By Hans-Johann Glock
W.V. Quine and Donald Davidson are one of the top thinkers of the 20th century. Their impact on modern philosophy is moment to none, and their effect in disciplines corresponding to linguistics and psychology is strongly felt. wondering a few of their uncomplicated assumptions, this article comprises fascinating comparisons of Quine and Davidson with different philosophers, quite Wittgenstein. The textual content additionally deals specific debts of significant matters in modern analytic philosophy.
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Extra info for Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality
Sample text
Lewis. Quine continues to stress even in his later writings that the formation of our beliefs and theories is shaped primarily not by brute facts or experience, but by ‘pragmatic’ considerations, that is, considerations of predictive power and cognitive efficacy. Some pragmatists insisted that our theories about the world should be subservient to the aims and requirements of our activities. Quine’s conception of knowledge is not utilitarian in this way (LAP 119). But it is instrumentalist. He holds that our theories ‘are almost completely a matter of human creativity – creativity to the purpose, however, of matching up with the neural input’ (PLSP 50–1; see TT 2; WO 17–20; PT 14–15).
For example, to claim of the liquid in a flask that it is an acid is to claim, inter alia, that the action of placing a blue litmus paper in the flask would have a certain result, namely that of turning the litmus paper red. By this Logical pragmatism token, the meaning of a word like ‘acid’ consists of the ‘conceivable experimental phenomena’ implied by its affirmation or denial (Peirce 1934: 273). Non-realist accounts of truth: According to Peirce, truth is ‘the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate’ (1934: 268).
James (1978: 238), in particular, anticipated Quine’s and Davidson’s holistic view that our beliefs cannot be assessed individually, but only as part of a web of other beliefs. Furthermore, Quine advocates a version of naturalism, an idea which he traces to Dewey and Peirce (OR 26–9; PPE 35–7). This historical claim is problematic, since both the idea and the label go back at least to 19 20 Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality nineteenth-century physiological naturalists like Czolbe.