybody 'learns that it is true by learning its words' (Quine 1973, ?21). This is a real puzzler, since the essence of Quine's behaviourism is that there is no distinction between learning that a sentence is true and learning its words. '[The trouble is] that we have made no general experimental sense of a distinction between what goes into a native's learning to apply an expression and what goes into his learning supplementary matters about the objects concerned.' (Quine 1960, p. 38) For a behaviourist, the present deflationary account of 'analytic' can amount to nothing more than saying that every competent speaker has learnt, somehow, to assent to the sentence. And yet Quine says that we have here a closer approximation to the intuitive notion than social stimulus analyticity.

6.3 I said that the definitions of'analytic' which Quine is concerned to attack are those which make analyticity seem philosophically important. Quine came to consciously see matters this way much later:

8 However, I cannot endorse Churchland's criticism (p. 59) of Quine's explanation. He says that 'Bachelors are unmarried' comes out as not intuitively analytic on Quine's account. But this is because he wrongly interprets Quine as saying that a sentence is relatively central if its abandonment would require manyfurther revisions of the theory.




'Moreover I now perceive that the philosophically important question about analyticity ... is not how to explicate [it]; it is the question rather of [its] relevance to epistemology'. ('Reply to Hellman' Quine 1986b, p. 207) But I am suggesting that the idea may have been subtly at work

already in 'Two Dogmas'. The argument in 'Reply to Hellman' is that, given holism, there is no

need to explicate analyticity, because the main philosophical question which was supposed to be answered by appeal to the ASD no longer arises. The question, according to Quine, was how to 'account for the

meaningfulness of logical and mathematical truths, which are clearly devoid of empirical content'.

Quine's historical reconstruction seems to be pretty wonky. How could the analyticity of mathematical truths ever have been supposed to explain their having meaning but no content? Analyticity just is hav-

ing meaning but no content. The orthodox view, which I see no reason to doubt, is that the main issue to which analyticity was relevant was the traditional dispute between rationalists and empiricists. The empiricist says that there is no a priori knowledge of the world; the rationalist

objects 'What about mathematics?'; to which the empiricist replies that mathematical knowledge is not knowledge of the world, i.e. mathematical truths are analytic. I can't see that holism makes that dispute go away. I know of nothing Quine has said which even seems relevant to the question of the respective claims of reason and experience as sources of knowledge. In fact Quine is so little aware of the strand in the

empiricist tradition which emphasizes the importance of experience as a source of knowledge that he can imagine that the relevant alternative to experience is not reason but extrasensory perception! (E.g. Quine 199o pp. 19-21) Quine's 'empiricism' is wholly concerned with the empiricist theory of content (verificationism, phenomenalism etc.), not the empiricist theory of justification ('no a priori knowledge of the world').9 (Quine does mention, in 'Epistemology Naturalized', the thesis that all truths about the world can be deduced, with certainty, from known truths about experience; but this is not the same thing at all-or, for that matter, an authentic part of the empiricist tradition. Quine's 'natu-

ralism', also, is sometimes seen as a restatement of the traditional

empiricist doctrine that there is no a priori knowledge. But wrongly: Quine says that it is futile to try to evaluate scientific methods of arriv-

ing at knowledge (futile because the attempt would presuppose some

9 For a seminal presentation of the distinction, see Stace (1944 ?11); endorsed by Hempel (1950 n.i).




firmer place to stand); this does not imply that reasoning is not among those scientific methods.)

7.

7.1 Quine's holism is a thesis about the unit of empirical content. We have so far looked at three conceptions of empirical content used by Quine in 'Two Dogmas', based respectively on truth-in-virtue-of, on an intuitive notion of confirmation, and on a relation of formal implication according to the rules of a deductive system. In his later work a somewhat different conception becomes prominent, and hence a somewhat different version of holism. Let us consider now what appears to be a new argument against intuitive semantics, depending on this mature version of holism.

An observation sentence is defined, behaviourally, as one for which assent or dissent is always prompted by current stimulation, in the same way for every speaker. In his later work Quine tends to regard the observation sentence as the fundamental possessor of empirical content. Its empirical content is defined as its stimulus meaning. The empirical content of a sentence or theory in general is defined as the observation sentences it implies, according to the formal rules of the system. (The theory of empirical content in 'Two Dogmas' ?6 is thus modified by splitting the connection between theory and experience into two parts, one described in terms of formal implication, the other in behavioural terms.)

Holism is now the thesis that most isolated sentences have no empirical content. The observation sentence is the exception-it 'has an empirical content all its own and wears it on its sleeve'. If all sentences were observation sentences, holism would not apply. What makes holism true (in a particular language) is that not all sentences are observation sentences.

