In Conversation: W.V. Quine - The Dennett Panel (1994)

our guest panelists in this program is Daniel Dennett distinguished art and science professor and director of the Center for cognitive studies at Tufts University although his areas of specialization are cognitive science philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology he has published extensively on most philosophical topics professor Dennett has also brought his work to a wider public audience most notably with the mind's eye co-authored with Douglas Hofstadter and his recent best-selling consciousness explained the main objective in this panel discussion is to provide an overview of professor Klein's major philosophical doctrines and to invite his comments on how he views these doctrines now very broadly the areas we'll consider include his early association with logical positivism his notorious skepticism about meaning his stance on epistemology and ontology and his characterization of philosophy as a part of or continuous with science finally we discuss coins opinions of philosophy today and ask which problems he would choose to work on now if he were just beginning his philosophical career we now join the panel on location in Cambridge Massachusetts professor Cohen in our interview we touched on a number of your philosophical doctrines and philosophical themes which I'd like to pursue now in greater detail to help us to do this we're joined now by Daniel Dennett professor of philosophy at Tufts University Paul horik professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Martin Davies whose wild reader of mental philosophy at Oxford University Paul could you start us off yes professor Quine I'd like to ask you about your sense of the philosophical sea at the beginning of your career as he found it then a common assumption about philosophy throughout its history is that it concerns a specially profound and important realm with facts of its earning having to do with the ultimate nature of reality and how we ought to lead our lives these facts often assumed completely distinct from scientific facts and are to be investigated by methods peculiar to philosophy involving pure reason speculative insight but at the beginning of the the century beginning of the 20th century a movement was established and positivism or logical empiricism that put into question this conception of philosophy the positive this such people as the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap held that what they called speculative metaphysics could give us nothing more than empty words disguised nonsense and that it should be done away with did you find yourself in sympathy with this critique of traditional philosophy I'm very much in sympathy with the with their attitude towards a good deal of speculative metaphysics of what I would take issue is over the notion of there being a sharp boundary between that on the one hand and responsible science natural silence on the other I think of it rather as a matter of degree the the the more speculative and general the problem or that the doctrines are perhaps the the more thought the more philosophical and you do proceeding in that direction of reach a level finally where you can't make proper responsible sense of the doctors at all and there you're in the realm where I very much sympathize with the the logical positivists or empiricists in rejecting it is meaningless as for questions of how to how one should live one's life this sort of philosophy in philosophy would be is so very remote from from science and from the kind of speculative philosophy that I find continuous with science that I wouldn't know where to put it it's a sort of well it's it's perhaps somewhat in a fire with engineering perhaps is human engineering in which one would draw on scientific findings and so far as they were were relevant including finding perhaps in psychology and it's it's only a accidental matter of traditional usage perhaps to call a philosophical to go back to the first part of your answer to my question the pacifists thought that it was essential to get a strict separation between speculative metaphysics but they deployed and science that they liked and saying as you just did that in your view there isn't a strict separation between metaphysics and science are you departing in a fairly substantial way from the central tenets of well I'm certainly departing from them on that point and well pretty substantial I should think but that but that's not the only point at which you depart you dedicated word an object in 1962 rudolf carnap teacher and friend and the book begins the first chapter was just a a clarion call to to a different view of where we start in philosophy to what car that had always proposed and I'm wondering were you able to persuade him that you were right in any of this which which features of your of your vision 25 years after 30 years after you became his student which features of your vision were you able to persuade him of his any back there in the period when when I was well in 1930 33 it was when I was discussing so intensively with in with Carnap and fog for some couple of months at that time he was between two books the as loga father felt at which was decidedly based on the phenomenal istic approach and karna had already departed from that orientation himself and was and had just been writing that does perhaps finished writing his logical syntax of language of which his wife was typing and I was reading chief by shieff as it came out of her typewriter of certainly of my own attitude inward an object was decidedly remote from the out bow but I felt not as remote from his current view that the in the logical syntax and my departures from his attitude in that book were were matters of largely matters of detail but also again as in the case of the condemnation of metaphysics a question of my disavowing a demarcation in favor of gradations and I felt early in late that my departures from car naps you of use as of logical syntax from which incidentally he also departed very decidedly in the next few years in another direction from mine but I thought that my departure from that burning to that intermediate stand and pray that turn-ups development was a departure in the sense in which science progresses not throwing over the old science that somehow having been the wrong direction but further improvements in in the same general spirit and I felt I was sharing turnips in general spirit the rigorous approach to philosophical questions and liberal use of the techniques of mathematical logic and that stays and that to this day I think is a tremendous contribution on part of well the other circle but more work particularly car not probably your most famous and influential piece of work is the article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" published in 1951 could you say what the main theses are in this paper and why you think it was found to be so revolutionary yes but not when I when I going to give that lecture which the month later appeared as a paper in the philosophical review I had no conception that it was going to be such a we're going to bring such a such a widespread and voluminous response I had I've written it and prepared prepared my lecture only under quest it was a it was some assignments I had how many years earlier ninety or nineteen about 1940 so ten eleven years earlier had come quite definitely to the conclusion that turnips dichotomy between empirical knowledge and what he called analytic truth which was just a matter of verbal conventions that this was itself an unimpaired and ill-defined or undefined that economy and that the contribution of convention of unconscious convention incidentally which had seemed to me rather at contradiction in terms of the between what you might put down to the meanings of the words things what's true by virtue of the meanings of the words in the sentence and on the other hand what's true in view of scientific discoveries and peripheral discoveries it was a misconception and that there's a in general a contribution from both sides in just about everything we saved trying to get down to to pure logic and then you've got something which surely is acquired through learning the logical words the grammatical particles and or and etcetera which are governed by by laws of logical inference the title of the paper refers to two dogmas of empiricism then presumably one of them is there as the as the point you just mean the the assumption of there is a strict distinction between what is known on the basis of experience what is true and virtue of empirical facts and what is true simply as a matter of definition or convention what is the other dog ma'am what is the relationship between the two governments the the other dog that the the notion that our knowledge was in in that paper they came in as a speculative a as one possible reason for people being so convinced in the convinced of the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic statements and I've been groping for a reason why that seems so fundamental yes reduction in syrup was the word I used and that of all our empirical concept concepts about the the nature of physical objects and the rest of could be reduced by at by definition or at least of linguistic convention some are short of definition to sensory sensory input and what I was pushing instead as a holism of holism the sort of thing that had been urged a couple of decades before pure DM okay according to which such reduction this is not to be that not to be hoped for your idea was that once reductionism has been done away with and replaced with holism and there isn't the need that positivist thought to draw a distinction between analytic and synthetic true these are truths of fact I'm sure that meaning yes that was that that was part of the argument of more of the argument against analyticity consisted in my charting out some of the familiar characterizations a true by virtue of the meanings of the words as one characterization one that's definition of at end of Oh a vague Irwin true by necessity of true by virtue of definitions and I argue that these were not helpful because they were subject to the same doubt says that a notion of analyticity itself and so having having dismissed those and then also having dismissed this as I suppose further likely source of the first augment namely the the dogma of reductionism that combination was my my argument but as I as I think back on it but I wasn't persuaded even then that I had disproved the the possibility of a of a satisfactory notion of analyticity I was questioning what is it and maintaining that we had never been told the this skepticism about the notion of analyticity the about the idea that some sentences are true solely in virtue of what they mean extends to a more general skepticism about a notion of meaning and concepts related to the notion of meaning such as definition on another word are you was your position then that it's simply an illusion that words have meanings and that sometimes two words have the same meaning if so how do you