G) Quine: Two Dogmas, demonstrating how can only experimentally verify the whole body of science only, not any individual statement.
Scientists conduct experiments on individual statements, or small sets of them, all the time. Quine’s nihilistic conclusion that “any statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough changes elsewhere in the system” fails to grapple with the question of how knowledge can be achieved in the face of the fact that it is achieved. The words “drastic” and “come what may” should have been a clue to him, a small sensation of confusion, for these words admit there is something wrong with going to such lengths, while the sentence denies it.
I spent most of this morning making arrangements for a trip abroad. To this end I looked up hotels and railway timetables on various web sites, and at last made choices, decisions, bookings, and payments.
I expect the trains to depart and arrive at the times stated, my tickets to be accepted, and the hotel I have booked to exist and to be expecting me. What is the coherentist analysis of this situation? Why am I rightly confident in these arrangements, subject only to the realistic but fairly unlikely possibilities of engineering faults, the hotel burning down, and the like?
Correspondence (matching theories to observations) is a subset of coherence (matching everything with everything)
It is a very useful subset as long as observations are reliable and easy to procure, which is in your case, and indeed in most, but not all cases it is so.
A counter-example would be Many-Worlds: you cannot match it with observations, but you can match it with other theories and see it follows the pattern.
Your observations rest on definitions which come from other parts of your knowledge. Trains depart on time? Down to the nanosecond level or second level will be okay? Is 10 secs late still okay? Based on the starter timezone, even if it goes through multiple ones? If they base departure time on starter time zone and arrival on destination time zone, won’t it upset your expectation of the trip length? If not, can you miss a connection? What does ticket accepted mean, would presenting a false ticket and bribing the conductor would count as accepted? Would a well made false ticket that tricks all the conductors do? This is not nitpicking, it just means your observations are obvious because they rest on all kinds of non-conscious, tacit, consensual knowledge beyond that. And that is roughly what Quine meant: I can prove hardly any time train ever departs on time if I just make another change in the system, such as saying on time means nanosecond exactness. This is a change not worth making, of course.
Correspondence (matching theories to observations) is a subset of coherence (matching everything with everything)
Correspondence is not just matching theories to observation. It is matching theories to reality. Since we don’t have pure transcendent access to reality, this involves a lot of matching theories to observation and to each other, and rejecting the occasional observation as erroneous; however, the ultimate goal is different from that of coherence, since perfectly coherent sets of statements can still be wrong.
If your point is that “reality” is not a meaningful concept and we should write off the philosophizing of correspondence theorists and just focus on what they actually do, then what they actually do is identical to what coherentists actually do, not a subset.
As far as I can tell, most coherentists want to match theories with reality too, because truth doesn’t really have any other useful definition. The goal is not to be coherent within a random and reality-detached set of sentences: the goal is to be coherent with the whole of science. When a scientists rejects (assigns very low probability to) the observation of a perpetuum mobile on the basis that it contradicts the laws of physics, that is a standard coherentist move. This is another one. The goal is to avoid having to waste time and costs on non-fruitful data gathering. Ultimately the only thing that is rejected is that blind data-only approach that may be considered the straw-manning of the correspondenceist position, except that one is actually unfortunately used too much. A coherentist will simply not spend money buying an airplane ticket to check if someone’s garage has a dragon, the proposition contradicts so much we already know that the very low prior probability does not worth the cost. You may as well call this a wiser version of correspondencism, the barriers are not exactly black and white here. This is unfortunately philosophy, so fairly muddy :)
You can have holism without coherence where you require that the whole of science is true by correspondence, but the parts aren’t.. Inasmuch as it is correspondence, it isnt coherence.
The correspondence theory of truth is a theory of truth, not a theory of justification. Correspondentists don’t match theories to reality, since they don’t have direct ways of detecting a mismatch, they use proxies like observation sentences and predictions. Having justified the a theory as being true, they then use correspondence to explain what it’s truth consists of.
This is not nitpicking, it just means your observations are obvious because they rest on all kinds of non-conscious, tacit, consensual knowledge beyond that.
That’s what nitpicking is!
And that is roughly what Quine meant: I can prove hardly any time train ever departs on time if I just make another change in the system, such as saying on time means nanosecond exactness.