Now the argument Quine uses against one candidate definition of synonymy depends, he thinks, on the fact that not all sentences are observation sentences. As we saw, Quine argues that social stimulus synonymy is not a good approximation to the intuitive notion of synonymy. For example 'Brutus killed Caesar' is socially stimulus synonymous with 'Brutus killed Caesar and there have been black dogs', but they are not synonymous. But he thinks that social stimulus synonymy is a good approximation to synonymy for observation sentences, indeed for occasion sentences generally. 'When the sentences are occasion sentences, the envisaged notion of synonymy is pretty well realized




in intrasubjective stimulus synonymy, especially as socialized.' (Quine 1960, p. 62) But if that is so, then if all sentences were observation sentences, and there were no sentences like 'Brutus killed Caesar' and so on, the objection to social stimulus synonymy would go away. So

apparently we have here an argument against a suggested definition of an intuitive semantic notion which actually depends on the truth of holism.

However, holism is still not a premiss of the argument: all the argument needs is an example of a pair of sentences which are socially stimulus synonymous but not synonymous, not a general principle which

implies that there are such examples. And, more important, Quine is wrong to think that social stimulus

synonymy is a good approximation to synonymy for observation sentences. 'Here is a rabbit', for example, is socially stimulus synonymous with 'Here is a rabbit and there have been black dogs', but they are not

synonymous. The inadequacy of social stimulus synonymy does not

apply only to standing sentences: holism, once again, makes no difference.

(Similar considerations seem to refute Quine's claim that indetermi-

nacy of translation does not apply to observation sentences. Let us define the word 'quabbit' as follows: x is a quabbit iff (i) x is a rabbit, and (ii) there have been black dogs. ('Define'? We are provisionally adopting the standpoint of intuitive semantics, for purposes of reductio ad absurdum.) Consider a manual of translation which differs from the

homophonic only in translating John's 'rabbit' as 'quabbit'. It seems clear that no plausible behavioural concept of correct translation (no plausible set of 'constraints') could prefer the homophonic scheme to this alternative. Yet there is, by intuitive standards, a fact of the matter as to whether John really means 'quabbit' when he says 'rabbit'-even in the observation sentence 'This is a rabbit'.)

Quine argues that in this case the mentalist should be satisfied with social stimulus synonymy: 'For we can argue [qua mentalists] that only verbal habit can plausibly account for concomitant variation of two occasion sentences, in point of assent and dissent, over the whole

gamut of possible stimulations. There is still the unscreened effects of

community-wide collateral information, but there is no evident reason not to count such information simply as a determinant of the verbal habit' Well, that's all very well for Quine to say: he thinks there is no difference between the hypothesis that a concomitance of assent conditions is due to current verbal habit, and the hypothesis that it is due to current community-wide collateral information. But the essence of our




intuitive mentalism-its essential error, according to Quine-is to dis-

tinguish collateral information, even community-wide, from verbal habit, as factors in current linguistic behaviour. That is why we don't count 'There have been black dogs' as analytic. Why should Quine expect the mentalist to suddenly give up the distinction, just for occasion sentences?

(Quine's identification of cognitive synonymy with social stimulus synonymy, for occasion sentences, is repeated in 'Use and its Place in Meaning', with a remarkable addition. He claims there that a word is cognitively synonymous with a word or phrase if replacement of the one by the other in any occasion sentence yields a synonymous sentence. This claim is intuitively plausible. But, as Quine points out, it implies, if synonymy of occasion sentences is definable, that the general notion of cognitive synonymy for terms is definable-contrary to 'Two Dog- mas'!)

7.2 In the foregoing account of the observation sentence I omitted a detail which, while not relevant to the main argument, is of some independent interest. More precisely, Quine's concept is 'observation sentence modulo n seconds', meaning that every speaker will give the same verdict when given a stimulus of length n seconds. A sentence may be an observation sentence modulo n seconds and not be an observation sentence modulo n-1 seconds. The empirical content of a sentence or theory, in general, consists in the implied observation sentences modulo n seconds, for a suitable n.

Now if two theories differ in factual content, there is an observation sentence modulo n seconds implied by one theory that is not implied by the other, and hence a stimulus of length n seconds which would disconfirm one theory but not the other. Quine's theory of content therefore has the following consequence: any factual disagreement can be settled in n seconds. This would be a very interesting thesis, if only Quine had told us the value of n.

Also I described the Word and Object theory. It underwent later changes, most notably concerning the notions of the stimulus and the observation categorical.

In Word and Object a visual stimulus was a pattern of ocular irradia- tion. Quine's settled view, from 1965 on, is that a stimulus is a pattern of firing of sensory receptors-a very different thing. The definition of 'observation sentence' in terms of uniformity of stimulus meaning across speakers then seems to presuppose that different speakers have similar receptors. Quine came to think the assumption extravagant. In




'Empirical Content' he adopted an ill-considered alternative definition: an occasion sentence is observational for a speaker if its stimulus meaning for that speaker is uniform over time. In Pursuit of Truth (Quine 1990 ?16) uniformity across speakers returns to centre stage, but not uniformity of stimulus: all must assent on 'witnessing the occasion'. But judgements of similarity of 'occasion' are not objective; they are exer- cises rather of 'empathy'. It appears to follow that the concept of observation sentence no longer has any place in a properly objective science of verbal behaviour-though Quine does not explicitly draw this conclusion. Perhaps Quine would have done better to stick with the Word and Object conception of stimulus, for the purpose of defining 'observation sentence'.