reconcile this exfoli extreme skepticism with your own evident fascination with language oh good yes I wouldn't have said I wouldn't have said that words don't have meanings but rather are the words never have always have different meanings or never have the same meanings rather I would say that I can't make adequate sense even of those sentences because I'm challenging the notion of meaning and yes I think even back at that time I was seeing this problem of meaning as the same as the problem of analyticity because one of the ways of defining analyticity was that of well that of a an analytic sentence that was equivalent to or had the same meaning as a tautology zero equals zero you could define there's one of the ways of defining one of these concepts in terms of another in this case sameness of meaning what was worrying me early in late especially late later getting on towards word and object was the notion of sameness of meaning and that's what I was challenging and I argued that to challenge to say the notion of sameness of meaning is to challenge the notion of meaning that is to say the notion of the meaning of an expression because there's no entity without identity you haven't you've made sense of it some alleged object or category of objects except insofar as you've explained it's the criterion for deciding when you have two of them and when just one when are they the same when are they different if you can't say what when meanings are the same you haven't said what meanings are now I'm stressing the plural of meaning because of I'm not and never was rejecting semantics and the semantical side of linguistics I couldn't bear to so we are engaged and semana sis and lexicographers are engaged in this study of meaning and the meaning of language and the meaning of sentences here here however I'm using the word meaning not as a distributive term but I'm using it as a as a mass term of like like water like short meaning of language meaning of things but not meanings of anything when you first began this challenge to the notion of meaning I think a lot of people just couldn't imagine that you really meant it we could really get along without this idea of fixed meanings in the head which gave words their meaning and then you came up and word knob jekt with your famous thought experiment about radical translation which was I think supposed to drive that point home see and and let me just say what that thought experiment is because it's been a lot of puzzlement and a lot of controversy about how to read it we imagine a tribe of people living off somewhere where they're completely isolated from from the rest of the world so that there's no knowledge of their language so there's no bilinguals anywhere there's no chain of interpreters and we imagine sending a couple of linguists into the field to learn the language of these people and they each go about the job independently and of course they they they have to work it out from first principles they have to they have to it would be like trying to learn a language on another planet you would have to work out what words for yes and no were and it would be an elaborate analytical procedure and the amazing conclusion you came up with was that in principle these two linguists could go and they could both do a wonderful job they could come back with a dictionary and a grammar so that you could converse with these people you could learn their language and yet if you look closely at the two at the two dictionaries that the two versions of this language translated into in our language say they'd be different that is to say they would not just in trivial details they would be in substantial ways they would be different ways of rendering their language in Ireland and then the amazing claim you made was and there wouldn't be any fact of the matter about which one was right now a lot of people now they knew you were serious of help your challenge to meaning because this was a today I think I sort of outrageous suggestion that there wouldn't be any fact of the matter and many critics have tried to offer refutations of your of your radical translation thought experiment and one of the things they've done is they've challenged you to give an example even an imaginary example of what it would be like for this actually to have what would what would happen what would be the case can you respond to the to the challenge that you give us an example of a real radical translation failure the indeterminacy of radical translation I've never been able to to arrive at a satisfactory example of that radical translation is a is a hard job but the position is plausible rather to me on the basis of consideration of what one has to go on and of what does constitute a test of a faithful manual of translation of the test the only test I can see in Jerez is in principle of smoothness of dialogue success in negotiations when you're using that language and so here you would have two manuals which are completely faithful and successful by by any such test and furthermore we could even say they by chance are are equally equally simple in their translations and now how about the test of their distinctness their dissimilarity because of from any point of view there are many acceptable ways of translating a sentence from one language to another but simply because of the fact that we have interchangeable sentences in our own language and either of these would do as of translation of the length sentences in question from the from the alien language so which isn't that but rather of translations that are incompatible in some sense and the a test that presents itself is this you have some text some long monologue in the native language and you have these two manuals and each manual gives a translation which is smooth and successful by the the negotiation and the fluency test and then and then you try using the manuals in alternation first sentence from this monologue you translate by the one manual the next sentence by the other and you alternate these and whereas each pure translation by a single manual turned out to be a splendid and smooth the this zigzag translation turns out to be incoherent there's a there's a way of formulating the criterion that doesn't depend on a intuitive notion of equivalence of English translations which is something I also challenge of course when I'm challenging the same as of meeting the radical translation thought experiment was a way of pressing the skepticism about meaning I wonder if I can just give you two ways of expressing that skepticism just ask you which would be the more faithful to your intentions would it be better to say the notion of meanings perfectly alright in its own place it just can't play any role in serious science or would it be better to say notions of meaning translations and honor be definition are really fundamentally flawed no III think that's a good point and I go with your first there and well lexicographers use the word meaning and not only the meaning in the sense of a mass term but the meaning of this brush and meaning of that they'll divide a definition down into sense one sense two sets three of the reason for doing that is different context and which is used in a somewhat different way and the that's alright we can we can explain their use of it and we can explain all their that they're used with that without appealing to to anything in the way of a of an idea in the mind that that is fixed in its attachment to a particular strength of four names well if we take the the interpretation is saying that a meaning can't play a serious role in science yes is that completely general for example would it rule out the possibility of meaning playing a role a serious role in a science of linguistics or a science of psychology for example I think it does I think I mean I would I would be skeptical about the years of the notion of meaning in in theoretical linguistics as distinct from practical lexicography theoretical linguistics or as in psychology or or in psychology as in philosophy I'm struck by the the way that if we took this skepticism fully seriously it would seem to undercut what many people would think of as the Philosopher's stock-in-trade if you ask a philosopher a question there are many philosophers whose very first response will be depends what you mean or first define your terms but those notions meaning and definition are sub judice a according to the skepticism about meaning so if it's taken so seriously would it really undermine that standard philosophical response well no I think that could be paraphrased paraphrased satisfactorily and a lot of these idiomatic uses of the word can be and certainly I use the word meaning often enough in a non-technical way myself and it could quite imagine know somehow inhibiting that we can just review this little section of discussion many people are going to want I imagine to reject skepticism about meaning but since you've given these arguments of course they have to reject one or other of the starting points one or other of the premises or assumptions are you able to isolate for us perhaps the two or three really key assumptions that are playing a pivotal role in these arguments that somebody would have to deny in order to deny your conclusion yes the perhaps the principal wood is just assumption well I'd say the observation but one that tends to be neglected is that we learn language only through hearing it and in observable situations it's it's a matter of observable behavior the way language is handed down it's also the way it's used of language is said to be used in communicating meaning communicating ideas of how do we know that a given sentence conveys the same meaning to me that the speaker had in mind oh the only way we know is by considering the context and considering whether the weather his use of the word fits in with the way we might have used the word now the it's the observable manifestation it's the sentence not the thought not the meaning that we have to go on early and late and the the I think the moral of it is all right that's all we have to go on why don't we stop with that and recognize that that's what we're talking about we're talking about these sentences and and their use and and in what circumstances and it's a it's what the what the lexicographer also is doing and in fact if you if you think about how a dictionary actually runs it's very seldom that well I think it's less than less than equally often anyway that you find a an out-and-out literal definition and ostensibly equivalent but the phrase to the word that's being explained look up elephant look at well look luck so don't indicus or whatever yes that's not much help but then you get descriptions and the dictionary the purpose of a dictionary as I see it early in late is to give you enough information about a word so that you'll be helped sufficiently in your reading or in your use of it and that there's no boundary between the dictionary encyclopedia except in terms of that purpose that the dictionary doesn't the diction they are lexicographer doesn't deliberately go