Changing the definition of the words in a sentence does not change the proposition that was originally expressed by the sentence. It just creates a different proposition expressed with the same words, and is irrelevant to understanding the original one.
Scientists conduct experiments on individual statements, or small sets of them, all the time. Quine’s nihilistic conclusion that “any statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough changes elsewhere in the system” fails to grapple with the question of how knowledge can be achieved in the face of the fact that it is achieved. The words “drastic” and “come what may” should have been a clue to him, a small sensation of confusion, for these words admit there is something wrong with going to such lengths, while the sentence denies it.
I spent most of this morning making arrangements for a trip abroad. To this end I looked up hotels and railway timetables on various web sites, and at last made choices, decisions, bookings, and payments.
I expect the trains to depart and arrive at the times stated, my tickets to be accepted, and the hotel I have booked to exist and to be expecting me. What is the coherentist analysis of this situation? Why am I rightly confident in these arrangements, subject only to the realistic but fairly unlikely possibilities of engineering faults, the hotel burning down, and the like?
Correspondence (matching theories to observations) is a subset of coherence (matching everything with everything)
It is a very useful subset as long as observations are reliable and easy to procure, which is in your case, and indeed in most, but not all cases it is so.
A counter-example would be Many-Worlds: you cannot match it with observations, but you can match it with other theories and see it follows the pattern.
Your observations rest on definitions which come from other parts of your knowledge. Trains depart on time? Down to the nanosecond level or second level will be okay? Is 10 secs late still okay? Based on the starter timezone, even if it goes through multiple ones? If they base departure time on starter time zone and arrival on destination time zone, won’t it upset your expectation of the trip length? If not, can you miss a connection? What does ticket accepted mean, would presenting a false ticket and bribing the conductor would count as accepted? Would a well made false ticket that tricks all the conductors do? This is not nitpicking, it just means your observations are obvious because they rest on all kinds of non-conscious, tacit, consensual knowledge beyond that. And that is roughly what Quine meant: I can prove hardly any time train ever departs on time if I just make another change in the system, such as saying on time means nanosecond exactness. This is a change not worth making, of course.
Correspondence is not just matching theories to observation. It is matching theories to reality. Since we don’t have pure transcendent access to reality, this involves a lot of matching theories to observation and to each other, and rejecting the occasional observation as erroneous; however, the ultimate goal is different from that of coherence, since perfectly coherent sets of statements can still be wrong.
If your point is that “reality” is not a meaningful concept and we should write off the philosophizing of correspondence theorists and just focus on what they actually do, then what they actually do is identical to what coherentists actually do, not a subset.
As far as I can tell, most coherentists want to match theories with reality too, because truth doesn’t really have any other useful definition. The goal is not to be coherent within a random and reality-detached set of sentences: the goal is to be coherent with the whole of science. When a scientists rejects (assigns very low probability to) the observation of a perpetuum mobile on the basis that it contradicts the laws of physics, that is a standard coherentist move. This is another one. The goal is to avoid having to waste time and costs on non-fruitful data gathering. Ultimately the only thing that is rejected is that blind data-only approach that may be considered the straw-manning of the correspondenceist position, except that one is actually unfortunately used too much. A coherentist will simply not spend money buying an airplane ticket to check if someone’s garage has a dragon, the proposition contradicts so much we already know that the very low prior probability does not worth the cost. You may as well call this a wiser version of correspondencism, the barriers are not exactly black and white here. This is unfortunately philosophy, so fairly muddy :)
You’ve got coherentism confused with holism.
Is holism even a thing?
Yes. So is Google.
You can have holism without coherence where you require that the whole of science is true by correspondence, but the parts aren’t.. Inasmuch as it is correspondence, it isnt coherence.
The correspondence theory of truth is a theory of truth, not a theory of justification. Correspondentists don’t match theories to reality, since they don’t have direct ways of detecting a mismatch, they use proxies like observation sentences and predictions. Having justified the a theory as being true, they then use correspondence to explain what it’s truth consists of.
That’s what nitpicking is!
Changing the definition of the words in a sentence does not change the proposition that was originally expressed by the sentence. It just creates a different proposition expressed with the same words, and is irrelevant to understanding the original one.