Quine eventually came to see the empirical content of a sentence or theory as residing in the observation categoricals it implies. An observation categorical is a sentence like 'Where there is smoke there is fire'; it is compounded out of two observation sentences-here 'Here is smoke' and 'Here is fire'-but is itself an eternal sentence. The prime reason for the modification was 'Problem 1: observation sentences are occasion sentences, whereas theory is formulated in eternal sentences, true or false once for all. What logical connection can there be between the two?' ('Empirical Content', Quine 1981a p. 26)

The modification is, however, ineffective and unnecessary. The observation categoricals do imply observation sentences. For example 'Where there is smoke there is fire' implies the observation sentence 'Here is smoke -- here is fire'. And any experience which would disconfirm an observation categorical (in this example, an experience of smoke without fire) would do so by disconfirming the implied observation sentence.

7.3 There are passages in which Quine considers the criticism (as he

evidently takes it to be) that the acknowledgment of observation sentences represents ('strictly speaking, 'in principle', 'legalistically') a substantive weakening of the holism of 'Two Dogmas'. (E.g. 'On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World' Quine 1975, p. 314; 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' Quine 1981c, p. 51; 'Reply to Vuillemin'

Quine 1986c, p. 620.) But his treatment of the point is quite opaque. In 'Reply to Vuillemin' for example, he argues that the 'extreme holist'can accept that observation sentences have their own empirical content, because 'even an observation sentence can sometimes be disavowed to save a theory'. But how is this supposed to be relevant? If an extreme holist is one who holds that no sentence has an empirical content of its




own, Quine's point will not help him much, once he has admitted that an observation sentence has an empirical content of its own. Also Quine's point seems to be false: by definition, an observation sentence cannot be denied, given a current stimulus which would prompt anyone to assent to it. The latter difficulty is actually raised by Quine himself: 'Witnesses must agree in their verdict on an observation sentence at the time'. He says, apparently by way of response, that 'the standing sentence that records the observation is a theoretical sentence and can be re-evaluated afterward'. But this seems to be irrelevant also.

I think Quine's contortions were quite unnecessary. The correct way to reconcile the extreme holism of 'Two Dogmas' with the new theory of content is simply to point out that the observation sentence is an ide- alisation. In real languages, like English, no sentence has an empirical content all its own because there are no observation sentences. Even such a favourable case as 'This is red' is only approximately observational. (Feeling a familiar object in the dark, I agree that it is red; but the same stimulus would not prompt assent in all competent speakers.) Exam- ples like 'Here is a rabbit' and 'Here is smoke' need to be taken with an even bigger grain of salt.

8.

8.1 Quine says the unit of meaning is the theory. He infers (wrongly, I think) that terms and sentences generally lack meaning of their own. According to an alternative interpretation, due mainly to Harman (1967), Quine does think that terms and sentences have meaning. His holism consists in thinking that their meaning is determined by the theory in which they occur. Which theory? Harman says it is the speaker's total theory-all the sentences he accepts.

Harman deduces this position from Quine's account of translation in Word and Object. Quine says, according to Harman, that a correct translation manual between the language of A and the language of B must translate every sentence accepted by A into a sentence accepted by B. Harman's Quine concludes that what A means depends on all the sentences he accepts.

I earlier criticized Harman's interpretation of Quine's rejection of the ASD. The interpretation of Quine's holism as a doctrine of theory- dependent word or sentence meaning also has little to recommend it.

First let me get out of the way one comparatively minor respect in which Harman's reasoning is not faithful to the actual Quine. Quine does not hold that a correct translation must translate every sentence




accepted by A into a sentence accepted by B. The translation of an observation sentence accepted by A need not be actually accepted by B, if their actual current stimulation differs. And a stimulus analytic sentence for A must be translated into a stimulus analytic sentence for B- i.e. one that not only is accepted but would be accepted if his current

stimulation were different. A more accurate summary would be that a correct translation manual is one such that, for any condition C on current stimulation, if a sentence is assented to by A under condition C, its translation must be assented to by B under condition C. (Quine does not explicitly give all the constraints on translation which are implied by this formula. For example, he does not explicitly require that if a sentence has a non-empty positive stimulus meaning and an empty negative stimulus meaning (e.g. 'There are centaurs'), its translation must have the same. But this is probably not an intentional omission.)

But presumably Harman would not really wish to deny, on Quine's behalf, the relation between assent and current stimulation. Most adherents of the view that the meanings of words are determined by a theory seem to focus on 'theoretical' terms; they assume an independently-understood 'observational' vocabulary. The most charitable interpretation of Harman, I think, is to see him, somewhat similarly, as taking for granted a Quinean story about the meaning of observation sentences. The interesting question is how theoretical sentences get their meaning; and Quine's alleged answer is, holistically-it depends on everything we accept (including which observation sentences we accept). On this charitable interpretation, how accurate is Harman's representation of Quine?