beyond that purpose in the factual information that he's conveying so just to sum up about the possible rejection of the meanings gets isn't the best way from what you've just said would be to reject the idea that all that the child learning or acquiring language has to go on is the behavior of the surrounding tom specifics yes and then what is the alternative there's telepathy there's somehow in it commands a language but that's refuted when we start observing observing the infant and finding that well twins have separated at birth and put in two different languages different households that linguistically come up fluently in the two languages and not in their respective languages and completely help us in the other language so that won't carry us very far linguistic readiness that's good you're pushing linguistic readiness speculatively and this is Chomsky as I get to get it push it as far as you can short of treading on differences between specific languages then the infant refutes the hypothesis is a fit if it riches beyond that that limit but up to that limit yes I think those hypothesis those hypotheses are welcome certainly to me but they just raise the question if your a further further research let's find what is the mechanism of this psychological neurological mechanism of this extreme linguistic readiness and just what does it consist in this much we can be sure there is some linguistic readiness innate beyond what the higher apes and other animals have or the birds with their bird calls although they do have signals there must be to account for our just incomparably greater facility and learning learning at that incomparably more complex systems and so that this is all at the at the perfectly legitimate empirical level of speculation now you mentioned Chomsky and his challenge or his attempt to challenge this view but you also made several other claims use you just now you said all the town has to go on is the observable behavior and you then you clarify this by saying by talking about the use of sentences and how the meaning is is to be discerned from the use of the words in the sentences and that raises in my mind a question that's often asked your insistence on behavior makes you a behaviorist but there are two very different apparently kinds of behaviors there's Skinner and this behaviors in psychology with whom we've often allied yourself but then there's there's Vidkun Stein the later Wittgenstein and his doctrine of meaning in use and that's often called a sort of behaviorism to Chomsky's criticism of your view would seem to be largely a criticism of you as a Skinnerian behaviorist but can you say something to sort out these different meanings of behaviorism and and which kind of behaviour you've said just now in effect that there's no alternative to being a behaviorist that you can see could you could you spell out which kind of a behavior is no alternative yeah very good yes this is separately importantly the to figure out no I'm not a behaviorist in the sense of following along with the Skinner's more specific technical considerations of operant behavior and conditioned reflex and the rest of I take all this seriously I'm prepared to believe that it's true right down the line but I'm not a specialist in that field and it's not and that those things don't really affect my fuel or concern it concern me in in this philosophical context what does is yes just as you say it behaviorism in the sense in which you can apply it to Vic and shine and rile and in the case of language one must be behaviorist in that sense that these does that extent because that is unless one really takes the radical step of for believing telepathy or something equally unjustifiable but because we learn language by the external manifestations we learn words for our most in word undetectable experiences or pain but then joy or satisfaction we learned these words and apply them to ourselves and to others yes but we've learned them also only by external manifestations seeing the circumstances in which people use them may be divining their feelings partly by their facial expressions and of course we're very good at that this is largely innate this Faculty of that's been established by observing infants just shortly after birth and how they'll respond to facial expressions so I read but and so one must be and so for meaning in particular or any other linguistic concepts we've got to look to the external manifestations are meaning in use there's Lichtenstein and that's good as far as it goes meaning as use yes but you can't believe it at that simply as use no two expressions have the same use they can't it's physically impossible because if you use an expression you can't use any other expression then and there in place of it you can't say two of them at once so they don't know to express never say views that's it's a question of the relevant use the significant use these semantically significant views and that's the problem that's where the problem comes in that's not the solution you've mentioned that one of the consequences of abandoning the two dogmas of empiricism is a blurring of the distinction between metaphysics and science another effect that you've written about as what you call a shift towards pragmatism could you explain what exactly you mean by pragmatism in this context no no it's not taught there to be what is meant or should be met but well it's I think it may all go back to the last page of a one of my papers I guess it was a paper a car enough and logical truth rather than two dogmas of empiricism but that was more this second paper was more of the same ten years later or so and of in that at that point I was citing Carnot and criticizing had been criticizing turnips against our cleavage between what he called frameworks of of us theory and the actual factual content of the theory of theory something in Natural Science a and the framework Carnot characterized at purely pragmatic you you set up a concepts terms whatever of structure your theory in the way that seems most convenient and and efficient in in handling the particular data that you're trying to handle in contrast to things that can really be true or false rather than really convenient and I then referring to my by rubbing out of that demarcation I said yes I agree with Caron upon what he says about the framework is but I have a more thoroughgoing pragmatist in that I would carry this attitude right through to the factual statements themselves none of which after all are are simply sense experience reports of it the pragmatist right down the line I think maybe I drank CI Lewis into into that - he was a I think some respects his view was rather like carne ups well there was this ostensibly in fact really if you take it in isolation literal confession of faith so I can't really blame people for pacifying there's a pragmatist but as I say I never quite satisfied myself as to what it meant I've been empiricist you you're an impaired assistant and and you're also a naturalist who blurs the mark the demarcation between science and philosophy yet a lot of people would say a lot of scientists are in the habit of saying that what science the task of science is to discover the essences of things to get right down to the essence of living things or matter or whatever and right into dogmas of empiricism you make it clear that you have not much faith in the concept of an essence you say meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word so your challenge to meaning is also a challenge to the very idea of essence could you could you tell us something more about that it it did indeed and when the scientist says of science that he's that it's after the essence of things this scientist has deserted his last and is trespassing on the ground that he's not sufficiently familiar with namely philosophy philosophy of video on science yes certainly that's the way of looking at things now with here against matter rubbing on a boundary because of some traits of for just introspective scientific theory and and the prediction of observation systematizing our sense experience some traits of some things are a lot more work more important not more important than others and loosely speaking then there they're thought to be they're regarded as essential and we make classifications according to these and they these are what become the definition of the species or genus or whatever it may be but that's a matter of explaining with the words which have been set up pragmatically we'd like to ask you about what you take the implications of your central ideas to be for the various departments of philosophy distal knowledge of metaphysics logic ethics philosophy of science and so on um well beginning with epistemology this is the area in which which is addresses problems surrounding the concept of knowledge here you've recommended an approach that you call naturalized epistemology and in which these questions are to be dealt with by the biological sciences as I understand it is there any role for philosophy paestum ology naturalized I think of it as a as a study at very much the philosophical end of the continuum which I think of as science this is a matter again of my not recognizing that a any objective demarcation between the two realms of the naturalism in this way distinguishes me as one kind of an empiricist from the empiricists who would reduce our discourse about the empirical world to a discourse about a sense experience and sense of sensory qualities now either by definition or at least by systematic criteria of a kind that I've made the discourse about the physical world clearly subsidiary nor derivative from a basic phenomenal istic language this I given up as a as a one of the ways of thinking of science rather than the science of the of the physical world as the means by which we manage our that's a sense experience we when we remember something from long before we we don't remember ordinarily the the colors involved or they positions of things we've already drawn the conclusion in physical terms what happened what happened to the object what happened to the man and that's what we remember and so that we can't have a a language of pure phenomena as a going concern on which to build something else well so the venture the interest is still the old traditional philosophical interest but it gets for me it gets translated into a a naturalistic course scientific concern about the following question of science itself tells us that our information about the world is coming in only through the impact of particles on our sensory surfaces and a light rays on our eyes and that those are our data and yet we come out with the the that was our whole elaborate apparatus of science and even the tremendously powerful science that makes such effective predictions and and develops such overwhelming technology and how does that work and so as granting the existence of the physical world and the light rays and the particles that are hitting us the question is working within this physical world itself just what are the connections and this is