In its favour, it at least attributes to Quine a behavioural account of meaning (via his behavioural account of translation). Harman has certainly got right the point of first importance to Quine, that if there is an acceptable definition of meaning, it is behavioural. It is true, also, that Quine does use his account of translation to give definitions of some concepts from intuitive semantics (e.g. observation sentence). And there are times when it is not very clear whether Quine is giving a behavioural definition of an intuitive concept, or merely attempting to 'account for our intuitions'. Furthermore, there are times when Quine says that the question whether a behavioural account of some semantic term comes close enough to capturing the intuitive use to count as a behavioural definition is not an important question (because a behavioural definition would not have bad philosophical consequences).

But none of these grounds for uncertainty applies to Quine's treatment of the intuitive concept of meaning itself (as applied to words or




sentences). Quine is as clear as he can be that meaning can not be defined behaviourally, via his account of translation. His point is that translation does not proceed by equating words with 'the same meaning'.

How on earth could the indeterminacy thesis be thought to be compatible with the idea that a correct translation is one which equates words with the same meaning? Harman is, indeed, somewhat sceptical about indeterminacy, but there can be no doubting Quine's attachment to it.

Further, the Harman-Quine thesis seems to imply that any sentence I accept is analytic, since your failure to accept it would be constitutive of your not meaning the same by it. Harman considers this problem specifically in relation to the logical truths. For them, at least, he openly admits 'that a person who denies our basic logical principles thereby indicates that he misunderstands what he says or means something different by his words from what we would mean'. (Harman 1967 p. 132) Then why aren't they analytic? His answer is that, on Quine's view, although there are many sentences which cannot be denied without changing their meaning, there are none which can't be given up. 'One may give up even "Copper is copper" by refusing to have any expression corresponding to "copper" or by refusing to countenance the "is" of identity.' Well, yes; but would one be giving up 'Copper is copper' without changing its meaning? Wouldn't one be depriving it of meaning? Anyway, Harman's manoeuvre is not available if the Harman-Quine thesis is understood as saying that you must accept any sentence I accept if you mean the same by it; and that is what would follow from Quine's account of translation, if anything about sentence-meanings did, since Quine requires that the translation of an accepted sentence must also be accepted.'0

I know of only one passage in Quine that could seem to support Harman's interpretation. Near the end of chapter 1 of Word and Object, Quine gives the following as a statement of holism: 'Unless pretty firmly and directly conditioned to sensory stimulation, a sentence S is

'O Essentially the same problem has been considered by others, e.g. Churchland (1975 pp. 46-7). He agrees that there are sentences which 'do not admit of a denial that is consistent with our current understanding of the terms they contain' Then why aren't they analytic? Churchland's answer is that such sentences may be false. A tricky situation-a sentence can be false, as currently understood, but you can't say it is false, as currently understood! Churchland himself appears to get caught. He says that a denial of'Phlogiston is an elemental substance' for example, 'would indeed be inconsistent with our understanding of the term 'phlogiston' [our current understanding - which, he says (Churchland 1975 p. 55), is the same as its original meaning].' And yet, he says, this sentence is actually false. He seems quite oblivious to the implication for his own understanding of 'phlogiston'




meaningless except relative to its own theory; meaningless intertheoretically' (Quine 1960, p. 24; there are echoes at p. 34 and p. 75.). This is not quite what Harman wants: to say that meaning is relative to a theory is different from saying that it depends on a theory. But, in any case, the statement is not to be relied on. Quine immediately goes on to say: 'This point, already pretty evident from ?3 and from the parable of neutrinos in ?4, will be developed in more detail in chapter 2'. Evidently Quine is identifying holism with the indeterminacy thesis! To do this he must, at a minimum, be overlooking the difference between relativity to a theory and relativity to a manual of translation. In such a context, we are entitled to regard his statement of holism as equally careless. (Quine's statement of holism here also seems to be designed to let him assimilate holism to the thesis that the only admissible notion of truth is a disquotational notion! All these connections are strongly hinted at, but not clearly stated, let alone argued for.)

Quine sometimes says things like '... the supposition that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all' ('Two Dogmas' p. 41). It is just possible, I suppose, that Harman attaches some significance to the 'taken in isolation'. (In 'Meaning Holism Defended' Harman says 'Any version of meaning holism says that there are cases in which parts have meaning because of their place in a larger whole'. He gives Quine's holism as an example, but then says 'For Quine, individual theoretical sentences simply do not have empirical meaning, taken by themselves'. (Harman 1993 p. 163, my emphases) This is a rather conspicuous self-contradiction, unless he thinks the final phrase provides a way out.) But such phrases can serve no other function than merely emphasizing that the topic is the statement, rather than the theory it is part of. Whether a statement is con- firmable or meaningful cannot literally depend on whether we 'take it in isolation' or not. If a statement-a particular inscription or utterance-- is part of some particular theory, we can't change that just by deciding to 'take it in isolation'.