obviously going to involve considerations of of neurology and psychology one on the other hand to pursuing this more characteristically philosophical aspect that would try to quarantine those as best one could and leave them to the to the experts but draw freely on their findings and conclusions insofar as they seem pertinent to clarifying our problem our puzzle about how we can get all this out of so little and such a different kind of kind of thing accepting that naturalized epistemology is a task for the philosopher it would see where it might seem at first that could exist happily alongside more traditional epistemology so I wanted to ask you about a couple of aspects of traditional epistemology one project in traditional epistemology has been to try to say what knowledge is what the word knowledge means and in that project a watershed came a few years back they've been a very dominant view that knowledge is a matter of getting the right answer having a true belief and having the right to be certain or being justified something like that and then Edmund get here came along with some examples which seemed to show that that was a decisively wrong account and then traditional epistemology took on a rather different form trying to define knowledge leaning quite heavily on notions like causation and relations to the external world how would you view that watershed in traditional epistemology here again the same old pattern of questioning a dichotomy in this case the watershed itself well the Academy I'm wondering about namely the Tweed belief of true belief and unjustified belief and this I would find a matter of degree how here we believe it on what grounds and how well is this belief going to stand up against challenge and so the challenge then maybe precipitates a further experiment to justify the theory in question and that I I feel that I've doubted the demarcation between between true belief other than knowledge and knowledge itself in fact I felt that this is a case where rather a paradoxical situation for mr. Balaji in other words theory of knowledge has as one of its findings that there's no such thing as knowledge that knowledge is started a legitimate concept I'd love to pursue that line further that's just for a moment though turn to another major project in traditional epistemology that's trying to address skeptical arguments so how do I know that I'm not dreaming what justification could I possibly have for thinking that there's an external world these are classical questions what kind of response do you have to those questions oh good we're at naturalism that comes in certainly in full force namely the the I could understand the terms of dreaming or reality of external world and all that only relative to the sorts of tests that would that would induce or or reinforce my my belief in applying these these various terms and then know the difference between dreaming and waking for instance well we know how we seem to know they're good many ways in which we conclude that we're we're not dreaming we have these these long systematic memories we'd be very much surprised if this turned out to be just pseudo memories that were implanted recently when we fell asleep and it's a question here as in empirical science generally a question of impossibility what is the likeness and there's no question of absolute certainty about it I think that perhaps my my answer to skepticism in a word and in general is just that that again it's a matter of not of there being no no end point it's just a matter of extreme improbability in view of the rest of our systematic overall theory the theory in terms of which we say that there are wombats there are no unicorns and we say we're awake not dreaming once in a while I think each of us has had the surprise in that respect he thought he wasn't dreaming it turned out he was and so we can imagine this unlike I think I think another parallel at the point that it was Eddington pointing out that it's physically possible it's compatible with physical laws that all the water in a jug find itself just on one side one half of the jug just because of the random movements of the molecules that it just happened to get my chance to get over there at the same time same place and the molecules of air being down the other side yes how improbable and I think that this is the realistic way to look at impossibility and on the one hand and certainty on the other that it's just that that matter of degree and so my answer to skepticism in general would be the whole thing may be false or even apart from dreaming and waking here our our expectations the expectation of which our scientific laws are based depend ultimately on inductions that we've made predictions of future experience the generally following the principle that if things happen under seemingly the same circumstances as they happen before that they will happen again and if we reproduce the conditions we get those results it could turn out that they're the suddenly they're systematically a lot of surprises and our old theories aren't working it's all well anymore again this by our rigorous scientific standards and practices is the vanishingly probable these issues about justification and knowledge our issues of how we're able to arrive of the truth or perhaps if we're able to arrive at the truth but what in your view is it for something to be true what is truth according to you ah what is truth it seems to me that tarski brought out the essence of truth in his paradigm the paradigm was snow is white quote a in quotation marks here talking about the sentence snow is white that sentence is true if and only if snow is white our how do we determine whether something is true it all depends on the example take tarsiers example we we get some snow and we examine its color and see whether the term applies and whatever the subject is if it's if there's a puzzle as to what it means to call the sentence true I say don't blame the concept of truth blame the sentence if the sentence is clear the sentence itself is telling you what would have to be the case in order for it to be true so here we have what regrettably and mistakenly FP Ramsay called the disappearance theory of truth now he felt and others have felt err did at one point apparently that you don't need the notion of truth we just had these sentences we do need the notion of truth but for quite a humdrum reason namely you often want to say something like almost everything he said in that lecture was true yeah you can't get rid of the word true there by eliminating quotation marks as in the case of snow is white because there are none or again you want to say in a logic lesson that every sentence of the form quote if P then P or Q unquote is true you can't go enumerate in all those sentences there are infinite infinite in number and we need truth for district 4 for such situations which still makes truth a drum concept but then there's one further I think very important that a provider or a it has to be added to all this namely in science when when the theory that seemed to be going along fine we said it was true runs into difficulty and a change is made we don't say that used to be true but it's no longer true we say we thought it was true turns out not to be this is a very special trait of this notion of truth which does go beyond the sort of trivialities that I've been been sketching namely that it's well it Kant's phrase ideal the pure reason it seems to me to fit it nicely although that's not something I can satisfactorily define either it's an ideal and we're we're aiming at this ideal even though we perhaps can't make sense of it it's I think it may reduce simply to our to a characterization of our idiom our usage are you namely our usage is not to say that the truth change with the progress of science are usually just to say that that our conception of what is true changes with the progress of science the charles sanders peirce tried to accommodate this situation by defining truth as the limit approached as science goes on forever but this doesn't I think this is good a good figure of speech that was a science is not going to go on forever and furthermore it's not even clear that science does progress after a point anyway in the future it's going to be it's going to be doing better and better not better and better what do I mean by that are tested better and better in the case of science is experimental testing and seeing whether the experiment comes out the way you predicted it would come out and we may have more and more success we do have more and more success by that standard as time goes on but it's just a was just a pious hope on or a dream on versus part that that was going to continue and finally approach a limit of one unique doctrine so I don't think there's any hope there I think we have to say well this is the way we have this scientific the scientific practice the nature of science is to frame hypotheses and go on testing them by experiment and when they fail of making a tinkering and making improvements and going on and testing again by experiment and this is the kind of thing that's made life easier in many ways and harder in many ways and has made for technology and there's the situation and then it comes to we could come to our idiom in describing of what's going on here and our idiom just happens to have this curious twist in it that we talk about something having the supposed rule but not having been true rather than talking of something as having been true and no longer be they're just ask before we don't the next question if the first idea had worked out would have only been an account of scientific truth do you think scientific truth is all the truth there is yes I think I do but but I think I cheat here by putting so much into science including mathematics and that there's another boundary that I tend to blur between mathematics and Natural Science and the and and then as for as for values and well I just has it eight to use the note term true there things are better and worse from one point of view or another now here are some sentences of yours which I think are true and I think you think they're true and maybe there are scientific truths it's about it's about consciousness you say if we repudiate mental entities as entities there ceases to be an Iron Curtain between the private and the public the remains only a smokescreen a matter of varying degrees of privacy of events in the physical world consciousness still retains a place as a state of a physical object if we construe consciousness as a Faculty of responding to one's own responses now that's an absolutely crystal clear and forthright statement of up-to-the-minute materialism but you said this back in 1952 you were more than a decade ahead of JJC smart and the Australian materialists in announcing your allegiance to materialism but back in the 50s if you went and look to see what the neurophysiologists thought they weren't at all convinced that materialism was true so is this part of your your flexible definition of science that this is this is a this is a scientific