Harman says that Quine's holism about meaning is inferred from his behavioural account of translation. The orthodox (and correct) view is that it is inferred, rather, from his confirmation holism and verificationism. Some authors, accepting Harman's version of meaning holism, have therefore been led to ascribe to Quine a corresponding version of confirmation holism, along the following lines: the confirmation conditions of a sentence are determined by the totality of other sentences the speaker accepts. (E.g. would a ringing in the ears confirm 'Brutus




killed Caesar'? It might, for a speaker who accepted 'If Brutus killed Caesar my ears will ring'.)

This is not Quine's confirmation holism, either. Quine's view is that in general it is 'not significant' to speak of a single sentence being confirmed by such-and-such an experience-even if you add that whether this is true depends on something else. What can be confirmed is the conjunction of the sentence in question with all the other relevant sentences.

(Actual formulations of this 'determined by' confirmation holism often don't make much sense: 'The justification of a sentence depends on the justification of every other sentence'; 'Every statement in a theory (partially) determines the level of confirmation of every other statement in the theory'. My formulation above is meant to be charitable.)

8.2 Harman's Quine says that what A means depends on all the sentences he accepts. Since, in practice, there will always be some sentences containing a given word that two speakers give different verdicts to, Harman-Quine infers that the identity translation scheme is never quite correct, and hence that two speakers never mean quite the same by their words.

This is a very anti-intuitive conclusion. To some extent, however, this may be a result of Harman-Quine's focusing on meaning in the idiolect of a single speaker. We usually mean by 'meaning' meaning for a group, especially for a group such as 'English speakers'. (Quine focuses on this kind of case too.) For group meaning the analogous conclusion is that the meaning of a word depends on the sentences accepted by all members of the group.

This is still anti-intuitive. For example, it implies that there is no sentence of Arunta which means 'There have been black dogs', since no otherwise acceptable translation of that sentence would be accepted by Arunta speakers. (Until recently, at any rate, all dogs known to speakers of Arunta were brown.) The thesis that the meaning of a word is determined by a theory would be more plausible, then, if we allowed that the determining theory might include something less than all accepted sentences. (Translation, also, could then be said to require preservation of assent not to all accepted sentences, but just to those of the elite subclass.) The trouble is that the proposed elite subclass would seem to be in effect the analytic sentences: if Quine is right about the ASD there is no principled basis for delimiting the meaning-determining sentences.

This is a problem for anyone who, like Harman, is trying to explain meaning in non-semantic terms. The thesis could be understood in a




less ambitious way, however. Just taking for granted an intuitive, unan- alysed notion of meaning, a thesis to the effect that the meanings of some words are determined (in some specified way) by a theory could be substantive, plausible and interesting.

(Some authors reserve the name 'meaning holism' for the extreme thesis that the meaning of a word depends on all the sentences accepted by the group. Taking it for granted that meaning is determined by at least some of the accepted sentences (others call this 'holism' also), they therefore confront the argument 'No ASD, therefore holism.' This argument is at the centre of many discussions of 'meaning holism', most famously in Fodor and Lepore (1992).)

A second respect in which the Harman-Quine thesis is implausibly strong is in its requiring the meaning-determining theory to be accepted. It seems quite plausible to think that 'Phlogiston is an element' is a partial determiner of the meaning of 'phlogiston', even for modern speakers who think that sentence false.

Thirdly, the Harman-Quine thesis seems to be too strong in assuming that the meaning-determining theory must be formulated in the speaker's public language. For example, it is widely held to be constitutive of the English meaning of 'bachelor' that English speakers assent to 'Bachelors are unmarried'. But this seems to be definitely wrong. Sup- pose that the word 'unmarried' were simply banished from the lan-

guage. There is no reason why 'bachelor' should not mean exactly the same as before. Certainly it seems essential that speakers should apply 'bachelor' only to men they believe to be unmarried; but saying so does not seem necessary.

Even 'observation terms' (in public language) seem to be unneces-

sary. Suppose you think that 'Ripe tomatoes are normally red' is constitutive of the meaning of 'tomato'. Now let us banish 'red' from the

language-but people continue to believe that the things they call 'tomato' are normally red when ripe. Would the meaning of 'tomato' change at all? (It is extremely common for someone to believe something to be a particular colour without having a word for that particular colour. Ascriptions of such beliefs are, however, usually de re.)

For an actual example, consider 'cat'. It seems that to know the meaning of 'cat' you have to know what cats typically look like. But there is no way of putting that belief into words. (Except, of course, by using 'looks like a cat'; but 'Cats look like cats' does not contribute much to defining 'cat'.)

8.3 My discussion of holism and meaning is concerned throughout




with public language. Parallel issues and arguments concerning the so- called semantics of the alleged language of thought have been discussed (often in tandem) by many authors. The third objection would of course not apply in that context.

It should be obvious that Quine's discussion of holism and meaning is concerned, also, with public language alone. If this is not obvious, it is mainly because of the influence of Harman (1967). Harman's third major error in interpreting Quine is to represent him as supporting, in effect, a particular version of the language of thought hypothesis.

According to Harman's Quine, 'A general theory of language must ultimately attempt to explain linguistic and other behavior, and this requires the postulation of certain psychological states, e.g., desires and beliefs.' (Harman 1967 p. 144) Harman-Quine insists, however, that these explanations require only the postulation of sentential attitudes (not propositional attitudes), i.e. attitudes to sentences of the subject's public language.

Harman's exposition of the details of this sentential-attitude psychology is difficult to follow. Apparently there is some role to be played in psychological explanation by knowing a translation of the subject's language, although knowing a 'radical' (i.e., for Harman, a uniquely correct) translation is not necessary. But if we suppose that Karl accepts the sentence 'Der Schnee ist weiss' for example, how could our capacity to explain or predict his behaviour be assisted by knowing a translation of those words into English or Chinese, for example? (Knowing what the sentence means to Karl might be helpful, but that is not what Har- man proposes.)

But, whatever the details, it is clear that the real Quine could not put up with it. There is no hint in Quine that 'acceptance' of sentences might explain non-linguistic behaviour. There is no hint that 'desires' directed towards sentences could explain any behaviour. Quine's fundamental objection to propositional-attitude psychology applies equally to sentential-attitude psychology: it postulates hidden causes. Quine is prepared to consider suggestions as to how belief might be defined as a disposition to observable behaviour; but not as a hidden cause of observable behaviour.

There is, indeed, a brief passage in ?44 of Word and Object where Quine unfavourably compares propositions with sentences, as objects for the attitudes. But the sentences were not assumed to be sentences of the believer's own language: the Englishman, the Chinaman and the mouse would all believe-true an English sentence. Ascriptions of such attitudes would therefore not avoid indeterminacy. The supposed




advantage of the proposal was ontological only: the indeterminacy in the identity conditions for propositions would be replaced by an indeterminacy in the truth conditions for 'believes-true' The proposal was seen as a contribution to the development of the low-grade canonical notation 'meant only to dissolve verbal perplexities and facilitate logical deductions', not the high-grade canonical notation to be used in 'limn- ing the true and ultimate structure of reality' (Quine 1960 p. 221) And even at that low level, the proposal was quickly rejected by Quine in favour of one which did away with objects for the attitudes entirely.

8.4 The idea that the meaning of a word is determined by a theory has seemed plausible to many philosophers." (I mean this statement to cover views according to which the meaning of your words is determined by (some of) the inferences you accept. I assume that on any reasonable view the inference from p to q will be meaning-constitutive or analytic or whatever iff the sentence p--q is.) Some (e.g. Dummett) have seen it, contrary to Harman, as an improvement on Quine's holism-an improvement because it would reinstate word and sentence meanings, the compositionality of meaning, and so on. Another, converging, source has been the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis approach to the definition of theoretical terms. But the third objection above seems to be quite destructive of any version of the idea which tries to explain meaning, or the meaning of particular words, wholly in terms of verbal behaviour. Bringing in belief seems to be unavoidable.

The idea that the meaning of a word is determined by a theory has often seemed to be, in some perhaps ill-defined way, adverse to the ASD. Something of this opposition can, I suggest, survive the admis- sion of belief. To dramatize this point, I will describe a view which combines the functionalist definition approach with the whole box and dice of mentalistic semantics-beliefs, rules of meaning, a mentalistic definition of 'analytic', and so on.

(For an earlier statement of this view, see 'The Narrow Semantics of Names' (McDermott 1988). It diverges from Lewis's account (1970, 1972) in two main respects: (i) For Lewis the meaning of a term is determined by its links with other words (of the public language). For me the

" Quine's analogy of the network seems to be attractive to those who understand meaning holism in this way: the meaning of a statement is said to be its place in a network. The analogy seems to me to be as unhelpful in this connection as it is in understanding Quine himself. (See above).

Some writers (e.g. Churchland 1975 p. 61) even use a network analogy in relation to the mean-

ing of words. The nodes, now, are the words. A path between two nodes indicates that there is a semantically important statement of the theory in which both words occur. Such a network will have indefinitely many kinds of path!




defining theory is a belief, not an assertion. (ii) For me it is crucial that theoretical terms can be used referentially by someone who believes that the defining theory is not perfectly realized. Lewis says he agrees, but some of his most important results seem to depend on a 'simplify- ing' assumption to the contrary: e.g. the 'definability' (i.e. by necessary and sufficient conditions) of theoretical terms, and the possibility of mandatory reductions. (The apparently conflicting alternatives here could be reconciled if we assumed that for any theory T there is a weaker theory T' such that any possible nearest and near enough realization of T would be a perfect realization of T' (which could then be regarded as the real defining theory). But I do not think this is a safe assumption.))

Assume, then, that we have belief ascriptions 'S believes that p', whose status is securely factual. The nonlogical terms which can occur in the content-sentence p are our O-terms. For simplicity we assume that the O-terms are all names-of individuals, sets, properties, or whatever. (The logical particles include 'is a member of', 'has', etc.) Let Tbe a theory, in Ramsey-sentence form, in this vocabulary:

3xl ... 3xn T(X,..., xn).