truth that that are coming from saying epistemologists where your histological Avenue to this truth is lets you get out ahead of science of the rest of science in this way I think this may be that that the neurologists in those days weren't being as critically philosophical as they might have been but it's the same the same domain the same the same sort of the same sort of truth so that in effect here was a case where a philosopher reflecting on what had to be I mean you had some good reasons for your materialism could advance the truth in this area ahead of of the the laborers in the field the the neuro scientists who were who were looking at the neurons themselves well apparently so of course you know the history of that is I don't but but surely back in 52 there were others even scientists who who did see things pretty much this way well of course there were and had long since been John V Watson and fairly long since BF Skinner and I think this would Simon with them their viewers of course a lot of the antipathy to this frankly materialistic view of consciousness was summed up by rile in the concept of mind in 1949 as the doctrine of the ghost and the machine which he also criticized and in the notorious first chapter of the concept of mind Royall says that it's a category mistake he introduces this term of a category mistake to to say that there's minds on the one hand and brains on the other hand and he went to some lengths and not by anybody's standards successful thanks for telling us what a category mistake is but it has to do he said with different meanings of the word exists different senses of existence now you came along shortly thereafter with your doctrine that to be is to be the value of a bound variable this was your way of treating the the notion of existence do you see that your doctrine of to be is to be the value of a bound variable was was this an alternative to Ryles idea about exists was it a way of rendering formal and clear what rile is groping for all along what you think no certainly it wasn't in to natal with the wilds notion of categories in fact somewhere that perhaps in weird an object I came out against exactly that what named Levon trials notion of there being different senses of existence where do we draw the line and for me it's there is a simply a general idiom that applies all over the place you would apply it to numbers and and concrete objects and yep all in equal footing it's all a question of it's all the question of whether you're going to use them as well one way of putting it as objects of of relative pronouns or the mathematical that analog of those is the the variable bound variable and when you say everything is us and so when I say it I'm including I mean I'm including the numbers and everything there is of course and when somebody else says what they think there's somebody else it speaks and we can see what that person's ontology is suppose it doesn't agree with your suppose there's a difference is there a final objective arbiter of what there is of ontology of the of what terms refer to and we can we solve that problem of metaphysics and say this is what there is I see it as a matter of the the the best most satisfactory clear theme cut economical system we can set up that accommodates all of science as we see it and I see it as changeable revisable like the rest of science that it's just that the question of what there is is is simply a part of science reality is a scientific term as I think of it but one of your extensions or elaborations of your idea of the indeterminacy of radical translation is the idea of indeterminacy of reference how can we tell if two people actually are agreeing it's a reference of this very good yes I'm glad you bring this up because the nice thing about that my doctor of indeterminacy of reference is that unlike my speculation on indeterminacy of radical translation of sentences and that just applies primarily the sentences not words words only derivatively in this determinacy or inscrutability of reference is trivial and is incontestable and here's the consideration of consider any one-to-one reinterpretation of everything that there is for instance if this is applying to in surprise it applies to the creatures animals and other physical objects in the space-time you might associate arbitrarily with each cat just the rest of the cosmos minus the cat everything the the cause of the cosmic the cosmic complement and if you reinterpret all your all your nouns and verbs all your predicates as being true of the as this case of the cosmic complements another thing that they were true of that we ordinarily think of them is true do that systematically all the sentences still come out true and all the scientific evidence for for them comes out true because take a sentence such as of cats are carnivores the reinterpretation makes those words cats are carnivores mean cosmic complements of cats are collars any compliments of carnivores what's the difference those are equivalent it's essential here that I say as I did one-to-one correspondence which cause we call it the compliment fulfills because it isn't always if when you do this you get course run for instance there are mothers of lawyers well a man doesn't have to be a lawyer in order that the man's mother be the mother of a lawyer because he may have siblings but it's in that way that this could break down so it is essentially the same one-to-one but because we come the complements one-to-one and and all sorts of arbitrary correlations are just as good as others so when we take this into consideration I don't see what sense there is in wondering what somebody's talking about we just take the simplest line and say yes he's talking about cats not cosmic compliments classes everything you can you can play the same game and so what does it mean then I mean what's the point of ontology what's the point of objects talking about them what's the point of quantification bond variables and my answer is it introduces structure into the overall scientific theory and that structure in the scientific theory is needed for the logical structure in order that the scientific theory imply observation sentences and it's important observation sentences another observation terms because terms that's a question of denoting objects but observation sensors as holes which are our condition to to sensory input and stay put stay put no matter how we reinterpret terms or values of variables so when you consider the triviality of this was argument about cosmic complement it's puzzling why people including me I've been in the old days when I thought of ontology is being really the very heart and core of philosophy why they take questions of identity of objects so seriously what would you say to an object who maintained that this thesis of the inscrutability of reference or indeterminacy of reference isn't so much trivially true is trivially false on the grounds that it is trivially true that for example the word klein refers to klein and that is perfectly determinate and just as obvious as the analogous statement that you talked about earlier when we were talking about truth mainly that the sentence snow is white is true if and only if snow snow is white yes good all right now let's take that example now here we're we're reinterpreting all singular terms all general terms all verbs or so on systematically say by an academy compliment again so that that word in the quotation marks Klein that denotes my cosmic compliment under the reinterpretation we're interpreting that word and also we're reinterpreting the word in the rest of the sentence after you know sir designates of likewise to refer to my cosmic compliment there is this appropriate there's just at this point a president should try to clarify a little that musk awesome a puzzlement when I talk about cosmic compliment of Klein cosmic compliment of a cat and whatever I'm you're understanding me only because you understand the three words cosmic compliment and cat and so you're still there using them as words so what you have to think of in that phrase cosmic compliment of you have to think of as hyphenated words these are just the component syllables now of the word and not and in order to words and in turn because of what I'm trying to convey here is not a reformulation of the language but a conceptual reinterpretation of putting the whole thing now in a dangerously at mentalistic way of the order of the conceptual interpretation of these words the the the written sentences stay unchanged the written sentences which are sentences about reference the sentences such as the word Quine refers to Quine remains determined be true that's right it's unclear then exactly how the thesis of that reference is indeterminate is to be articulated so it seems as if we're agreeing that there are claims about reference that are determinately incorrect it leaves it leaves the question often the refers decline is what sense of quiet and in what sense of reefers yes and what yes and for someone and what sense of sense which is something is not quite clear on their self and in the history of philosophy one long-running debate has been a debate between realism and anti-realism so the realist says roughly that many many aspects of most aspects of the world are independent of our ability to grasp or conceive or know about them anti-realist says that reality is in some way more mind dependent how would you place your philosophy on that spectrum yes because I do I do think of myself at least in one sense as a naive realist going along with the dictates of science and changing my mind when the scientist told me to and and that's where reality lies and real is a there's a technical term of science along with photon and the rest and on the other hand how to reconcile that with all that with the with the the recognition that the very notion of object which is brought and I think this is brought out among other things by by this matter of determinacy of of reference there is gentleness as a matter of highly structured theory which is pinned down only to a testable reality only by by implying these observation sentences which are are conditioned to the sensory input and so in what sense then is this objective and brute fact and all and I think that the brute fact just concentrates on that point now and is reduced to that point and that there's a very very notion of object let alone let alone photon or nutrient or whatever the notion of object is such or number or class these are man-made naturally that certainly that the terms are and I think you can't go beyond and what saves us what saves all this from being a pure coherence theory of truth or what saves it again from being of pure idealism is just that tenuous link with our neural input I wonder if I can help to i'm locate the view even more precisely by asking you about a realist pieces that's been having some discussion recently sometimes people call it epistemic boundedness or cognitive closure so the idea is this we're evolved creatures the price we pay for being good at some things is that we're