We shall say that

T defines ci for S

iff

S uses zi as a name for the ith member of the n-tuple which is the nearest and near enough realizer of T(xl,..., xn);

that is to say, iff

(i) if, according to his beliefs, there is an object which is the ith member of the nearest and near enough realizer of T(x1,..., xn), he calls it Ti,

and

(ii)if, according to his beliefs, there is no object which is the ith member of the nearest and near enough realizer of T(x1,..., xn), he says 'There is no such thing as i'.

T defines zi for language L iff there is a meaning rule according to which T defines Ti for speakers of L. Then the thesis I think plausible is that many, perhaps most, names in English are defined by a theory in this way.




It is not claimed that the theory which defines a term is always that propounded by the first user of the term; nor that it always consists of those sentences containing the term which are 'platitudes' or 'common knowledge'; nor that a term is always defined for a speaker by his total theory. There need be no general answer to the question 'Which theory defines a name?' All that is true in general is that each term is defined by some theory or other. We still seem to have a testable, non-vacuous, empirical thesis.

Nor is it claimed that all words are defined by a theory. The logical particles are an obvious exception.

It might be thought that another obvious exception is the O-terms themselves. But remember that in my version the O-terms are our terms, the terms we use in the content sentences of belief-ascriptions. I did not require that S himself must have these words in his vocabulary, or direct translations of them. If he does, they will be exceptions to our thesis. For example, if our psychology is prepared to attribute to S the belief that something is red, then the relevant connection between speech and thought may be simply that he calls something 'red' if he believes that it is red. My own view, however, is that a decent psychology will not use such terms as 'red' in its belief-ascriptions. It will ascribe beliefs (and desires) which are in a certain sense about nothing but the subject's inputs and outputs. Redness, no less than electron- hood, will be seen as something postulated to explain certain facts about the subject's in/outputs: S believes there is a stable, natural property of objects which causes, in specified circumstances, input of such- and-such a kind, and he calls it 'redness'. (See, further, 'The Narrow Semantics of Names'.)

I am, however, aware of one respect in which our thesis may be unre- alistically strong. For most names the defining theory is probably not exactly the same for all speakers of the language. This is one kind of vagueness-small differences between speakers in standards for correct use. (Another kind of vagueness comes from the fact that speakers for whom a term is defined by exactly the same theory may still disagree about (i) the relative semantic importance of different parts of the theory, and (ii) how near to perfect a realization has to be to be near enough.)

It was obvious all along that the vagueness of many terms in natural language would make it harder to find water-tight examples of analytic sentences. I will follow the tradition and idealise vagueness away. I want to show that there is another reason why analytic sentences are hard to find.




(Quine touches on the matter of vagueness in ?4 of'Two Dogmas': 'It is often hinted that the difficulty in separating analytic statements from synthetic ones in ordinary language is due to the vagueness of ordinary language and that the distinction is clear when we have a precise artifi- cial language with explicit "semantical rules". This, however, as I shall now attempt to show, is a confusion.' I think it is Quine who is con- fused here. What Quine shows in the rest of ?4 is that an explicit listing of a language's semantical rules, under the heading 'semantical rules', does nothing to clarify the meaning of that heading. But this has nothing to do with vagueness of the terms in the language itself.)

I said that our thesis is testable. How could it be tested? Given a term Ti, the first step is to think of a candidate for the defin-

ing theory T. Next, how do we test the hypothesis that Ti is defined by P? That depends on what exactly constitutes the existence of a meaning rule for a language. But presumably if there is a rule requiring assent to certain sentences under certain conditions of belief we should expect to find at least a fairly good correlation. Now we can test the claim that ti and cj are defined by T for a particular speaker S as follows. Arrange for S's beliefs to vary, and put 'Tli?Tj' to him each time: S should assent iff he believes that 3y 3z (FyA GzAy?z), where Fy entails that y is the ith member of the nearest and near enough realizer of the realization formula of T, and Gz entails that z is the jth member of the nearest and near enough realizer of the realization formula of T.

(Common-sense mentalism says that it is possible in principle to know what a man (or a mouse) believes and desires without first knowing the meaning of his words.)

8.5 Our functionalist thesis has as consequences two points which Quine and other opponents of the ASD have made much of.

(i) If ti is defined by a theory T, there need be no sentences, or hardly any, which are analytic in virtue of the meaning of ti.

For one thing, the defining theory may not be fully expressible in words.

If it is, then we have the 'normal' statement of the theory, using the theoretical terms it defines: T(T1,..., Tn). This long conjunction (typically) will not be analytic: it will of course be assented to by competent speakers who believe the theory has a unique perfect realizer, but not by competent speakers who believe the theory has no perfect realizer, or no nearest and near enough realizer. (The 'modified Carnap sentence of the theory-which says that if T has a unique perfect realizer then T(r1,..., Tn)-will be analytic, however.) Also there is no reason to




expect that any significant number of the component parts of the theory will be analytic: typically, just about any part of the theory can be denied.

Indeed, just about any part of the theory can typically be denied even consistently with referential use of its terms. Consider 'Phlogiston is an element'. It is probably part of the theory which gives 'phlogiston' meaning. But we think that it is false, because there is no such thing as phlogiston. Perhaps those who say it cannot be denied by competent speakers really have in mind the conditional 'If phlogiston exists, it is an element' (What matters here is the existence of the kind phlogiston, not the existence of instances of it. Compare unobtainium349 (Lewis): there is such a thing as unobtainium349, although there is not any of it.) Let us say that a sentence is referentially analytic if it cannot be denied consistently with referential use of its terms. Then the important point is that 'Phlogiston is an element' does not seem to be even referentially analytic: it would have been possible to say 'Phlogiston exists, but it is a compound' under the rule of meaning for 'phlogiston'. In general, there is no reason to expect that T(c1,..., Tn), or any of its component parts, will be even referentially analytic. It might be true that the realization formula has a conjunct such that any nearest and near enough realizer of the former would be a perfect realizer of the latter, but this does not seem to be typical.

So our thesis certainly seems to imply that analyticity lacks the importance which at least some philosophers have attributed to it. We cannot say, for example, that the meaning of a word is in general consti- tuted by the analytic truths in which it occurs. Our total verbal theory cannot be divided up into those sentences which 'fix the meaning' of our terms and those which 'say something about reality'. Typically, just about all the component sentences in which a term occurs non-vacuously will be synthetic.

This is a point which Quine treats as a key point in the case against intuitive semantics. He says 'We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it' (Quine 1960, p. 16). His example involves two physicists discussing whether neutrinos have mass; the point of the story is apparently that their respective theories cannot each be sepa- rated into a part which defines 'neutrino' and a part which describes neutrinos. This is his main illustration of'holism', as that is understood in Word and Object.

(ii) It is often said that the distinction behind our talk of analytic and synthetic is really a distinction of degree, and that it is a defect of this or that definition of the terms that it does not admit intermediate cases.




Our functionalist thesis can endorse this criticism, and supply a rem- edy.

An analytic sentence is, on our mentalistic assumptions, one which you cannot deny without breaking or rejecting the rules of meaning for L, whatever your beliefs. Now if xi is defined by T, the component sentences of T(x1,..., Tn) which contain xi will have the property that you cannot deny too many of them, whatever your beliefs, without breaking or rejecting the rule of meaning for Ti-or rather, that you cannot deny too many of them consistently with referential use of ti. Such sentences are semantically important for i.'12 And in determining whether 'too many' of the relevant sentences have been rejected, some sentences may count for more than others: these sentences have more semantic importance for xi. Then analyticity is just the extreme case of overriding semantic importance. At the opposite extreme are sentences which are of no semantic importance for any ti. (Perhaps it would be better to reserve 'synthetic' for them.) It is a virtue of our functionalist thesis that it enables us to see analyticity (and, perhaps, syntheticity) as just the not-so-important extreme case of an underlying distinction of degree which does have some claim to philosophical importance- semantic importance.13

12 The term 'semantic importance' comes from Churchland (1979 pp. 51-4), but my use of it differs from his.

For Churchland a semantically important sentence is one public rejection of which is incom- patible with effective communication-if you reject it you will be suspected of not knowing the meaning of some of its words. Now any sentence which (in intuitive terms) expresses a belief which is common knowledge will satisfy this definition: for example, 'There have been black dogs'. But this sentence is not semantically important in my sense.

Churchland also gives a list of features which 'make' sentences more semantically important: being universally accepted, being 'general', being frequently invoked in the drawing of everyday inferences, being one of a small number of such sentences, and being commonly used in introducing the relevant term. But a sentence can have maximal semantic importance in my sense (and, it would seem, under Churchland's definition of semantic importance) without having any of these features but the first: e.g. 'It is raining or it is not raining' (And the first feature is not sufficient for semantic importance, in my sense or his.)

Like mine, Churchland's notion of semantic importance is explained in terms drawn from the common-sense intentional vocabulary: there is no pretence that it is being defined behaviourally.

Churchland has an argument (p. 52) to show that semantic importance in his sense has nothing to do with analyticity. I agree with the conclusion, but I cannot understand the argument. The argument is: Imagine two people who accept exactly the same general sentences, but disagree as to which of these sentences are analytic. Despite the disagreement about analyticity, they can com- municate without misunderstanding, as long as they continue to accept the same general sentences. My puzzle is that the argument says nothing at all about semantic importance in Churchland's sense: how can we tell what communication depends on, if we assume from the start that neither speaker ever wants to change the other's 'general' beliefs?

13 I am indebted to anonymous referees for many helpful comments and suggestions.




Department of Philosophy MICHAEL MCDERMOTT The University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia michael. mcdermott@philosophy. usyd. edu.au

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Quine's Holism and Functionalist Holism

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