pretty bad at other things maybe one of the things that we're bad at is grasping certain really very important aspects of reality it could be it would seem then that some of the the true story about some really important aspects of reality is just constitute constitutively or constitutionally beyond our grasp it might be if we were really unlucky with the true story about how we're able to be conscious or how we're able to act freely something really important to us is just something that we can't grasp because of how we have evolved how do you feel about that the trend this is where I'm hemmed in by my naturalism and Beyond regret it may very well be that beyond our grasp in the sense that there are these things that if we were more successful we might get a to get a hold on in our scientific efforts but as a matter of fact we never will and but it would be at that level and of course it's part of the proper attitude towards science is fallibilism and fallibilism across the board incidentally that means of course that naturalism itself is part of that insofar as my national is as I claim continuous with with science and new avenues with conceivably new avenues could open up where we would happily no longer be just dependent on this manure of five senses but that we also would get a telepathic Avenue forces or more fantastic still that somehow an Avenue into the future and well I would stand corrected and I'd be very happy about is anything these goes along with your not accepting the idea that scientific truth could be equated with what survives in the long run of scientific inquiry right goes along with that quit I don't know you said you're hemmed in by your naturalism but I want to give your naturalism a little more play here expanding on what you just said you imagine that in principle there might be telepathy or we might see into the future but of course there's one thing that we already do which sets us apart from all the other animals and that as we talk to each other and we read books so the examples that are often trotted out by these exponents of cognitive closure you know you you know you can't get an ant to understand democracy or a bird to understand quantum physics it's just not their little brains just aren't up to it those are little naked animal brains that are not in communication with other brains our brains are in communication with other grains and so we we get a tremendous leg up from being part of a culture it seems to me that much more realistic than your imagination about telepathy is this the sharing that already sets our brains just on a different scale from the brains of of the other natural creatures who do indeed to show these cognitive limitations oh yes yes well I like that I like that this is the if we think back to the to it to the time of the what when the Apes were as far as our line of progress well what we have now in the way of communication is as fanciful and magic as from our present point of view telepathy is and I think this makes this imaginative concession all the more all the more vivid and in serious I'm a great deal of your time especially at the beginning of your career in the thirties and forties was spent on logic could you tell us if you see some relationship between philosophical ideas about language and science yes it was a it was certainly a philosophical Drive in the first place that made me so enthusiastic about mathematical logic I had had a already a taste for mathematics which was a an essential component here but the idea of getting to the bottom of what numbers are and all the rest and to all this systematization in terms finally really as it developed in later years reduction to a single predicate plus elementary logic single predicate of class membership does the whole trick all the mathematics and so that was a philosophical driving itself but but one limited sort of philosophical question another link is that the great difference seems to me the mathematical logic made even a mathematical logic at its elementary level in the the precision formulation clarifying clarifying questions systematizing a sort of thing that well I think there's a very instructive impressive exercise in this in JH woods rather neglected axiomatic method in biology in which he that takes a basic biological a predicate or two and applies the principia mathematica kind of construction to the rest of biology are a good deal of it and so this is clarifying the philosophically attractive of analyses and reductions and I think what to me also reduction the philosophical reduction is attractive I like it as far as it'll go and when I when I deployed it in two dogs I was deploying but I took to be an excessive it and a day and you're irresponsible extension of it so that would be the linkless philosophy I guess that I see do you think that the development of logic and work and foundations of mathematics has contributed to the progress of science physics for example say quantum mechanics or relativity and if not can logic really be regarded as a department of rational inquiry according to your naturalist early that's good well it hasn't it hasn't contributed as far as I know to those studies which i think is partly a reflection on the quantum physicists and the others and I in fact I hope I hope for the better I've been delighted to see in fairly recent years graduate students a number of them in philosophy that going over in the physics department taking seminars getting really seriously into quantum mechanics and and there are these these these really baffling puzzles in quantum mechanics which I keep hoping they can be cleared up and possibly partly with the help of highly trained physicists with the more philosophical bent and and and training I think a wonderful irony back in the days that latter latter part of the 19th century and a good chunk of this century of old-fashioned hidebound mathematicians were inclined to scoff about that the rigour they've the the pedantry of formalization and after all they know what they're doing for heaven's sake let's go on let's make discoveries as formalized Frager the kind of thing that Frigga really brought into the full full existence and then what happens Alan Turing comes along and founds computer theory and logic is the but it was the turning point the basis it was the the the the basic sort of principle of computer theory in touring so-called what other what other people in Turing of quality machines the most elementary computer that at the same time was during solution to a basic problem in foundations of pure mathematics namely the question of the possibility of a mechanical decision procedure as between decision between truth and falsity for for logical formulas the same thing and and then on top of that besides mathematical logic being that the really the birth of computer theory and that's really serious form also it is the continuing mathematical logic in this elementary form handmaiden because it's what goes into programming and so from having been the this trivial sort of stamp collecting offshoot of serious mathematics for the patents and playboys it becomes vital tooks vital to the highest tech professor Guan I'd like to take you to a topic that you cover very little in your work in fact it could be said that you have notoriously avoided the area and this is the area of moral and political philosophy there are very very few writings that I know that you've you've made any direct pronouncement on moral or ethical issues but one on the nature of moral values you set out a naturalistic account I believe of how you see moral Phillip what we're most lost we might might have a basis could you sort of take us through that well the way I see it there's the great difference between moral judgments and there are judgments about the the world the facts of the world is that we have this these checkpoints in experimental observations where it's up to nature and not us and not our own concepts to see whether it comes out right and and as I see it there's no analog to that in in ethics and morality and our our moral judgments as I see it are laid down by by society by early childhood training partly also quite possibly oh surely in fact by natural selection I think of altruism which we also find in other animals and so we have these at these endowments and these scruples and they have their survival value in the survival of our society our species in a way but then what does that be for for philosophy our as because of the increasing complexity of society over down the ages that we get more conflicts within the individual even where things get sorted they have to have to get sorted out on the way and it seems to desire to do this on the other hand it seems somehow evil and so we try to systematize and if one can try to pushing it farther and farther systematized our intuitive our inherited unconsciously assimilated values try to articulate them and systematize them into a a minimum of first principles from which the rest could be derived and this I don't know how much could be hoped for in this sort of food equation of course has been has been attempted Khan for one but anywhere I see that as a legitimate sort of question a meaningful question from a naturalistic point of view and and I don't see this point of view as somehow of bounded permissiveness of we for a long a long way we can depend on other people having the same pretty basic moral values that we do not because of the same reason same heritage same genes genes in large part and our moral arguments for them will be rather technical technological arguments in terms of cause and effect if you do this this other things have to happen and after all that's not desire oh you're right so you're changing their view of what would be the moral move on the basis of science scientific knowledge may be very very rudimentary common-sense science but it's on the scientific side of things the cognitive side and it's just with the really depraved that you get down to the point where there's just no common basis at all and that doesn't mean then okay let them go their way no that's dangerous because that holding cost and all that but you come to the point where your values are ultimate and you've got to fight for them and and I think that that that remains without there any sort of rationalization in terms of of divine sanction or anything else but how do you how do you actually arrive at that bedrock I mean what procedure do you use to arrive it I like that a dialectic procedure yes well I mean yes arguing reasoning the cause and effect if you do this such a search will happen and they try to shorten the consequences gets them to consider the further ramifications of the of the act that they're contemplating and make a better better world and do a better job of cost accounting what would you say to someone like for example Morton white in his paper which he writes where his plea to you was that since human beings are what they are and they have things like aesthetic appreciation they have things like a feeling of that they should or shouldn't do the right thing that there should be a naught in the matter and so on and he suggests that you occurred the same epistemic status normative status to what he sees is that important part of the human being in the same way as you Accord to science principles I want to bring this back a bit in on the nature of moral values you said that the best that you can get for problems of morals the best that you can get in morality is a coherence theory but in questions of science there is more of a correspondence yeah I would seem to me to indicate that there is a fundamental difference somehow between epistemic norms on the one hand and value norms on the other hand which you've what but how do you arrive at that well it's a it's the it's the absence of experimental checkpoints where where you're leaving it to nature to decide that come out right or not in the case of moral values your checkpoint is again against your own intuitions and the analog on this scientific side to that would be checking against your more general scientific beliefs but stopping short still of the observation sentences which are the ultimate checkpoints and which it can't be duplicated on the on the other side and that's that that I see as the difference and this sort of the the evolutionary or the teleological part of the story would be that you would just not do an action because that was not naturally selected for it was it was you would be doing your species wrong by performing say gratuitous murder or whatever the case may be that would be something that would explain perhaps how before you can even verbalize the notion that that particular action or that particular activity is wrong before you can verbalize that you may even have an instinctive an intuitive reaction to know that that is wrong that's right be interested give it to it it would be but when it becomes rebel eyes then it's a this would be an appeal to natural natural selection and would be on the scientific side namely the cause of people's behavior it's crime we started off talking about blurring the distinction between science and metaphysics the perhaps as we've gone on it's become clearer that really there's no opposition to be seen between scientific and philosophical questions for the Safa questions are a subpart still there are sub class and they presumably got their own marks their own characteristics their own diagnostic features what would you say distinguishes a philosophical problem well again I see I can't make a demarcation that's part of my point but it could be more a vagary speaking and I'd like to make it less vague if I could there's gradation and some issues and questions are more philosophical than others and but now perhaps perhaps there's an illustration in ontology that the the comments comments there's ontology a strictly scientific matter about whether there are or aren't unicorns wombats this and that and nothing philosophical about that and then we and then of course you raise it to raise the question about abstract objects and that's decided to philosophical but the scientific side of that is well these are all values of variables and there's a scientific criterion of what we're going to count as as as as counting for ontology in a given theory and so that's the way it's accommodated but then we get to the point where we're pressing our our desire for aught illogical economy beyond the point where the scientist with his eye on predictions and the rest has any interest in doing it a couple of extravagant cases of it um here the scientist in his will Victor his his cosmic picture a space time he has a space time and he has a physical object moving around in it the of the Philosopher's he's a philosopher now and is by virtue of his motivation or consistent his motivation he's after economy for its own for its own sake and not for a further scientific predictions here you've got these space-time regions on the one hand and physical abuse and the other you don't need all that just settle for the space-time regions and some of these space-time reasons are sort of furry and delicate and some of them are brittle and all that but just identify bodies with the regions of space-time that they occupy our bodies become a qualitatively various filaments of space-time past to future but everything comes out the same way of course this again indeterminacy of reference of the place here in a very realistic way and then this philosopher still keen on economy and he push for science for serious science if you need numbers you need the whole of mathematics or the whole the whole of classical mathematics pretty much some of the higher set there you don't need for application in serious physics and the rest of numbers these are values are variables you've got numbers existing along with thee and sets of numbers along with the space-time and the bodies but this is redundant you don't need the space-time pick a coordinate system and identify each point of space-time with a quadruple of numbers and then identify each region of space-time with a set of the quadruples of the numbers corresponding to the component points but you've already identified your bodies your physical objects with those so now you've ended up identifying rabbits and wombats and the rest with assets of quadruples of numbers and this all still goes without any violence to anything in science of the more typical scientist and the privet of sense the farther away from the philosophical extreme says okay so far but the philosopher has this funny sort of further further motivation I just pressed not a second look what do you think is the difference between the sort of economy and simplicity that you think the philosopher is typically striving for and the sort of simplicity that the physicist is looking for in his theories because after all it's not as if a scientist ignore those considerations and simplicity and favoring one theory rather than or not yes I think it's certainly simplicity in the same sense but the scientists is interested in it only insofar as it's applying two theories that he's interested in in respect of their predictive tests and so this is a from from the experimental scientist point of view my suggestion is a playful sort of further further pursuit of economy the same ole sense what do you think of VidCon Stein's thesis at a philosophical thesis that philosophical questions are all pseudo problems based on confusions growing out of language in one way or another yes of course that and that was very much the vienna circle point of view in fact bigger sign had a hand in its beings oh and i don't share that I think an awful lot of philosophical questions are that I think a lot of a lot of philosophy is a progressed of by well again this mathematical logic comes in there or take Russell's theory of description the what Ramsey called the paradigm I guess he called it a philosophical analysis of his case for Russell clarifying what seemed to be quandarious about non-existence and how can you talk about things not existing when there's a nothing there not to exist and so so a business and philosophy a gorilla philosophy is exactly the kind of clarification and it comes in and I would still call this attempt to call philosophy at least in large part comes into physics in a very decided way when Einstein raises the question about some old annuity and in fact he if I recall that had been quoted as accrediting the the positivist somewhat with this insight that you have no criterion of simultaneity such as you seem to have needed it would have needed to carry it out the way the old way and so so yes i agree with Wittgenstein that this is characteristic of a lot of philosophy but on the other hand of I think there's good old philosophy that isn't and I'm conversely that if we again take this somewhat early example it's not characteristic exclusively of philosophy here we've got physics in the strictest sense of the word so again I disagree wickers dine on the demarcation but now even with regarding the problems that are pseudo problems where you were you're agreeing with him about that I don't think you agree with him about how to deal with them I mean earlier you said the vit consign this is part of the problem not part of the solution his his own treatment of language its use his own his own brand of behaviorism as one that you were rejecting can you say having or about about how about this side of your disagreement oh yes a regiment brought that up because here we get Ricky sign as a philosopher of ordinary language and that whole oxford movement of ordinary language which came of a victim sign through rile as i think of it and then Strawson carrying up with it paradoxically when you think in terms of victim steins earlier years come a scorn for mathematical logic and what's the point of putting these things over into symbols and narrowing our terminology and all that when we can only explain it in terms of ordinary language and we can only apply it afterwards at the level of ordinary language when I just stick to the ordinary language in fact it's a sort of defence of ordinary language that I use as a defense of the behaviorist 'ok handling of semantics but the other hand my position is that that behavioral behaviorist expanding of semantics is correct and desirable and that the ordinary language on the other hand approach to philosophy as nearsighted i feel they're they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater the the attitude i prefer and it's a scientific attitude and it's been mathematicians attitude right down the line is for efficiency and practical purposes and clarity in your pursuit change language introduce new devices symbols or whatever narrow your terminology and use your words perhaps a strange ways perhaps if you can get your colleagues to understand what you're saying rather than considering that as the ordinary language people did that end the party from ordinary language that that's where you're throwing out the baby of course which is the baby it was just the bathwater so what have you fair to say then that the heart of your disagreement with that late but concern in conception and perhaps the what you mentioned the ordinary language conception is that those traditions leave no room for philosophical theory so the philosophy can be therapy but it can't be theory would that be the the core of it it certainly very much in it ah yes the core of it I think that they're they're missing so much of what I think of is serious or is well philosophy that's just reduced to a technological disagreement I mean everyone can agree that these attempts to simplify scientific mathematical theories as something worth doing vickens time I'd agreed with that so the issue would just be whether we're going to call it philosophy of science and that would yes oh yes yes yes it is a good point i think a good deal of it could be characterized that way what i find a serious about it is the the way the value judgments come in namely that the other thing is it worth doing and of course in so far as we can sign says yes as we're doing too all right he's in the clear and it's terminological but you don't you didn't find the typical ordinary language philosopher says taking that tolerant attitude particularly to logic serious logic I think we see here also maybe a difference between the different sides of the Atlantic all of us here both the English and the Americans have spent a lot of time on each side and over and over it's come out in our discussion today that that you see a unification of science and philosophy as you say at one point though the philosopher and the scientists are in the same boat and I think you really carried the day in in this country in the United States that way of thinking about philosophy is certainly a very very popular very widespread if not like there are pockets of reactionary disagreement of course of that but in England the the vid continue now by what you just said the vid const in Ian's idea that that philosophy must be kept aside from science that philosophers can do everything that they need to do without paying close attention to science has perhaps a much a much firmer grip on philosophical thinking I wonder if you if what your reactions are two to that difference a possible difference between philosophy on in the United Kingdom as opposed to english-language philosophy in America today uh yes I I haven't really kept my ear the ground but I had the feeling that that in England also the the ordinary language attitude is a good deal weaker than it was back there even I was first exposed to it in Oxford of but then another thing to keep in mind is that the ordinary language people aren't the only ones with whom I disagree on these matters now Karn up and especially car not but some to some degree others in that circle of were really very decidedly concerned with mathematical logic and and all for it and applying it and that no ordinary language of restraints about them and yet for karna just as much as for the ordinary language people of philosophy was a matter of words concerned with words with the signs and that not not the world and turnips slogan in the logical syntax was that mathematics know the philosophy is the syntax of the language of science philosophy is the syntax of the language of science that later on tarski with his theory of truth influence caught up at the point where he he relaxed that philosophy is the semantics of the language of science but still sharp cleavage between philosophy and science under which was the clearance between between language and and fact I do decidedly respect the cleavage between sign logic but not between the philosophy and science I just contrasted the success that you've had in selling your lesson of naturalism in the United States as opposed to in Great Britain where there's still pockets of reaction and yet on both sides of the Atlantic and perhaps even especially in the United States one of the main implications you've tried to draw from your naturalism and that is your skepticism about meaning seems largely to have fallen on deaf ears it's now 23 years since we're an object and your flight from intention your attack on propositional attitudes is something that nobody could make sense of and what have we seen occupying many philosophers attention in the interim we've seen your colleague Hilary Putnam on the meaning of meaning and all the notorious twin earth experiments we've seen your your students all Kripke and his puzzle about Pierre the puzzle about what Pierre believes and that's a problem about intentionality and meaning as well we've seen Donald Davidson and David Kaplan and others following you with their work on how to make sense of quantifying into propositional attitudes we've now had a quarter century of the propositional attitude task force as it is sometimes called and you seem to be saying inward an object that this was not a suitable work for philosophers what do you make of this well good the propositional attitudes are the 1department of intentional discourse that I've found it impossible really to get along without of unlike necessity and other Oregon talk of meaning which I do see my way of dispensing with well but in the case of propositional attitudes I think the crucial difference is between the day dicto in the day reh the day dicto is where we're putting the whole believed sentence whole belief into the believers mouth as of what he believes is what he we think he believes as if it were a sentence that he was uttering and although it may be our translation that's all right well this a better give an example the ralphs believes that the man in the brown hat is a spy to go back to one of the examples we kicked around for 40 years maybe almost and of as a distinct from there's someone whom Ralph believes to be a spy in this ladder we're saying somebody in our real world whom he believes to be a spy actually the man in the brown hat is burner J Arquette he doesn't know it and so can we say that he does or doesn't know that burner J orchid is a spy there's the day dicto and there's a tight kind of problem that the adicto races and what quantifying into propositional attitudes has to do with and my present view is this propositional attitudes stay dicto make good sense of their there's a vagueness yes about the verb believes itself what are your criteria for believing what counts as believe what counts merely is as a lip service in and but but as far as that the logic of it is concerned and the ability with the rest of science as a extension list enterprise it goes alright our time is drawing to a close rustic wine and I think just a few closing remarks would be appropriate about how you appraise or survey the current scene in philosophy ie the preoccupations with the current study of philosophy by I find on the fourth hole I find it very encouraging and hopeful it seems to be cgi see a very bright future now the perhaps the the the most hopeful bit is the increasing communication between philosophers and and scientists in various fields of science but well Dan Dennett here getting over so much into neurology and psychology and also computer theory and tying this in with a theory of knowledge and it's exactly the sort of thing that brings more and more deeper understanding of well what I and my naturalistic way think of is epistemology and then again I spoke earlier of the the students graduate students in mathematics and in philosophy who have been going over into physics seminars and getting up on the really problematical things in in physics so I find all this very hopeful of course there are counter currents there's orders deconstruction and in general the movement which i think of is rather nihilistic and negativistic there's I it may be wishful thinking but it doesn't seem to be that's the sort of thing that has much survival value there have been of scoffers and nihilists and skeptics all along that's for your own work are you working on anything at the moment no no no no fresh tangent certainly I've been having to prepare various lectures for various occasions and that's about what has been coming to writing up a series of lectures that I gave in Catalonia a couple of years ago for a book that they want but it's not it's going to be more a teaching kind of thing the kind of thing that I would do in the classroom and then something that's going to make a feasible change in the views that I've already been expressing which have been it changing some right down to the present day almost my final question if you were now twenty-five years old just beginning your philosophical career which problems would you choose to work on now well I think of two lines of research that I think would be promising they both are just carrying on the sort of thing that I already believe in now rather than promising a whole new vision but one of them and it's a sort of thing again that Dan Tennant is much involved in just getting deeper and deeper into neurophysiology and related matter getting the mechanism of thought and what goes into all this and in the way of clarifying the really deepest roots of what I would think of still as of epistemological interest and the other is a sort of long term project is that related to my schema ties ation of the the checking or confirmation experimental checking of the scientific theory at which I have schematize as the logical deduction of a from a body of theory that's a small or large it's just big enough to be strong enough to accomplish the following namely to logically imply what I call them well luckily apply a connection between a pair of observations observations that could be made for if for each of which we would have an observation sentence to report it something that would be the condition to our sensory input and the implication would be that whenever this observable thing happens this observable thing what must happen with it or just after and that implication of the two observations that's a general statement which would be implied by this chunk of theory that I'm imagining and then you go ahead and test this prediction this by by fulfilling bringing about the first observable condition and seeing if the second one does actually occur so here's the testing of a theory but it would be quite another thing to trace out from a serious chunk of scientific theory well let's not start off with quantum mechanics or even with relativity theory but with Newtonian mechanics perhaps quite explicitly schematized in the mathematical logical Observatory devices and follow-up them the implications logically said it all up other supporting considerations we keep coming in which would be obvious platitudes that the scientists would even cross his mind to just stand to reason but all these would have to be made explicit and in such a way as actually to to realize this hypothetical connection of implication that I think is fundamental and to do this with for one another part of science and then I even imagined that if this were carried out and everything seemed to be an order still in that room and that about the those general principles it might even be that doing it more and more would would help science itself by showing in one case here was a rather questionable hypothesis wasn't needed at all you got the old implications without that money intervening we chuck it it's progress in the way of elegance and economy and then in another case maybe we find a lacuna it might alert the scientists or something if well maybe there's a crucial experiment still that could spike the theory that they thought was already pretty well established it might be this might mean finally a real maybe there'd be the consulting philosopher in the physics lab and to be a more complete more complete cooperation between philosophy and science or the rest of science than we see even though

Channel: mehranshargh

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Rating: 4.9849057 out of 5

Keywords: Dennett, Quine, 1994, In Conversation: W.V. Quine, Paul Horwich, Martin Davies, Daniel Dennett, W.V. Quine, Rudolf Fara

Id: O1wlNvfASaU

Length: 126min 9sec (7569 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2016